Spotlight on success: Ali's eggs travel from Dubai to London

When our Chief Egg Officer, Ali, first froze her eggs in Dubai a decade ago, she was buying herself time. Ten years on, she still wasn't sure whether she wanted children but equally she wasn't ready to let her eggs go.

The problem? Storage limits. In the UAE, the rules are tighter — generally around five years for single women, with longer periods available to married women.   There are also greater limits on assisted reproduction options and egg donation.  

These limits aren't really science-led. There's no evidence that frozen eggs degrade over time. The rules tend to reflect local culture and attitudes towards assisted reproduction and family formation. In the UK, the picture is very different: since 1 July 2022, eggs can be stored for up to 55 years, with consent renewed every ten years. 

So Ali made the call: move the eggs to London. She worked with Simon Hedley to make it happen.  We'll be honest, it wasn't a ten-minute job.

The paperwork was real

Moving eggs between countries isn't really a "country-to-country" thing. It's an agreement between two specific clinics — a Dubai clinic and a London clinic — deciding to work together on this one shipment. The London clinic also needed cast-iron evidence that Ali's eggs had been stored to the right standards. Anything less, and they wouldn't accept them into their own lab environment, in case it became a risk factor for everything else stored there.

Getting the two clinics to actually talk to each other took some patient nudging. The Dubai clinic wasn't exactly thrilled to lose a long-standing storage customer. The London clinic, understandably, wanted an onboarding fee, Ali's came in at around £180, though this varies clinic to clinic. The upfront admin costs aren't insignificant.

Group shipping kept costs down

For the actual move, Ali chose group shipping through our Egg Courier service. That meant her eggs travelled batched with others heading the same way, rather than booking a dedicated cryogenic shipment just for her. Same safety standards. Lower price tag.

The eggs arrived in London safely. They're now sitting quietly in their new home, wondering what comes next.

More room to think — and more options

The longer storage window is only part of why this move mattered. In the UK, Ali now has paths that simply weren't on the table in the UAE,  including using donor sperm, or one day donating her eggs to help someone else if she decides she doesn't want to use them herself.

For now, no decision is being rushed. That's rather the point.

Watch this space.