Photo/Illutration An embryo culture room at a clinic in Yokohama (Natsumi Adachi)

The Tokyo metropolitan government will introduce a subsidy for healthy women to help cover the steep costs of freezing their eggs, a move aimed at countering the falling birthrate.

The metropolitan government has earmarked 100 million yen ($733,000) in a budget proposal for fiscal 2023 to cover costs related to the program startup.

That includes a survey to gauge demand ahead of the formal launch of the subsidy program, expected in or after fiscal 2024.

Under the policy, the Tokyo government will provide up to 300,000 yen per person to about 200 to 300 Tokyo residents a year, regardless of whether they are married.

According to metropolitan officials, it marks first time any prefectural government has created a policy like this.

But it is not an entirely new idea in Japan.

The city government of Urayasu, Chiba Prefecture, subsidized the costs of egg freezing from fiscal 2015 to 2017.

Women in their late 30s and older are less likely to become pregnant because the number of eggs they have starts to rapidly decrease and the quality of the available eggs deteriorate as well.

According to the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology’s 2020 survey, the rate of pregnancy with assisted reproduction technology, such as in vitro fertilization, lowered as women aged.

But women can freeze their eggs before they drop in number and begin to deteriorate. That allows them to try to become pregnant through in vitro fertilization and other means once they are ready to have a baby.

Grace Sugiyama Clinic Shibuya, a clinic in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward, started collecting eggs for freezing in April 2022.

Many of their patients are around 35 years of age, the clinic said. About 40 to 50 women have come to the clinic for the procedure per month.

Yuka Okada, director of the clinic, said many of these women “do not necessarily place their careers above marriage.”

“They have yet to meet a partner, but they want to prepare for a future childbirth," Okada said.

Egg freezing is not covered by insurance, though, and the costs differ from clinic to clinic, and it is not cheap.

Grace Group Inc., a company that stores frozen eggs, conducted a survey of 71 women who had done so. Sixty percent said they paid “more than 500,000 yen.”

A metropolitan government official overseeing the new policy said the new subsidy will provide another option for women from when they are in their 20s and remove barriers to those who may wish to freeze their eggs but do not for financial reasons.

Some companies have come up with their own subsidy programs.

Pola, a major Tokyo-based cosmetics maker, started subsidizing egg freezing in spring 2021.

Under the program, women receive 22,000 yen for a procedure to harvest the eggs and 220,000 yen for storing eggs for five years.

“There are many employees who are torn apart between career-building and the timing for getting pregnant and having a baby,” a Pola representative said.

Subsidizing egg freezing is an alternative that can provide their employees with a “sense of relief,” the official said.

The program has helped encourage employees to talk more about fertility treatments and menstruation with their bosses, the representative said.

The metropolitan government will also subsidize companies that subsidize any egg freezing costs incurred by their employees and implement a special leave system for egg freezing.

Tokyo also included subsidies for external fertilization and micro-insemination using frozen eggs in the budget proposal for fiscal 2023.

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