Hello Dr. Sher

I am 39, childless and I’m currently undergoing IVF in Portugal. I have had 4 miscarriages in the past (2 clinical and 2 chemicals). On my last scan, my AFC was 15. My AMH is 1.24.

I would like to make and store as many embryos as possible in back-to-back retrievals, as we will be doing PGTA testing on the embryos and I know many of them will be abnormal.

However, in Portugal, as soon as you have a fertilised egg, you are legally not allowed to retrieve more eggs.

This means if I do back to back retrievals, we have to freeze the eggs from the first round and then fertilise them with the eggs harvested from the second round. If we do three retrievals, we have to freeze the eggs from the first 2 rounds and then fertilise them with the eggs retrieved from the 3 round, and so on and so forth. We can do as many retrievals as we like, but as soon as any batch is fertilised, we’re not allowed to do more.

Our options are:

1.) Collect as many eggs as we can from 2 or 3 or 4 rounds, but with the risk that we lose some in the freezing and thawing process. Pro is that we can collect more eggs to fertilise in one shot and hopefully this results in more embryos.

2.) Fertilise the eggs from the first round to reduce risk of egg loss. But that means we have to go through the entire process: fertilise, wait for day 5 embryos, PGTA testing and also transfer (if we make it that far). Only once all the embryos have been used or have failed, can we retrieve again. Given the attrition rate, it seems unlikely the first round will produce anything.

Currently, I am leaning towards collecting as many eggs as possible in 3 to 4 rounds. But a lot of people are saying that egg freezing at my age is too risky – that the eggs are too fragile.

What is your opinion on this? Thanks so much