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wired.comA New Startup Lets You Freeze Your Eggs For Free. But Is Anything Ever Free?Cofertility manages the costs of egg freezing and storage, in exchange for half the batch. One young client becomes suspicious of the arrangement—and starts to investigate.

Clients must, in the company’s words, “donate half of the eggs retrieved to intended parents that need the help of an egg donor to have a baby.” It’s called egg sharing, and it hadn’t been commercialized widely in the US until Cofertility came along.

Unlike in traditional cash-pay egg-freezing, Cofertility covers the costs of egg freezing by selling aspiring parents on profiles showing donors’ height, weight, racial background, family medical history, and self-administered aptitude ratings. www.wired.com/story/egg-fr...

wired.comA New Startup Lets You Freeze Your Eggs For Free. But Is Anything Ever Free?Cofertility manages the costs of egg freezing and storage, in exchange for half the batch. One young client becomes suspicious of the arrangement—and starts to investigate.

The egg-to-embryo-to-fetus-to-baby ratio is often described as an inverted pyramid—so when Cofertility donors give away half their frozen eggs, they don’t know if their best shot lies in the portion they kept.

wired.comA New Startup Lets You Freeze Your Eggs For Free. But Is Anything Ever Free?Cofertility manages the costs of egg freezing and storage, in exchange for half the batch. One young client becomes suspicious of the arrangement—and starts to investigate.

To Eve Feinberg, a reproductive endocrinology specialist at Northwestern’s medical school, Cofertility's model is problematic because it undervalues the product that donors are selling.

wired.comA New Startup Lets You Freeze Your Eggs For Free. But Is Anything Ever Free?Cofertility manages the costs of egg freezing and storage, in exchange for half the batch. One young client becomes suspicious of the arrangement—and starts to investigate.

It’s widely accepted that fertility declines over time, but it’s in the industry’s interest to convince women they’re closer to the cliff’s edge than they are. The procedure is also a lot for a person to put their body through.

wired.comA New Startup Lets You Freeze Your Eggs For Free. But Is Anything Ever Free?Cofertility manages the costs of egg freezing and storage, in exchange for half the batch. One young client becomes suspicious of the arrangement—and starts to investigate.

“Three in five Gen Z women are concerned about their fertility,” Cofertility’s CEO Lauren Makler said on a podcast last year, citing a survey by a network of California fertility clinics. The oldest members of that generation are about to turn 30.

wired.comA New Startup Lets You Freeze Your Eggs For Free. But Is Anything Ever Free?Cofertility manages the costs of egg freezing and storage, in exchange for half the batch. One young client becomes suspicious of the arrangement—and starts to investigate.

“When we have patients [in their twenties] in our clinic that come to us about freezing eggs, we actually counsel them against it,” says Lydia Hughes, a doctor who has argued against Cofertility’s model in the past.