What are our options? Birth control, egg freezing, and more
Learn all about different contraception options, family planning stages, and what to know about egg freezing from our panel of experts, Dr. Evelyn Minaya, Dr. Robin Miller, Dr. Jen Caudle, and Tamika Simpson.
Transcript
What are broadly the types of contraception that a woman might have access to? [MUSIC PLAYING]
It depends on your lifestyle. OK, so you have long-acting-- we call them LARCs-- long-acting reversible contraception.
And that includes IUDs. And there's copper IUDs, which are good for 10 years. And then you have hormonal IUDs, which
are lasting five to seven years now. Then we also have implants, which are rods that you put in your arm. And they're about good for three years.
Then, of course, we have our pills, our patches, our injections, our rings. It depends, again, on your lifestyle.
If you're the type of person that you will always remember to take a pill, I think you'll be OK. You also have condoms plus spermicide.
That gives you a lot of protection. There are so many different options, depending upon your lifestyle and your communication
with your OB/GYN, what is the best thing for you? Knowing what choices we have is really vital to our well-being.
So how do women need to go about making choices for themselves regarding family planning?
In general, it's just a nice idea to plan ahead. Figure out what you want, what you
think you might want your life to look like. Maybe create that five-year plan. Does that include having children? Does it not include having children?
Is it a maybe? Because sometimes that's the option. And it's just really taking some time to understand yourself,
what you want, what you don't want, and then taking that information and having a conversation with your health-care provider to talk about all of these different birth control
options. Women are increasingly turning to egg and embryo freezing and deciding to have children later on in life.
Can you talk about what egg freezing or embryo freezing is/and, because they're different? What's the process?
Yeah, so the process, simply put, women are given hormones in injections
so that they harvest more eggs. A needle is introduced into the ovary. The eggs are extracted.
And for just freezing the eggs, those are taken and frozen. But for the embryo, they are fertilized and then frozen.
It's a similar process, but one more step for the embryo. This is really a conversation that not everybody
is able to have. How much does egg freezing cost? How much should someone expect to pay? Talk to us about how companies may be dealing with that.
Is it covered by your insurance? What I am hearing from a lot of my clients who are going through these processes,
they're paying $10,000. $8,000 to $15,000 seems to be what the average amount is.
And some companies are jumping on board and wanting to help and support in this. What I'm seeing is that there are oftentimes
reimbursement programs, which still means people have to be able to come up with that $8,000 to $15,000 upfront and then submit it
to their company for reimbursement. For those of your patients who may be contemplating freezing their eggs, what questions
do you suggest that women ask themselves or find out the answers to? I think, for one, it's a very personal journey.
Every single person is going to have a different story and a different experience and a different reason. And I think there's a lot of stigma, too, in there,
that sometimes that this is only for single women. There's many, many couples that I work with that are deciding to freeze their eggs because, you
know what? They don't want to have a baby right now. Maybe they want to travel the world. They want to do all of these different things. And a baby is just not where they're at.
And that's OK. [MUSIC PLAYING]
womens health
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