Brynn Whitfield Still Wants To Freeze Her Eggs—But This Thought Always Stops Her
Brynn Whitfield wants to freeze her eggs. But something always stops her. It's a thought that niggles at the back of her brain, makes her pause.
The Real Housewives of New York star's egg freezing journey is not a secret. In fact, she shared some details with her co-stars on RHONY's rebooted 14th season. “I want someone who wants a family,” Brynn told the other housewives in episode 9 when discussing romantic partners. “I want to be a mom.”
But after Brynn recounted a story of an egg freezing consultation experience that ended with her literally scrolling her phone looking for sperm donors, Erin Dana Lichy bristled, and called Brynn's statements a "weird lie." The tension between the two friends continued through the next episode.
So, when the 36-year-old breakout reality star first sits down to talk to Women's Health about the possibility of freezing her eggs, she initially pauses. She seems to take a deep breath, as if sharing this part of her life requires a little more emotional steeling.
"I've been thinking about it for the past two years," Brynn says.
Brynn went to her first and only egg freezing consultation.
But the visit to the fertility startup clinic in Manhattan left her confused and upset, and she hasn't gone to another consultation since. Each time she thinks about making another appointment, Brynn has found a reason to back out: She has plans, something came up, the timing's no good, she's worried about how it will physically affect her.
She knows freezing her eggs is the smart thing to do for someone like her. She really wants kids, and told her RHONY cast mates that “creating a family for myself is the only thing in my life right now that I want the most and don’t have.”
And Brynn says she's so grateful she's in a position to have the healthcare coverage and resources to retrieve her eggs. But when she starts to actually plan another initial consultation for egg freezing, she has a "massive panic attack."
At her previous consultation, the doctor started talking to Brynn about the benefits of creating embryos, asking if she was considering that, instead of just freezing her eggs. Brynn says she thought this consultation would involve some pamphlets and brochures, not a transvaginal ultrasound and an hour-long conversation with the doctor about timelines, costs, egg freezing cycles, and stats.
The whole appointment, from the embryo discussion to the ultrasound, was jarring to her, and she wished she had been more prepared with questions. "In order to have an embryo you need to have sperm, in order for sperm you need a man," Brynn says.
It's not the intensive process, or the medications, or the surgery that scare her.
"I was premed in college, I'm not afraid of any of that," she says. It's the fact that she's going to these egg freezing consultations without a partner.
"It's like this realization of like—I know this sounds probably stupid—but like, 'F*ck, I have to do this,'" she says. "And every time I have this thing of like, 'I can't believe I have to do this. This wasn't my plan to have to do it.'"
Brynn thought she'd be married with a kid by 27, not freezing her eggs as a single, 36-year-old woman. "It becomes very real that I don't have a child yet," she says. And that realization—of where she is right now in her life—is hard for her to come to terms with.
She knows the stats. Frozen embryos have a slightly better survival rate when they're thawed compared to frozen eggs—95 percent compared to 90 percent, respectively, per UCLA Health. Plus, it can sometimes take several frozen eggs to create one genetically viable embryo, and then the embryo has to also survive to result in a live birth.
A recent study at NYU Langone showed that, if the average woman is 38.3 years old when she freezes her eggs, the overall chance of a live birth from those frozen eggs was 39 percent (the odds were slightly greater, 51 percent, if the woman was younger than 38). For frozen embryo transfers, about 69 percent resulted in a live birth in women 35 to 37, per a study from CCRM Fertility, which has 34 locations across the US and Canada.
"Do I start interviewing?" Brynn jokes. "It's so overwhelming."
Brynn says her cast mates often didn't understand that she speaks in 'innuendos and metaphors.'
Humor, if you can't already tell, isn't just Brynn's magnetic personality trait. It's also her most reliable shield when facing the hard things in life. And anyone who has watched her open up on RHONY knows that she's faced a lot of those.
She takes fault for the interpretation of her dramatized appointment retelling, and says that's just her way of dealing with things that upset her. It helps "kind of hide the fact that, like, I'm in pain over this," Brynn explains.
"When I'm telling the story to the girls, I'm diluting all of that into my typical Brynn way of doing things," she says. "And instead of just being vulnerable and crying that it upset me, I'm trying to make it funny."
Brynn and Erin have talked it all out and are on good terms now, but Brynn said her friend's response was "hurtful" at the time. And she says she does bring it up with Erin during the reunion episode taping.
Brynn does plan to go through with egg freezing, and she has a game plan.
And despite the intense, vulnerable subject matter during our initial interview, in true Brynn fashion, she quickly follows her emotional outpouring about egg freezing worries with a lighthearted quip.
"If I could put the chicken costume on and just go in and lay some eggs and toss them in my freezer next to my ice cream I'd do it. But there's so much more involved," she says.
When Brynn does freeze her eggs, she says she’ll likely do it at her friend's clinic in Switzerland, where she says it's cheaper, in December or January of 2024, "schedule permitting." And she'll do it with a laugh.
"I'll try to, like, stay awake while the anesthesiologist is putting me to [sleep], I'll be like, 'Can't put redheads down!'" she laughs. "I'll be good."
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