Chelsea offer fertility treatment and egg freezing for players in UK-first

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FT Desk

Chelsea Women have become the first club in the United Kingdom to give their players free access to fertility services such as the freezing of eggs.

A new fund has been put together worth £189,000 which is sufficient to cover egg-freezing treatment for every member of the squad - representing the largest investment in fertility care ever made by a women’s sports team in the country.

At Fertility Plus clinic in London’s Harley Street, egg freezing costs £6,995, followed by an annual storage fee of £425. Players can also use the fund to help cover IVF treatment, which begins at £13,750. In addition, the money may be used for other gynaecological care, including smear tests, contraception and consultations with a specialist about menstrual health.

Egg freezing begins with an assessment by a fertility specialist, followed by around two weeks of hormone injections to stimulate the ovaries to produce multiple eggs. During this time, regular scans and blood tests are used to monitor their development and determine when they are ready to be collected.

The eggs are then retrieved in a short procedure, usually performed under sedation. Mature eggs are rapidly frozen and stored at very low temperatures. If they are used in the future, the eggs can be thawed, fertilised with sperm through IVF and developed into embryos for potential transfer to the uterus.

“Most women can go back to work almost immediately,” said Dr Amit Shah, consultant gynaecologist and the co-founder of Fertility Plus.

“But with sportswomen, it’s very interesting how that works, how they approach it and how long it would take them to return to play.”

The Royal Spanish Football Federation will soon announce plans for egg freezing for its World Cup-winning squad.

However, those plans haven't proved to be universally popular.

Ana Peleteiro-Compaore Brion, a Spanish Olympic triple jumper, said on Instagram: “The problem obviously isn’t freezing eggs. The problem is: why does the institution these women work for have an interest in financing them to delay their motherhood? And here there’s a problem that for me changes absolutely everything. Is this measure intended to make it easier for women to be mothers, or is it intended to make it easier for them not to be while they’re playing?

“Look at what can happen here. Instead of adapting the sports structure so that motherhood fits within it, we adapt women’s reproductive timing so they continue to fit the structure. And there’s still something that worries me even more. Today, freezing eggs is an option. But when that option is offered to you by the institution your professional career depends on, at what point can the option start to become an expectation? Because let’s imagine the next step: if you could freeze eggs, why did you decide to get pregnant right now? And there we have a huge problem.”

An issue that many sportswomen face is that their peak career years come at the time when they are most fertile.

Chelsea Women are simply being given the option to freeze their eggs, according to Dr Shah.

“These fertility treatments are not the sort of treatments they should be having during their peak seasons,” he said.

“They require a fair bit of effort, concentration and time off work, which is a lot to undertake.”