We spoke to The Bachelor’s Whitney Bischoff about why so many alums have visited her clinic and decided to put their eggs on ice

Mar 29, 2018 Meghan Collie

It could be the fact that the women of Bachelor Nation are hella career-driven, or that the majority Bachelor relationships just *don’t* work out, but many contestants have frozen their eggs—and a few have even Instagrammed about it.

There’s one woman to thank for that: Whitney Bischoff, a nurse from OVA, a Chicago-based fertility lab. In between vying for Chris Soules’s affection on season 19 of The Bachelor—they ended up engaged, but later split, surprise surprise—Bischoff spent much of her off-camera time educating her fellow contestants about egg freezing.

Unintentional or not, Bischoff’s stint on the show ended up paying off big time for OVA. “Carly Waddell was the first [contestant] to be really curious,” Bischoff tells FLARE. “After the show, she reached out and froze her eggs with me. Now she’s married with a baby!” Although Waddell didn’t use her frozen eggs to conceive Isabella Evelyn, she has said that she has no regrets about going through the process. “I had the best back-up plan in the entire world,” Waddell later declared in a promotional video blog for Bischoff’s clinic, which now uses its Bachelor Nation cache to attract new clients.

In fact, it wasn’t long before Bachelor faves Kaitlyn Bristowe and Andi Dorfman also froze their eggs at OVA.

When the Bachelor ladies began Instagramming about OVA (with the hashtag #NotAnAd), reality-TV producer Jessica Nahmias took note. Nahmias—who has worked on The Bachelor, in addition to shows like Yours, Mine or Ours and Bar Rescue—had already asked a gynaecologist about freezing her eggs a few years before when she was 27, but had been told she was too young to even consider it. “I took my doctor’s advice, but part of me wishes I had just done it then,” says Nahmias, now 32. “I knew in my soul that I was going to have kids much later in life.”

She even waited a few more years before consulting a new doctor about freezing her eggs. But she was met with same response: too young. Nahmias was told she shouldn’t consider the procedure until she was 35. “I found that hard to believe because I thought 35 is the age when your eggs start declining in quality, so why wait until that happens?”

Technically, Nahmias is right: the chances of a successful procedure would be higher if she froze her eggs when she was younger. (For reference, Bristowe was 31 when she did it and Waddell and Dorfman were 29).

When Nahmias thinks back to the doctors who told her to delay freezing her eggs, she believes her relationship status at the time may have played a part in influencing their decision. “I think [the doctors] thought, Oh, she just wants to do this because she’s single and scared she won’t meet someone“—which couldn’t be further from the truth, she says. “I wanted to freeze my eggs because I didn’t want to be at the mercy of my biology. Our 30s are an incredible time for career growth, and I didn’t want to be held down by having babies at a time when it felt like it could compromise my career.”