Saundria Zomalt, a 47-year-old elementary school principal, is the mother of a four-year-old daughter she got through fertility treatment at a clinic in Sandy Springs.
She has one piece of advice, and she does not soften it: “First of all, freeze your eggs.”
She had a 50 per cent military discount and still paid about 35,000 dollars. She is not sorry. “I would have spent double, triple to have my little girl,” she said. “She has been the biggest joy of my life, especially going through divorce,” she said.
The advice is about the years before that bill. Freezing eggs earlier, she said, would have saved her the stress she went through later.
The gap she is describing is measurable. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that Black women are about twice as likely as white women to experience infertility, and a 2025 agency study found Black and Hispanic women sought pregnancy-related medical services at lower rates than white and Asian women. In Georgia, where Black residents are uninsured at higher rates than white residents, later care costs more and works less often.
Dr. Karenne Fru, a reproductive endocrinologist, built her metro Atlanta clinic, Muna Fertility, for the women on the wrong side of that. She did not want a patient to arrive and have to explain her own context before anybody looked at a chart. What she tells the women who do arrive is to go home and talk to the younger ones, their sisters and cousins, because outcomes are age dependent and the clock is the one thing a clinic cannot give back.
She also wants the conversation out of the hands of women alone. “It takes at least two bodies to reproduce,” she said.
LaQuana Cardwell, 48, an educator who founded the No More Empty Christmas Trees Foundation in 2015, learned about her own fertility after a diagnosis, not before it. “It was very devastating to me because I had no knowledge of infertility in general,” she said. By the end she had spent between 40,000 and 50,000 dollars.
“Maybe if I had that knowledge, I could have had a chance to use my own eggs, you know,” she said.
She talks about it now on purpose, and the reason is in the sentence she keeps repeating to other women: “You’re not alone.”
