Should professional sports organizations encourage female athletes to freeze their eggs?
It’s part of an evolving conversation about athletes and motherhood, as the Spanish Football Federation becomes the latest body to support fertility treatments for female players.
As part of its agreement, the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) said on Tuesday it would cover the full cost of egg freezing treatment for all international players who have been called up to the national team at least twice.
“It is important that female athletes feel that they do not have to choose between their professional and personal lives,” Barcelona midfielder Patri Guijarro said on Tuesday.
For female athletes, the peak performance window and the fertility window overlap, which researchers note often makes female athletes feel like they have to choose one or the other.
The RFEF’s decision follows similar fertility regulations recently announced by several other football teams and federations.such as the National Women’s Soccer League and Chelsea FC women’s team, as well as other leagues such as the WNBA and the Women’s Tennis Association.
But while fertility preservation measures such as egg freezing are generally presented as another way to give women in elite sports greater freedom to decide whether and when to become mothers, some experts and advocates worry it could perpetuate the idea that women should wait until retirement to do so.
Exciting move, but needs more support: Olympian
In some ways, every time a sports organization or team announces fertility funding, it’s an exciting step forward for female athletes, says two-time Olympic rowing champion Jill Moffatt, co-founder of MOMentum, a Canadian nonprofit that supports mother athletes.
On At the same time, Moffat says it would be a real feminist “win” if they offered the same level of support, such as maternity leave and childcare options, for female athletes who decide to have children while competing in high-level sport.
“Otherwise it’s kind of a double-edged sword,” she told CBC News.
“It’s physiologically possible to have a baby and come back and compete at the highest level… but there are still a lot of obstacles.”
Moffatt says it’s also important to remember that for many 2SLGBTQ+ athletes, IVF is sometimes a necessary part of family planning, regardless of whether they decide to wait. In that sense, she said, funding egg freezing and fertility treatments is a “huge win.”
There’s also the fact that fertility treatments are expensive, and many female athletes likely wouldn’t be able to afford them without funding, Moffatt said. For example, CBC Sports previously reported that 65 percent of PWHL players made less than $60,000 a year last season.
Most Olympic and Paralympic athletes “just try to keep the lights on,” Moffatt said.
“Felt incompatible with my career”
For many female athletes, offering this option at all may seem like a big step forward, given, as the researchers noted, sports culture has long held the belief that pregnancy is the end of an athlete’s career.
“Pregnancy and motherhood have long been considered incompatible with a career as a professional or elite athlete because policies were either absent or treated unfairly towards women,” Allison Sandmeyer-Graves, CEO of Canadian Women & Sport, told CBC News.
As a result, women who wanted to start a family often ended their careers early or waited until retirement, she says, adding that waiting too long also poses a risk to a woman’s ability to get pregnant.
For some, putting off starting a family until they’re done playing is the right choice, and freezing eggs gives them some security. Sandmeyer-Graves said.
This is confirmed by Margie Davenport, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Alberta, who recently helped FIFA develop guidelines to support pregnant and postpartum female soccer players.
“Being pregnant during an active playing career is not the right choice for every athlete. Egg freezing is gaining traction as a practical alternative for those who prefer to wait until retirement,” Davenport told CBC News.
“Ensuring that female athletes do not have to choose between their careers and motherhood is fundamental to the well-being of female athletes and the development of women’s sport.”
And that’s encouraging, according to British rugby player Natasha Hunt.
“There’s a thought process behind it, like it’s normal. For example, we want to support you on this journey and make sure your contracts are still in place,” Hunt said on Thursday’s episode of The Good, The Scaz & The Rugby podcast.
In the same episode, when asked if she would freeze eggs, British player Megan Jones replied: “100 per cent yes” but said more attention should be paid to it.
The Canadian paratriathlete shares her experiences as an athlete and young mother on social media.
Medical and ethical considerations
Training athletes has also raised concerns among some medical experts, who warn that egg retrieval is far from simple and requires hormonal drugs and a surgical procedure.
IVF is also not a foolproof plan. According to a September 2025 press release from the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society (CFAS) discussing the most recent data from the Canadian Registry of Assisted Reproductive Technologies, live birth rates for those who undergo at least one embryo transfer in a year can range from 38 to 50 percent. CFAS noted that these rates vary by age, and success rates decline with increasing age.
The CFAS report also said these results show that the number of elective egg freezing procedures more than doubled between 2019 and 2024.
“There is no guarantee that when you defrost or defrost these eggs, turn them into embryos and they will actually succeed and lead to a successful live birth,” Dr. Lamia Zafrani, a London-based sports gynecologist, told German broadcaster DW this week.
Zafrani said there are also ethical considerations when an organization offers egg freezing.
“There’s always a question about whether you offer egg freezing and fertility preservation; the main point is that you’re telling your players, ‘Don’t get pregnant while you’re working for us,'” Zafrani told DW.
That’s why it’s so important to support pregnant and postpartum female athletes, Moffatt said. with MOmentum. She says there needs to be more options for child care, specialized physical training, breastfeeding facilities and recognition for athletes who bring children to sporting events and training camps.
In 2025, the federal government changed its policies for treating pregnancy as an injury within the athlete funding model. Advocates called it a huge step toward gender equality in sports.
“There is more work to be done in Canada and internationally on this topic, but we are moving in the right direction,” Sandmeyer-Graves said Friday.
“Every choice comes with trade-offs.”
The Spanish Football Federation said on Tuesday that its agreement was not designed to discourage footballers from having children while they are active, but to offer them another option so they do not have to rule out motherhood because of their sporting careers.
It said the initiative complements existing work-life balance measures, including support that allows players who are mothers to have their children nearby during away trips, training camps and tournaments.
“Every choice comes with trade-offs,” said Davenport, the University of Alberta researcher. These may include managing learning through postpartum recovery, managing uncertain rates of success in egg preservation, or combating age-related decline in fertility later in life.
But she says that ultimately, “true autonomy means recognizing that no one schedule fits every athlete.”
Until recently, pregnancy was considered an injury under Canadian sports law. But with recent changes to the Athlete Assistance Program, that is no longer the case.