We Spoke To Women Who Froze Their Eggs, Here's What They Wish They Had Known
The first thing most women mention is the hormonal stimulation phase and the shock of it.
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Note: This article is written for Birla Fertility & IVF by Dr. Parachi Banera, who is an expert in Assisted Reproductive Technology.
Priya, 34, a product manager in Bengaluru, made her decision on a Tuesday afternoon between two back-to-back work calls. She had been thinking about it for months, the biology, the cost, the what-ifs. She booked a consultation, went alone, and told nobody except her closest friend. "I didn't want opinions," she says. "I just wanted to do it."
She did. And six months later, when asked what she wishes she had known before starting, she laughs not bitterly, but with the particular exhaustion of someone who learned everything the hard way. "Almost everything," she says. "I wish I had known almost everything."
Priya is not alone. As egg freezing quietly moves from niche medical procedures to a conversation happening in offices, group chats, and therapy rooms across urban India. A growing number of women are emerging on the other side of the process with a clear message: the information available before you start is nowhere near enough.
We spoke to several women who have been through it. Here is what they want you to know.
"I had no idea about the injections"
The first thing most women mention is the hormonal stimulation phase and the shock of it.
For 10 to 14 days before the egg retrieval, women self-administer injectable hormones to stimulate the ovaries to produce multiple eggs. The injections are daily. They go into the abdomen. You do them yourself, at home, at roughly the same time each day.
Meghna, 31, a lawyer in Mumbai, says nobody at the clinic adequately prepared her for this part. "They said 'stimulation injections' and I nodded like I understood. I did not understand. The first night I sat on my bathroom floor for twenty minutes trying to work up the nerve." She pauses. "And then I did it every day for twelve days. You get used to it. But I wish someone had walked me through it properly, shown me a video, given me a support number, something."
The physical side effects, bloating, fatigue, mood shifts, abdominal pressure as the ovaries enlarge are real and can be significant. "I looked four months pregnant by day ten," says Roshni, 29, a designer in Delhi. "I was in a client meeting trying to look normal and I was so uncomfortable. I had told nobody at work."
What they all wish: that clinics offered a mandatory pre-cycle briefing that included a realistic physical timeline, not just a medical consent form.
The loneliness nobody warned them about
Almost every woman we spoke to went through some or all of the process without telling family. The reasons varied fear of judgment, not wanting to explain, protecting the decision from becoming a committee discussion but the result was the same: navigating a physically and emotionally intense medical process largely alone.
"My mother would have turned it into a conversation about why I'm not married yet," says Meghna. "My father wouldn't have understood. So I just didn't tell them." She attended all her monitoring appointments; there are typically four to six ultrasounds during the stimulation phase on her own, before work.
Priya told her employer she had a minor procedure and took one day off for the retrieval. "I went under general sedation, woke up in recovery, took an Uber home, and ordered food. That was it. Nobody knew." She says this matter-of-factly, but adds: "It's a strange thing, to go through something that significant and have it be completely invisible."
While most women spend weeks researching the procedure itself, far fewer have a clear understanding of the long-term financial commitment involved. Beyond the initial treatment, egg freezing cost can include annual storage fees, future transfer expenses, and in some cases, the cost of additional cycles to achieve the desired number of frozen eggs.
The bill that keeps arriving
The financial surprise most women did not anticipate was not the procedure itself, it was everything after.
Annual storage fees, typically between ₹15,000 and ₹30,000 per year, continue for as long as the eggs are stored. For women who freeze in their early 30s and don't use the eggs until their late 30s, that is a decade of quiet billing. Add the cost of the eventual transfer cycle another ₹1 lakh to ₹1.8 lakh and the total spend looks very different from the number on the clinic's website.
"I budgeted for the procedure. I did not budget for everything else," says Roshni. "The storage fee comes every year and it's not a lot in isolation, but it's a reminder every single year that you're paying to keep a possibility alive. There's something emotionally loaded about that, on top of the financial part."
Some clinics have begun addressing this more transparently. Birla Fertility & IVF, for instance, structures its pricing as fixed multi-cycle packages ₹1,35,000 for one cycle, ₹2,25,000 for two, and ₹3,15,000 for three, with stimulation drugs included and free storage up to a set cryolock limit making the upfront cost more predictable. The network has also introduced EMI options starting at ₹1,666 per month, recognising that lump-sum fertility costs are a barrier for many women who would otherwise choose to preserve.
But even structured packages have limits, and the transfer cycle remains a future cost across all providers. The financial journey does not end at retrieval.
What they all wish: a full five-to-ten year financial projection at the time of consultation, not just the procedure price.
The thing they don't regret
Here is what is also true: every woman we spoke to said she would do it again.
Not because it was easy, or cheap, or well-supported. But because the alternative of doing nothing, waiting, hoping biology would cooperate felt worse.
"There's this feeling after," says Priya, "that's hard to describe. It's not happiness exactly. It's more like I did something for myself that nobody can take away. I bought myself time on my own terms." She thinks for a moment. "That's worth a lot. I just wish the path to it had been less of a guessing game."
The women who have been through egg freezing are not asking for it to be made easier in a soft sense. They are asking for it to be made honest in consultations, in marketing, in the conversations India is only beginning to have about reproductive autonomy.
The procedure exists. The technology works. What women need now is the full picture before the first injection, not after.