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(Text on screen): Fertility Authority, Your Most Trusted Source
Ask the Experts
How long can eggs or embryos remain frozen?
Dr. Jim Toner, Atlanta Center for Reproductive Medicine: We do a lot of freezing now, of eggs and embryos.
And it's kind of interesting because once the eggs or embryos are in a freezer, nothing changes.
It's almost like that Star Trek thing where you go into suspended animation.
You can come back in a year or a decade or probably a century and the embryos themselves
would have the same quality as they did the moment you froze them.
So, there really isn't a clock running. The only clock that's running is the social one.
You know: "How old do I want to be when I get pregnant the next time?"
But there really isn't a difference between eggs and embryos, and duration doesn't really matter.
They're in liquid nitrogen, and it's such a cold environment that all the cellular processes are frozen. They're not happening.
So, it doesn’t really matter how long they're in that state.
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