Fertility Preservation

If you’re thinking about fertility preservation — no matter the reason — it’s natural to have a lot of questions and maybe even some worries and concerns. Our compassionate team will listen and make sure you have all the information you need as you decide if fertility preservation is right for you.

What to expect at your first visit

When you first meet with our expert team, they’ll spend time talking with you about your reasons for fertility preservation. They’ll ask about your concerns, your timeline and your health. Together, you’ll come up with a plan that works for you, both in the short term and for the long haul.

That may mean taking certain precautions to protect your reproductive organs (ovaries or testicles), during radiation treatment. Or it may be that freezing your genetic material (your eggs or sperm) is your best route.

Meet Our Fertility Preservation Team

When you choose fertility preservation at Cleveland Clinic, you’ll have a team of experts by your side to make sure you and your reproductive tissue are well cared for. Depending on your needs and reasons for wanting fertility preservation, you may meet with:

• Andrologists (experts in male fertility).
• Embryologists (specialists in egg retrieval and caring for embryos).
• Obstetricians and gynecologists.
• Urologists.
• Oncologists.
• Radiation oncologists.
• Specialists in LGBTQIA+ care (for people who choose fertility preservation before gender-affirming care).
• Mental health providers.
• Social workers.

When you choose to preserve your fertility, your mind is probably racing with questions about what to expect and how it all works. Our experts will help you understand your choices and what they mean for growing your family one day. And they’ll work with you through every step of the process. They’ll make sure your reproductive tissue stays healthy and protected so it’s ready when you are.

Egg freezing

If you choose to freeze your eggs, your Cleveland Clinic treatment will start with about 10 days of hormone therapy to stimulate egg production. During that time, you’ll meet with your provider several times so we can monitor your progress. Then, your team will remove a number of eggs and store them securely. You’ll be lightly sedated during the retrieval process.

Freezing your eggs allows them to be fertilized later, either with your partner’s sperm or donor sperm. When you’re ready, your eggs will be thawed, combined with sperm and implanted via in vitro fertilization (IVF).

Freezing eggs is a popular choice for people who want to ensure their future fertility and haven’t found the right partner or a sperm donor. It’s an option for young people assigned female at birth (AFAB), including children whose cancer treatment may affect their future fertility. And it’s available for people who will undergo gender-affirming treatment, too. In most cases, egg freezing is best done before or around age 35.

Embryo freezing

If you have a partner or a sperm donor with whom you want to have children, you could choose to freeze embryos. Embryo freezing is the best-studied and most widely used form of fertility preservation.

As with egg freezing, you’ll have 10 days of hormone therapy, close monitoring and an egg retrieval procedure. For embryo freezing, though, our experts will fertilize your eggs with sperm before they’re frozen. We’ll closely monitor the fertilized eggs for a few days before we securely store them.

We’ll use our EmbryoScope® high-tech incubator and time-lapse camera to keep a careful eye on your embryos. It’s one of the most sophisticated technologies available to monitor embryo health.

And when you’re ready to get pregnant, your team will thaw a healthy embryo and implant it into your uterus.

Ovarian tissue freezing

Some people need to begin cancer treatment quickly and can’t wait for an egg- or embryo-freezing process. Or you may have other reasons that keep you from doing hormonal therapy. Ovarian tissue freezing is an experimental procedure available at Cleveland Clinic that may help preserve your fertility.

If you choose ovarian tissue freezing, your team will remove ovarian tissue in a minimally invasive procedure. When you’re ready, the team will thaw the tissue and reimplant it. Eggs from your ovarian tissue can also be frozen for future use.

The goal is for you to regain your fertility. After your ovarian tissue is reimplanted, you could become pregnant naturally, rather than through IVF.

Ovarian tissue freezing is relatively rare. Cleveland Clinic is one of the few hospitals in the U.S. where you can get this procedure.

Sperm freezing

While female fertility declines with age, people assigned male at birth (AMAB) usually make sperm beginning at puberty and continuing throughout their lives. But some health conditions can cause you to make a limited number of sperm. Radiation and chemotherapy, can also damage your sperm. And if you’re having gender-affirming care, you may want to preserve your genetic material before undergoing surgery.

The experts in fertility preservation at Cleveland Clinic can help with it all, freezing your sperm so you can pass on your genes to your children.

Testicular tissue freezing

If your semen doesn’t contain the sperm needed for fertilization, we can still help.

Our expert fertility specialists can extract sperm directly from testicular tissue. They can freeze those sperm until you’re ready for them. This option is the only fertility preservation technique available to young people AMAB who aren’t yet producing sperm (prepubertal) who are facing infertility due to other fertility-harming treatments they may have. Cleveland Clinic is one of only a handful of centers offering this treatment, which is still considered investigational.

Follow-Up Care

When your genetic material is in our hands, you can be confident we’re treating it with the utmost respect and care. We’ll monitor it around the clock, making sure it stays healthy and viable.

And when you decide it’s time to grow your family, we’ll be ready, too. We’ll walk you through the transfer process and keep a close eye on you to make sure you have a healthy pregnancy.

Taking the Next Step

Whether it’s a personal life choice or because of a medical condition, preserving your fertility is an important decision that’s completely up to you. The caring experts in fertility preservation at Cleveland Clinic are ready to answer your questions, listen to your concerns and help to put you in control of your family’s future.