Posted on 12/06/2014 11:18:09 AM PST by Kaslin
Egg freezing is being marketed as the new and hip thing to do among New York and Silicon Valley socialites. Freezing one’s eggs is touted as a means of delaying motherhood for the sake of one’s career.
Yet this is anything but empowering to the modern woman. The Washington Post tells of women who freeze their eggs after painful divorces so they can bear children at a later date. Then there’s Aimee Eyvazzadeh, a self-proclaimed “egg whisperer,” whose mission it is to promote and host high-end "egg-freezing parties" at expensive bars. Some companies are even providing egg-freezing “benefits” to encourage women to forestall motherhood in order to keep the workflow uninterrupted.
For example, Facebook, Apple, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Microsoft are planning to offer “benefits” for egg freezing; Google is considering this for 2015. Women everywhere should be deeply disturbed that their fertility (or rather, infertility) is now being used as a bargaining chip in the workplace.
With a promise to cover up to $20,000 in egg freezing fees per woman, the deal sounds alluring. While this is the price some companies are willing to pay in exchange for maximizing women’s productivity during their natural childbearing years, is it a price any woman should accept?
A woman’s natural fear of her ticking biological clock and the sad fact that marriage is at an all-time low enable companies to capitalize on the promise of reproductive “insurance.” This results in what amounts to incentivizing indentured, if still voluntary, servitude.
Egg freezing is fraught with moral dilemmas. It is also practically problematic because it is based on false promises, health risks, and a high chance of disappointment. For example, will the women be told about the high failure rate of pregnancy from frozen eggs? In the New York Times, Miriam Zoll reported: “Even with the new flash freezing process, the most comprehensive data available reveals a 77 percent failure rate of frozen eggs resulting in a live birth in women aged 30, and a 91 percent failure rate in women aged 40. According to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, for a woman age 38, the chance of one frozen egg leading to a live birth is only 2 to 12 percent.”
What if a woman banks (pun intended) on her eggs resulting in a healthy pregnancy later on and this never happens? What if she’s past her childbearing years by then? Will the money she has received for putting pregnancy on hold satisfy her frustrated longing for a baby?
AWired article laid out a detailed medical roadmap of the egg freezing process. After about nine to 13 days of self-injection of powerful hormones, twice daily, the woman is sedated while a doctor suctions the eggs by punching holes into her ovaries. She will most likely have to endure this procedure for two fertility cycles. The eggs are then flash-frozen and stored for about $500 to $1000 in annual fees. When she is ready to get pregnant, the invasive in-vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure will involve more hormone injections, daily blood tests, ultrasounds, and vaginal probes.
Will women be told about the health risks to them and to their future babies? Some of the known health risks to the woman include ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, surgical egg retrieval complications, and the emotional and psychological tolls associated with fertility failure. Questions should also be asked about the health of the eggs after they’ve absorbed chemicals such as cryoprotectants used in the freezing process and their toxicity.
Of course, not all of these risks are realized in every woman, and some women who have their eggs removed go on to bear children from their frozen eggs without complications. Even so, the process of in-vitro fertilization itself can result in the death of some of a woman’s embryos. The potential for the complications that might occur is significant; is that potential made clear to those opting to have their eggs harvested and then frozen?
Another practical question concerning the egg-freezing “benefit:” What if the woman is fired and loses the “benefit” after she’s already frozen her eggs? Are her eggs discarded or does she pick up the tab of keeping them “on ice?”
The social implications are also troubling. Invariably there will be women who choose to become mothers via a natural timeline and method, while others will choose to freeze their eggs. As columnist Miranda Devine of Australia's Daily Telegraph aptly put it: “On what planet is an employer’s offer to freeze the eggs of female employees not an Orwellian horror?...Forget the level playing field…There will be two tiers of women at Facebook and Apple: the freezers and the breeders. The former are the go-getters destined to climb the corporate ladder, whereas those women who have babies when nature intended are the slackers." Putting it simply, the choice not to freeze one’s eggs will stigmatize young motherhood.
When you pit women against women, and even worse women against their own children, there are no winners. The egg freezing option parades as a liberator of women from their gender and fertility (TIME called it “the great equalizer”), but it’s only the latest in a series of attacks on womanhood itself.
Facebook and Apple’s new policies are anti-woman, anti-child and anti-family. If such companies have up to $20,000 to spend on each woman employee, why not offer her a longer or paid maternity leave? Companies can help empower women by offering more flex hours, work-from-home options and on-site childcare to help create a healthy work-life balance.
