I've been banging the drum for turnbacks for years, to anyone who would listen. They may be in a grey area, and the French won't like it (initially), but I strongly believe it would stem the issue of illegal boats crossing the channel, and the knock on impact would be that it would get rid of the jungle at Calais, which the French would be in favour of. And then there might be a knock on / ripple effect, of moving people back to where they enter Europe/the EU, at which point there can be a fairer processing system.
On the point of Brits wanting to help refugees, I've long argued that we should have a humanitarian visa that grants refuge for a period of time (or until your home country is safe), at which point you have to return. That's part of the contract. There is some precedent / parallels for this with the Belgian refugees who came to the UK in WW1, and then who 90% returned after the war (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28857769).
There's an extra element to Australia's offshore processing. It's designed to keep Nauru afloat. Nauru has mostly depleted its phosphate deposits – which was previously its main source of income. The detention centre on Nauru is now one of its main sources of income. There's still around 100 people in detention on Nauru and these people are effective geopolitical pawns. Canberra pays to keep them there in order prevent Nauru from reaching out to China for cash. The tactic hasn't quite worked fully, as Nauru switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China for cash, but the detention centre still keeps Nauru in Australia's arch of influence more or less.
But this also creates a paradox in Australia's approach. Turnbacks reduce the amount of people being sent to Nauru. Which weakens Australia's ability to use the detention centre as a geopolitical tool.
I’m generally in favour of egg freezing, and have done it myself. That said, I think it’s irresponsible of Aria to talk about her 44 mature follicles without making clear that this is a *wildly rare* outcome.
The median total number of follicles for someone in with regular periods in Aria’s age group (25-29) is ~13-19*, and not all of them will respond to the medication or mature. Aria had *three times* this number grow AND mature.
On a more minor note, younger is not always better. Younger women are at higher risk of OHSS, which can lead to severe illness and even hospitalisation. Aria will know this, as her follicle count puts her in the highest risk group.
I presume the article will go into more detail, but I wanted to flag these because not everyone will read the article and I want to avoid people coming away with too rosy a picture of such a significant decision.
(This comment is a bit negative, so I want to end by saying congratulations to Aria on such great results, and I hope the operation went well!)
I agree my results are good and out of distribution. (Although I will say I have a couple of friends who have also done egg freezing who are roughly my age, and I didn’t have the highest number — I wonder if this is another small piece of evidence suggesting that we’re aging slower)
Obviously this is not medical advice and do their own research but my sense is that overall people are too risk averse about OHSS (and other measures people take for fertility preservation in general). At the extreme end OHSS is very dangerous, but the symptoms are very clear and treatable. I wouldn’t do egg freezing from a cowboy clinic with irresponsible people (the main reason I didn’t decide to do price-based tourism) but I think any serious place will monitor and intervene capably. I even know someone who was hospitalised with OHSS and told me it wasn’t so bad in the end.
The reverse of this is I know people who, for their first experience, despite very good indications got poor results because the doctors didn’t give them enough stimulation to get all their follicles so they’ve done subsequent rounds with more willing doctors.
My overall view is fewer uncomfortable and higher yielding rounds seems better than needing several rounds later.
Everything has tradeoffs and overall this is a very small amount of pain and risk compared to actually having a baby.
This is an excellent point in relation to Australia:
"So it turns out by being very predictable and consistent by building trust amongst the public, you actually get a much, much more generous overall policy than you do in this kind of uncontrolled principle agent world."
But, and it is a massive but, and only the first of three massive buts , there is a Nixon comes to China thing here. The public has to fundamentally trust that the government isn't going to allow uncontrolled immigration. So this is basically DOA under nearly any contemporary left-wing party.
The third massive "but" is that what else was not widely published was Australia's military and political cooperation with Indonesia. The "2012-2013" surge actually started with in 2007 with the election of a left-wing prime minister, and ended with the election of a conservative one. The left-wing one didn't want to train Indonesian soldiers because he thought they were all war criminals and was openly contemptuous to Indonesia (no particular animosity, that seems to have been a feature of his). So the boats started again, surprise!
"Pre-emptive" egg-freezer here, same age as Aria. I'm currently going through my 3rd and last round (started yesterday).
Very grateful for WIP’s focus on this topic. I’ve been considering freezing my eggs since my early to mid twenties, and was put off by much of the sceptical discourse around it. Egg-freezing should be done as soon as the woman can afford to go through it, both financially and circumstantially. Like Aria said, it should certainly be done by young women who want to “ensure” (render realistic) the option of having children into their 40s. In addition to quantity, egg quality, hence age, matters enormously. Ergo, considering a pre-harvest plan (supplementation, diet optimisation, cortisol-minimising lifestyle) around 3 months before the procedure might be worthwhile.
