Protect Your Fertility
Your family-building goals are central to our consultations. While we focus on helping patients have a family immediately, we also consider your long-term goals. You may wish to have more than one child, or you might not want to have children just yet.
Embryo freezing (or “embryo banking”) has revolutionised fertility treatment: we can now preserve the chances of having a baby, or second or third child, in the future and can help patients to have their whole family from one round of IVF.
Waterstone Clinic are cryopreservation specialists. We provide gold-standard freezing methods and deliver superior success rates.
Egg Freeze Process:
Step by Step
Ovarian Stimulation: You will take hormone injections for 10-12 days to stimulate your ovaries to produce and mature multiple eggs.
Egg Collection Procedure: Your eggs are collected in a simple procedure under light sedation. The embryologists fertilise the eggs with sperm (from your partner or donor) and monitor their development.
Embryo Freezing: When the embryos reach the blastocyst stage, they are frozen and stored in the laboratory at -196°C in our long-term storage facilities.
Future Use: When you are ready to use your embryos, they will be thawed and prepared for embryo transfer.
Success with Frozen Embryos
Our cryopreservation programme is hugely successful. In our laboratory, we use a method called “vitrification” to freeze embryos. This process has an incredibly high success rate for thawing: over 98% of embryos survive this process. When used in treatment, the embryos maintain the same success rate as fresh embryos.
Using Frozen Embryos
When you wish to use the frozen embryos, you will have a Frozen Embryo Transfer (FET) treatment. These cycles are quite simple and straightforward: there is no ovarian stimulation, egg collection, or fertilisation, as you have already completed that part of the treatment.