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Whatever your sex or age, cancer treatments can affect your fertility — your ability to get pregnant or induce pregnancy.

Most people worry about chemo and fertility preservation. But other cancer treatments, including other systemic therapies, radiation therapy, and even cancer surgery, can affect your fertility. It can also cause infertility in females and males.

Cancer treatment and chemotherapy fertility problems are often a big concern for adults during their reproductive years. Children and teens with cancer who undergo anticancer treatments can also face future problems with their fertility.

What Is Fertility Preservation?

Fertility preservation is an option to save or protect your eggs, sperm, or reproductive tissue so you can have biological children in the future.

What Are Cancer and Fertility Preservation Options for Males?

Boys and men going through cancer treatment have several options to preserve fertility.

Sperm freezing

If you’ve gone through puberty, this is a common and easy option to preserve your future fertility. Also called sperm bank or sperm cryopreservation, for this procedure:

• You’ll provide a semen sample. You’ll usually do this in a private room at the fertility clinic.
• The fertility clinic will test a small sample of the semen to make sure there’s enough sperm to freeze and store.
• If you can’t produce a semen sample or your sperm count is low, you can have a testicular sperm extraction (TESE), a special medical procedure for collecting sperm.
• When you have a healthy sperm sample, the fertility clinic will freeze and store it for future use. You can freeze sperm for an indefinite length of time.

When you’re ready to start a biological family with your partner, the fertility specialist will:

• Thaw your frozen sperm.
• Use it for an in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure so a woman can get pregnant.

Testicular shielding

You may need radiation for cancers other than testicular cancer. Testicular shielding involves placing a protective cover over your testicles to protect them from scatter radiation during radiation therapy for other cancers.

Testicular tissue freezing

This is a potential option for boys who haven’t gone through puberty and are at high risk of infertility from their cancer treatment. This procedure is still experimental. If you’re interested in it, ask your cancer doctor about ongoing clinical trials.

What Are Cancer Fertility Preservation Options for Females?

Girls and women who need cancer treatment have several options for preserving fertility.

Cryopreservation

Two of the most common and effective fertility preservation options involve cryopreservation, freezing, and storing your eggs or embryos for future use. The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) recommends both of these options.

Egg freezing

If you don’t have a partner or spouse before cancer treatment begins, you can still make sure you can have biological children in the future with egg freezing. This option is also suitable for those who have ethical or religious objections to freezing embryos.

For egg freezing, the fertility specialist will:

• Remove mature eggs from your ovaries.
• Freeze and store the unfertilized eggs.

In the future, when you’re ready to try to get pregnant, the fertility specialist will:

• Thaw your stored eggs.
• Fertilize them in a lab with the male sperm.
• Place the embryos in your uterus or in the uterus of someone else, called a pregnancy surrogate.

Other names for this procedure include egg banking, egg cryopreservation, or oocyte preservation.

Embryo freezing

For this procedure, the fertility specialist will:

• Remove mature eggs from your ovaries.
• Fertilize the eggs in a lab with sperm from your male partner or donor to form embryos.
• Freeze the embryos for your future use.

When you’re ready to try to get pregnant, the fertility specialist will:

• Thaw your frozen embryos.
• Place them in your uterus or a surrogate’s uterus.

Other names for this procedure include embryo banking or embryo cryopreservation.

Ovarian tissue freezing and transplantation

You can have this procedure before or after puberty.

For this surgical procedure, the specialist will:

• Remove part or all of an ovary through a minimally invasive procedure called a laparoscopy. This is an outpatient surgery.
• Freeze and store your ovarian tissue.

When you’re ready to try to get pregnant, the fertility specialist will:

• Thaw your ovarian tissue.
• Do another operation to put it back into your body.
• When the transplanted tissue starts to work again, the specialist can collect the eggs and try to fertilize them in the lab.

Ovarian tissue banking or ovarian tissue cryopreservation are other terms for this procedure.

Fertility-Sparing Surgery

Two different surgeries may prove helpful for females with early-stage gynecological cancers.

ASCO guidelines list ovarian cystectomy as an option for early-stage ovarian cancer. That means your cancer surgeon may remove just the ovary that has cancer and leave the other ovary in place.

Radical trachelectomy

If you have early-stage cervical cancer and want to get pregnant in the future, ASCO guidelines recommend this fertility-sparing surgery. This can happen instead of a hysterectomy, which involves removing both the uterus and cervix.

For this procedure, the surgeon will:

• Remove your cervix, nearby lymph nodes, and the upper part of your vagina. They won’t remove your uterus. The operation goes either through the vagina or the abdomen.
• Attach your uterus to the rest of your vagina.
• Place a special permanent band or stitch inside your uterine cavity to keep your uterus closed.

When you get pregnant in the future, you’ll need to deliver your baby via cesarean section.

Ovarian shielding

If you need radiation for cancers not related to gynecological cancer, such as breast cancer, your fertility specialist may recommend ovarian shielding. This helps protect your reproductive system from scatter radiation.

Before each radiation treatment, the technician will place a protective cover over your ovaries and other parts of your reproductive system.

Ovarian suppression

Ovarian suppression involves injections of drugs called gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonists to trigger menopause for a short time. The goal is to protect the ovaries and reduce the number of eggs damaged during chemotherapy.

Research on females with breast cancer has found GnRH agonists can prevent premature ovarian failure. That’s according to the National Cancer Institute.

Ovarian transposition

This surgical procedure is a standard option for young females getting pelvic radiation. ASCO recommends this surgical option for females getting pelvic radiation.

During this operation, also called an oophoropexy, the surgeon will move your ovaries above and to the side of your central pelvis. This may help lessen the risk of radiation damage to your ovaries. However, ASCO says this procedure isn’t always successful because of radiation scatter.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on February 24, 2025, and was last reviewed on January 13, 2026.