Discussions about egg-freezing should focus on numbers and details. 44 mature-enough follicles in one cycle is an extraordinarily high count, even for relatively young patients like ourselves. In most cases, this high response might put the woman at risk of OHSS (ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome), a serious reaction often requiring hospitalisation. Clinic management (low dosage, frequent monitoring, appropriate trigger protocol, and post-retrieval monitoring) matters enormously, particularly in such high-response —> high-risk cases. As was discussed, many of the women who go through this procedure do so abroad. Many clinics don’t take as precise an approach as they should, and often seek to maximise yield at the cost of health. Given the expense, I encourage y’all to do your clinic research accordingly.
I’m very glad the follicle-to-baby pipeline was outlined in the video. 44 mature-enough (to-be-punctured) follicles aren’t necessarily equivalent to 44 mature (aka usable) eggs, as the follicles may contain “immature” eggs or be “empty”/fail to “release” the egg following the trigger procedure. Having gone through my own stats, however, I don’t think Aria’s 44 follicles —> 5/6 children (aka live births) is correct. On average for a healthy woman of our age, 40 frozen eggs (an eggcellent follicle-to-frozen egg ratio) translates to 98% likelihood of 1 live birth, 95% of 2 live births, and 85% of 3 live births. I believe the probability of 5 live births with 40 eggs would be around 15-30%.
In case any woman planning on freezing her eggs is reading: Something I wish I’d known more about going into this pertains to back-to-back cycles. Many clinicians recommend this approach for patients undergoing multiple retrievals. This involves beginning the 2nd cycle at the onset of the post-retrieval “withdrawal” bleed. In most cases, this is practical (“get it over with”) and produces equivalent or slightly lower mature egg yields. In a minority of cases, however, this puts the patient at risk of underperformance due to low functional recovery — the ovaries haven’t had time to recover from the first cycle. For women who’re able and willing to accept some additional timeline, spacing retrievals and monitoring ovarian recovery is the more cautious approach.
Lastly, I’d like to finish this comment by pointing out that male-factor fertility is comparably under-optimised and certainly under-discussed (cheeky request for WIP coverage, if I may). My Dr shared that a surprisingly high number of young men (some as young as university students!) are choosing to freeze their sperm as they’re aware of the lifestyle effects on gamete quantity, motility, and quality. SO much more to be said on this extremely under-covered topic. If someone at WIP would like to do a piece on this, I’d be very happy to share my clinic’s name and ask my Dr whether she’d like to be interviewed.
I've been banging the drum for turnbacks for years, to anyone who would listen. They may be in a grey area, and the French won't like it (initially), but I strongly believe it would stem the issue of illegal boats crossing the channel, and the knock on impact would be that it would get rid of the jungle at Calais, which the French would be in favour of. And then there might be a knock on / ripple effect, of moving people back to where they enter Europe/the EU, at which point there can be a fairer processing system.
On the point of Brits wanting to help refugees, I've long argued that we should have a humanitarian visa that grants refuge for a period of time (or until your home country is safe), at which point you have to return. That's part of the contract. There is some precedent / parallels for this with the Belgian refugees who came to the UK in WW1, and then who 90% returned after the war (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28857769).
We were surprised to discover that offshore processing wasn’t what worked for Australia!
There's an extra element to Australia's offshore processing. It's designed to keep Nauru afloat. Nauru has mostly depleted its phosphate deposits – which was previously its main source of income. The detention centre on Nauru is now one of its main sources of income. There's still around 100 people in detention on Nauru and these people are effective geopolitical pawns. Canberra pays to keep them there in order prevent Nauru from reaching out to China for cash. The tactic hasn't quite worked fully, as Nauru switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China for cash, but the detention centre still keeps Nauru in Australia's arch of influence more or less.
But this also creates a paradox in Australia's approach. Turnbacks reduce the amount of people being sent to Nauru. Which weakens Australia's ability to use the detention centre as a geopolitical tool.
I’m generally in favour of egg freezing, and have done it myself. That said, I think it’s irresponsible of Aria to talk about her 44 mature follicles without making clear that this is a *wildly rare* outcome.
The median total number of follicles for someone in with regular periods in Aria’s age group (25-29) is ~13-19*, and not all of them will respond to the medication or mature. Aria had *three times* this number grow AND mature.
On a more minor note, younger is not always better. Younger women are at higher risk of OHSS, which can lead to severe illness and even hospitalisation. Aria will know this, as her follicle count puts her in the highest risk group.
I presume the article will go into more detail, but I wanted to flag these because not everyone will read the article and I want to avoid people coming away with too rosy a picture of such a significant decision.
(This comment is a bit negative, so I want to end by saying congratulations to Aria on such great results, and I hope the operation went well!)
*source: https://www.ejog.org/article/S0301-2115(16)30930-7/pdf#:~:text=2).-,Table%201,30)%20SD:%20Standard%20deviation.
Caveat: study excludes people with irregular periods, which are very correlated with higher follicle counts.
