As more women turn to egg freezing, hoping to stop at the biological clock and have children when they are older, some experts warn against relying on medical procedures.

Vardit Ravitsky, president of the Institute of Bioethics, said egg freezing is expensive and there is no guarantee. She understands why egg freezing is exciting for young women, but thinks it sends the wrong message to them.

“My fear, when I hear the young woman say, ‘I freeze the biological clock because they think it’s guaranteed. They think, ‘I put the baby on ice, not on eggs, and I just melt when I’m ready to be a mother,’” Ravitsky, who is also a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School, said. "Not that. That's the problem."

Egg freezing is not a guaranteed happy ending

Ravitsky points out the story of Evelyn Gosnell. Gosnell freezes her eggs three times at ages 32, 36 and 38, totaling 30 eggs, which is considered a very safe number. Gosnell believed she would not have any problems. But when Gosnell and her current marriage use her frozen eggs, things start to go wrong.

Only 19 of her 30 eggs survived. Worse, only one of the 19 eggs that are fertilized grows into embryos. Hungryly hoping for positive results, Gosnell and her fiancé sent some cells for genetic testing to see if the embryo is feasible.

Gosnell was working when he received the message about where the test results were. The message asked her to confirm whether she wanted to know about the baby's sex.

"I just started thinking, 'Oh, wow. They asked me this question, if I wanted to know about sex. It means there is a real embryo there. It means it's real. It's normal. It's going to be OK," Gosnell said.

Then the report came.

"And I opened it. It was unusual. That was a girl."

An embryo cannot become a baby.

Although rare, there have also been incidents of tank failure, with thousands of eggs and embryos destroyed.

Dr. Lucky Sekhon, a fertility expert at the New York RMA, said she explained to all patients that frozen eggs can never be guaranteed. Just like in a naturally occurring pregnancy, there is a decline every step along the way. She called it the inverted pyramid, explaining that women start with a certain number of eggs, some of which are fertilized, only some become genetically healthy embryos, and only some actually implanted.

Ravitsky describes it as a gamble where even women who manage to get pregnant after frozen eggs are at risk.

"The older you are, the greater the risk of getting pregnant," she said. "So you take multiple risks. You gamble at multiple stages."

Emphasize profits

Ravitsky said women are also gambling with their own money. Egg freezing is expensive, with a cost of up to $12,000 per cycle. The extra cost of storing eggs is also added to $500 to $1,000 a year, to thaw and fertilize a $10,000 bill.

"You are bearing the financial costs, are accepting medical expenses?" Ravitzki said.

While more and more large companies provide employees with frozen egg freezes, this is not the case in most companies.

“Most women who freeze eggs are white and have good resources,” Ravitski said. “If you have or don’t have resources, there is a big gap in your choices and reproductive autonomy.”

It also criticized companies that do offer egg freezes, a beneficial benefit, with critics accusing them of making up for egg freezing costs in order not to help women, but rather leaving female employees on the table.

Despite some criticism, the business is still booming in the fertility field. Venture capital and private equity firms support egg freeze startups and purchase and invest in existing private and academic fertility clinics to consolidate it into a huge network.

The company targets women who attract ads on social media and hosts fun events to inform and engage women.

Dr. Marcelle Cedars, a fertility expert at the University of California, San Francisco and former president of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, said it was great to get information from women, but she was worried that the focus of profits in private equity-backed parenting companies was on the distorted disease.

Asked if she had heard that doctors were forced to encourage more cycles to generate more income, Sedal said: "It must have happened in some companies. How quickly do you get someone? How many cycles do you get per patient, and that's how income is based on. That's the basis of payments and compensation. That's the motivation."

"I've always been in my mind when I hear my major is called industry. I don't think the past was." "But I do think it's becoming that way."

Should women freeze their eggs?

Ravitsky believes that society has driven high-achieving women to achieve so much before having children that they don’t have time. She thought it would be better if they could be young mothers.

“From a biological/medical perspective, the best time to have a baby is in your 20s or early 30s. But the best time in society is later than that,” Ravitski said. “I think we’re telling women, ‘Oh, in your 20s, you’re going to focus on your education, your career, find partners, have financial stability, have stable relationships so that when you have kids, you can be a responsible mother.’”

A better solution, she believes, is to give companies policies such as paid parental leave, flexible working hours and childcare services in the workplace to make it easier for women to have babies.

But the 60-minute woman talked to her and said they were not ready to have a baby. They said they knew that egg freezing was not sure, but the right move for them.

While the Egg Freeze didn't work out for Gosnell, the 30 frozen eggs didn't produce a baby woman, her story does have a happy ending. After multiple rounds of egg search and IVF, she and her fiancé welcomed a baby girl in December.