Aliza Virani had a bad experience freezing her eggs in Vancouver, so turned to Mexico for an alternative. But here in Canada, the egg-freezing business is booming
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Aliza Virani lost her international event-planning career and “prime dating years” during COVID-19 and a subsequent health scare.
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So in 2023, at age 33, she decided to freeze her eggs.
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All the messaging around the procedure made the North Vancouver woman feel like she was under “a pressure cooker” to do it before she turned 35.
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With financial support from her parents, she paid $16,000 but was able to freeze only three eggs, a low result for a woman her age. It was an “emotional and disappointing” experience, which she partially attributes to stress at that stage of her life.
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“We have the pressure to own a home, the pressure to have a career, the pressure to take care of our aging parents,” Virani said.
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Not to mention “the pressure to be married” and “still look young and beautiful.”
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The deafening tick-tick-tick of her “biological clock” had piqued her interest in egg-freezing, but when it was over she felt uninformed about the odds of success and alone while enduring harsh side-effects following her egg retrieval.
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Virani’s concerns echo those of many women interviewed for Fertility Inc., a five-part series by the Investigative Journalism Bureau and Postmedia News, which delves into the largely unregulated egg-freezing industry. Journalists documented examples of misleading advertising full of emotional manipulation, high costs that weren’t properly explained to patients and a lack of transparency about the odds of egg-freezing leading to a successful pregnancy.
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Egg-freezing involves collecting and storing eggs until a woman wants to have a baby. Then the eggs are thawed and fertilized with sperm to create embryos, which are transferred to the uterus to try to achieve pregnancy.
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While the procedure was developed in the 1980s to help women undergoing certain medical treatments, egg-freezing for family planning began in 2012 in Canada.
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Today, the industry is booming — more than doubling from 2020 to 2024. And yet, of the 4.1 million babies born in this country between 2013 and 2023, just 70 are known to have come from frozen eggs, according to Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society data.
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Despite this, Canadian women paid millions to freeze their eggs between 2013 and 2023.
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In an ideal world, Virani wishes society would allow women to slow down and protect their health, to improve their chances of having babies naturally.
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But for those women who want to freeze eggs, Virani set out to address the problems she had faced: high costs, lack of clear information, isolation and emotional uncertainty. She created an egg-freezing retreat in Mexico, The Fertility Co-Living, where women go through the medical procedure together.
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She held two retreats in July and November 2025, with eight clients from Canada, the U.S. and New Zealand, ranging in age from 31 to 43. The next one is scheduled for September, when four women are enrolled.
