When Heather Murray was 38, she decided to freeze her eggs — a notoriously taxing process, both physically and mentally. But instead of doing it at a clinic in her home city of Vancouver, she flew some 8,600 kilometres to Barcelona.
The main reason? The price. “Even including the flight and the accommodation, I saved around 20% overall,” she says. Still, it wasn’t a purely financial decision. Murray had done some preliminary calls with fertility clinics in Vancouver and didn’t like how gated the entire process felt — archaic booking systems; long wait times; a lack of consistency in care professionals. In Barcelona, meanwhile, she had the same attentive nurse practitioner from her first Zoom call through to her egg retrieval, which helped her feel supported and seen. “The clinic was very nice,” says Murray. “It felt very comfortable. I could ask lots of questions. They never rushed me.”
Murray is part of a growing number of women in Canada and the United States who are choosing to freeze their eggs outside of their home country. Infertility affects one in six people worldwide, so the global fertility market is big business: it was valued at US$39.27 billion last year, and is expected to balloon to US$92.60 billion by 2035. And cross-border reproductive care, or fertility tourism, is one of its fastest-growing sectors: approximately 60% of fertility patients reportedly consider going overseas for treatment. The cross-border fertility market is projected to skyrocket from US$2.6 billion in 2026 to US$6.1 billion by 2030.
Through word of mouth and personal research, destinations like Spain, Mexico, and Israel have become hot spots for North American women who want to take the pressure off of family planning without paying sky-high prices — which in Canada typically range from $12,000 to $18,000 for just one round (though on average, 50% of women end up doing at least two). Incurred costs include appointments, preparatory medications, the retrieval procedure, and egg storage. While some extended medical plans and public programs can lessen the financial burden, in Canada fertility care is a private sector, which means that women are paying for the vast majority out of pocket.
Elective egg freezing (which is different from egg freezing for medical reasons, such as cancer treatment) has been available in Canada since 2012 and has steadily risen in numbers — from 989 in 2019 to 2,580 in 2024. For women who know they want a family one day but aren’t ready to take that step yet, egg freezing is seen as an empowering choice because it alleviates some of the stress around timelines: healthy eggs are preserved so that they can later be used to potentially create a pregnancy through in vitro fertilization (IVF).
In August of this year, 36-year-old U.S. Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez catapulted egg freezing into the zeitgeist when she announced that she was beginning the process herself and would document it on social media. The misogynist outcry from the political right came swiftly, but so did the praise for helping destigmatize women’s reproductive health amid the backsliding Trump era. New York Magazine called her actions “a form of protest.”
Whether you’re in the public eye or not — and regardless of relationship status — egg freezing can be a vulnerable, lonely, and emotionally draining experience. Women must inject themselves with multiple rounds of medication to prepare their ovaries for extraction, and the side effects include bloating, fatigue, and pain — not to mention heightened emotions thanks to the increase in hormones. It can all feel incredibly isolating, which is a big reason why Murray didn’t freeze her eggs in Barcelona alone; she did it with a friend.
“We thought, ‘Let’s go on a trip, let’s work remotely,’” she says. “We wanted to have fun and make it more of a girls’ trip experience as opposed to something that you’re trying to do while working at home, which felt more difficult. Doing it at the same time as someone gave us both support through the shared experience of doing it together.”
That communal approach is the ethos behind The Fertility Co-Living. Think of it like a wellness retreat, but for fertility: women from all over the world travel to Mexico City and go through the entire egg freezing process as a group, allowing them to support each other from injections through to recovery. In addition to the medical care, the experience also includes wellness programming such as yoga and sound baths.
“I wish all medical treatment could be done in a holistic and community-centred way,” says founder Aliza Virani, who was inspired to create the retreat after going through her own egg freezing experience in Vancouver — which, after thousands of dollars and only three eggs, left her feeling disheartened and frustrated. She figured there had to be a better way: one that harnessed the best in international fertility care at a lower price (The Fertility Co-Living costs US$9,300 to US$10,200, which is about 40% less than egg freezing in the U.S. and 20% less than in Canada), and eased the emotional burden by creating a sense of fellowship.
“I’m still in a little bit of disbelief about how calm my nervous system was,” says Farah Manjiyani, who lives in Chicago and is a past participant of The Fertility Co-Living. “Every time all of us girls got in the same room and started talking, I immediately felt a thousand times better. We went to markets together. We had meals together. We hung out in each other’s apartments and danced and laughed and watched Sex and the City.”
The idea of egg freezing in a community setting remains far-fetched in Canada and the U.S. For one thing, about half of the fertility clinics here are now owned by private equity (PE); in the States, one-third have an affiliation with a PE or VC. In theory, of course, cash injections into the sector are a good thing, especially when it comes to expanding access to care — but since the main goal of these firms is making money above all else, it’s worth considering if that investment comes at the expense of the patient experience.
The industry certainly can, at times, feel like a cash grab, with messaging that preys on one of our most vulnerable human desires: raising a family. An analysis of 42 fertility clinics in Canada conducted by the Investigative Journalism Bureau at the University of Toronto earlier this year discovered that 35 of them made deceptive or exaggerated statements about egg freezing, including suggestions that it guaranteed a baby — when, in fact, the live-birth rate from embryos made using frozen eggs is only about 25%. Even early-stage testing to check a woman’s egg count, which is done prior to any decisions about freezing, can also feel like a sales pitch. “If your results are bad, they’re going to tell you to freeze your eggs,” says Virani. “If your results are good, they’re [still] going to tell you to freeze your eggs.”
Some Canadian clinics are actively trying to make the situation better. One of them is Twig Fertility, which has clinics in Toronto and Vancouver (and does, it’s worth noting, have one VC investor). “When we started Twig, the whole point was to elevate the patient experience, and redefine what fertility care could look and feel like,” says Dr. Rhonda Zwingerman, co-founder and chief medical officer at Twig. That means a physical space with the aesthetic of a facial spa, for starters; it also means being overtly transparent about pricing, and that each patient has a dedicated navigator with them throughout the whole process.
Any form of medical tourism has its risks. The most important thing is doing enough research to ensure that the care being offered is effective, high-quality, and safe. “I think it can be hard for people to know what they’re getting into,” Zwingerman says. “It’s a bit of a ‘buyer beware’ situation when you’re going abroad; you have to do a lot of due diligence.”
There’s also the issue of what to do with the eggs should a woman decide she wants to use them. Because they are stored in the country where she did the procedure, she either has to pay to have them sent to her (a risk in and of itself due to how delicate they are), or travel back to that country and do IVF there (which means more travel costs, but a cheaper procedure).
Either way, Zwingerman does understand how the price and experience at Canadian clinics could drive someone to seek care outside of the country. “These services are not inexpensive in Canada,” she acknowledges. “There’s a lot we probably can do better in terms of financial counselling and making sure people are aware of all of their options.”
Even for women who would rather freeze their eggs at home, though, access to care is a barrier. There are nearly 50 IVF clinics across the country, but the vast majority of them are in Ontario — meaning that women in other provinces are particularly susceptible to months-long wait times that they might not be interested in hanging around for.
Even so, Zwingerman is hopeful.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to keep people here, if we could provide them what they needed at home?” she says. “That would be my dream.”