Hi 👋
I agree my results are good and out of distribution. (Although I will say I have a couple of friends who have also done egg freezing who are roughly my age, and I didn’t have the highest number — I wonder if this is another small piece of evidence suggesting that we’re aging slower)
Obviously this is not medical advice and do their own research but my sense is that overall people are too risk averse about OHSS (and other measures people take for fertility preservation in general). At the extreme end OHSS is very dangerous, but the symptoms are very clear and treatable. I wouldn’t do egg freezing from a cowboy clinic with irresponsible people (the main reason I didn’t decide to do price-based tourism) but I think any serious place will monitor and intervene capably. I even know someone who was hospitalised with OHSS and told me it wasn’t so bad in the end.
The reverse of this is I know people who, for their first experience, despite very good indications got poor results because the doctors didn’t give them enough stimulation to get all their follicles so they’ve done subsequent rounds with more willing doctors.
My overall view is fewer uncomfortable and higher yielding rounds seems better than needing several rounds later.
Everything has tradeoffs and overall this is a very small amount of pain and risk compared to actually having a baby.
This is an excellent point in relation to Australia:
"So it turns out by being very predictable and consistent by building trust amongst the public, you actually get a much, much more generous overall policy than you do in this kind of uncontrolled principle agent world."
But, and it is a massive but, and only the first of three massive buts , there is a Nixon comes to China thing here. The public has to fundamentally trust that the government isn't going to allow uncontrolled immigration. So this is basically DOA under nearly any contemporary left-wing party.
The second massive "but" is that this is all downstream of "its the economy, stupid". See eg: https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2025/07/07/to-understand-america-today-study-the-zero-sum-mindset-writes-stefanie-stantcheva. Critically, Australia had economic growth and low unemployment in nearly all of the past 35 years.
The third massive "but" is that what else was not widely published was Australia's military and political cooperation with Indonesia. The "2012-2013" surge actually started with in 2007 with the election of a left-wing prime minister, and ended with the election of a conservative one. The left-wing one didn't want to train Indonesian soldiers because he thought they were all war criminals and was openly contemptuous to Indonesia (no particular animosity, that seems to have been a feature of his). So the boats started again, surprise!
"Pre-emptive" egg-freezer here, same age as Aria. I'm currently going through my 3rd and last round (started yesterday).
Very grateful for WIP’s focus on this topic. I’ve been considering freezing my eggs since my early to mid twenties, and was put off by much of the sceptical discourse around it. Egg-freezing should be done as soon as the woman can afford to go through it, both financially and circumstantially. Like Aria said, it should certainly be done by young women who want to “ensure” (render realistic) the option of having children into their 40s. In addition to quantity, egg quality, hence age, matters enormously. Ergo, considering a pre-harvest plan (supplementation, diet optimisation, cortisol-minimising lifestyle) around 3 months before the procedure might be worthwhile.
Discussions about egg-freezing should focus on numbers and details. 44 mature-enough follicles in one cycle is an extraordinarily high count, even for relatively young patients like ourselves. In most cases, this high response might put the woman at risk of OHSS (ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome), a serious reaction often requiring hospitalisation. Clinic management (low dosage, frequent monitoring, appropriate trigger protocol, and post-retrieval monitoring) matters enormously, particularly in such high-response —> high-risk cases. As was discussed, many of the women who go through this procedure do so abroad. Many clinics don’t take as precise an approach as they should, and often seek to maximise yield at the cost of health. Given the expense, I encourage y’all to do your clinic research accordingly.
I’m very glad the follicle-to-baby pipeline was outlined in the video. 44 mature-enough (to-be-punctured) follicles aren’t necessarily equivalent to 44 mature (aka usable) eggs, as the follicles may contain “immature” eggs or be “empty”/fail to “release” the egg following the trigger procedure. Having gone through my own stats, however, I don’t think Aria’s 44 follicles —> 5/6 children (aka live births) is correct. On average for a healthy woman of our age, 40 frozen eggs (an eggcellent follicle-to-frozen egg ratio) translates to 98% likelihood of 1 live birth, 95% of 2 live births, and 85% of 3 live births. I believe the probability of 5 live births with 40 eggs would be around 15-30%.
In case any woman planning on freezing her eggs is reading: Something I wish I’d known more about going into this pertains to back-to-back cycles. Many clinicians recommend this approach for patients undergoing multiple retrievals. This involves beginning the 2nd cycle at the onset of the post-retrieval “withdrawal” bleed. In most cases, this is practical (“get it over with”) and produces equivalent or slightly lower mature egg yields. In a minority of cases, however, this puts the patient at risk of underperformance due to low functional recovery — the ovaries haven’t had time to recover from the first cycle. For women who’re able and willing to accept some additional timeline, spacing retrievals and monitoring ovarian recovery is the more cautious approach.
Lastly, I’d like to finish this comment by pointing out that male-factor fertility is comparably under-optimised and certainly under-discussed (cheeky request for WIP coverage, if I may). My Dr shared that a surprisingly high number of young men (some as young as university students!) are choosing to freeze their sperm as they’re aware of the lifestyle effects on gamete quantity, motility, and quality. SO much more to be said on this extremely under-covered topic. If someone at WIP would like to do a piece on this, I’d be very happy to share my clinic’s name and ask my Dr whether she’d like to be interviewed.