Women everywhere should beware of false promises and health risks at the expense of their fertility. Women deserve much better than this.
This article does a good job of describing why.
And what sort of life will these children, if they survive healthily, have?
One single, older mom. No dad around. No grandparents.
The staunchest, most militant feminists don’t even remove them first.
Welcome to the Brave New World. Obama said he wanted all women to be able to work. Women who want to stay home with their kids are denigrated, and have been so since the 60’s. I’m so sad for those like me who wanted to stay home full time or only work a part time job. It is becoming impossible to be able to mother your own kids. And the last straw will be Government Day Care Centers. Cradle to grave indoctrination. Lord, please help us get back on the right path!
The next-to-last paragraph is the key since it turns the argument away from moral principles, something most corporations avoid, and get it into terms they understand: $$$$. Nothing is more empowering than the bottom line.
Will women be told about the health risks to them and to their future babies?
These are the "elite" women of America, or so they tell us. Aren't they smart enough to do the research themselves? All it would take is five minutes on Townhall.com.
Seems like a prospective professional woman’s best bet would be to
1) Get married early, finding your husband while still in school.
2) Have your kids early, in your 20’s like your body is designed for.
3) THEN think of a career. Maybe have the grandparents involved in raising the kids, as people used to do.
Women have been so indoctrinated against raising their own children. I resigned 14 years ago to stay home with our then 1 year old. Several women pulled by aside after they learned of my decision and cautioned me against it. One young mom’s comment has stuck in my mind all those years, “Are you sure you want to do this? I know he’s cute now, but he will get older and more difficult. Some days I dread picking up my daughter (2yrs old) from daycare.”
Still makes me sad to think of her daughter. They were young and in the middle of building their dream home, had stressful jobs and obviously had little to give their precious little girl.
Almost guaranteed failure, at an extremely high financial, emotional and social cost, promoted by your employer!
What's not to like!
Aldous Huxley just sat up in his grave ... claims he sees a brave new world off in the distance...
It would be interesting to know the numbers of women and numbers of IVF efforts that produced these results.
Sounds more and more like Orwell’s Brave New World and the time traveler’s visit to the ‘hatchery.’
Sounds more and more like Huxley’s Brave New World and the time traveler’s visit to the ‘hatchery.’
The companies would not have offered this dubious benefit, if a sizable number of their female employees weren’t clamouring for it. If they’re “indentured”, it’s by choice.
“One single, older mom. No dad around. No grandparents.”
It doesn’t matter—these womyn are too selfish to care about the quality of their childrens’ lives as long as they, the womyn, get the fulfillment they want.
Most of my college friends have been extremely successful money wise. Relationships ... not so much. One never married. ONe was married three times, has one son who is gay. One got married at age 30 and had her first and only child at 40. All but one of the child’s grandparents are gone. Because the one uncle is not married, there are no cousins. Another one married and had one child but so late in life that all the cousins are way older. Another one married fairly young but was only able to have one child.
These girls would have raised wonderful families if they had a chance but it seems like life didn’t turn out that way for them. They are the kind of gals who should have had big families and passed along their intelligence, morals and good work ethic but it just didn’t happen.
Sad ...
Of all my friends, I married the youngest at 28 and had the most kids. We only have three but it’s a big family in some circles.
I graduated in 1989. One of my college roommates got her degree in Chemistry and had four children and was working in the oil industry, the last I heard. Another went to law school, married and divorced, no children. Another is a doctor, two children. The last married while still in college, divorced, eventually remarried, no children.
I have ten children. I was just talking with my mother about long-term care insurance, following my father’s death from Alzheimer’s Disease, and she said, “You probably can’t get insurance, but surely one of the children will take care of you,” and she’s right: the 9th!
I'm not certain that that is significantly higher than the natural chance of a specific ovum being able to be fertilized successfully and going on to develop into a baby that survives until birth.
Half of all fertilized ova do not implant. Of the ones that do, about a third die soon after. I think that the chance of any fertilized ovum actually developing into a baby is about 10-15%. This does not include ova that, for whatever reason, cannot be fertilized in the first place (I have not seen statistics, but it would be surprising if fertilization were 100% effective).
I tend to think that the difference is that these women put all of their hopes on a limited number of eggs. Whereas, when a woman decides to get pregnant naturally, it is irrelevant how many ova do not fertilize, do not implant, or die almost immediately thereafter. She just keeps trying until she gets pregnant, even if it takes months, because even at a 10% efficiency rate, she'll still be pregnant within a year. The woman counting on frozen ova does not get to keep trying until she is successful.
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