Egg freezing fails to reconcile motherhood and career success

In a bold move that echoes a tech-utopian fantasy, Apple and Facebook are now telling their female employees: “We will pay to freeze your eggs.” Facebook has recently begun covering the costly procedure as part of its insurance benefits, and Apple plans to offer its package deal starting in January. The seemingly generous offer has its perks but also poses a paradox.

 

Instead of empowering women by freeing them from the ticking of their biological clocks, egg freezing only gives the illusion of autonomy while postponing childbearing to a later time. Reconciling motherhood and a career doesn’t get much easier if the only option these offers put forth is simply not to have a baby yet.

For many college students who will enter the workforce in a few years, the option might prompt the nonchalant response, “Why not?” As one New Yorker writer, Rebecca Mead, put it, “Better an iBaby than no baby at all.”

In Slate, Chavi Eve Karkowsky, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in New York City, argued in defense of egg freezing. “When asked about delayed child-bearing in many studies, the two factors that come up again and again are financial stability and the availability of an appropriate partner,” Karkowsky said. “[The latter] is the one that I think creates the egg-freezing push. At some point, while dating, and waiting, and having hearts broken (or yes, breaking hearts), many women want to start working with what they have, and not waiting for the right XY chromosome carrier to come around.”

It’s progressive that new technology can create such options that cater to single women, but if it’s an alternative that doesn’t provide a better solution to juggling both motherhood and a job, it doesn’t seem like the best idea. Egg freezing is an option because proponents believe that when nature’s deadlines are subverted, the prospects of motherhood — be it finding a suitable partner or securing that job promotion — get better. That’s not the case when the fight is pitted against Mother Nature herself. A woman who forgoes childbearing in her twenties or thirties in order to focus on her career might actually find that the demands of that job in her forties make motherhood seem even more daunting. Add to that the exhausting changes that come with middle age, and the issues compound. It’s a case of delusional fancy to pretend that a woman’s decision to bear children will become entirely her own if she just gets the chance to postpone. Cultural, professional, financial and biological pressures will always be present.

Proposing egg freezing as a solution is a naïve notion that follows a conviction that forward-thinking companies like Apple and Facebook take pride in — there’s always a solution to every problem or an answer to every question if only the right algorithm is found. Unfortunately, reconciliation of professional success and motherhood is a code that can’t be cracked quite so easily. Rather than an issue of time, this struggle to balance is a product of policies in the corporate world that make it harder on women to be mothers and hold jobs at the same time.

The fact that egg freezing is even available shows a lack of policy reform that made it even a need for young women to contemplate whether or not to go through with such a procedure. The limited availability of subsidized care for preschool children and the rigidity of corporate cultures that don’t enable flexible hours for parents of young children are just a few factors that need to change to make career and family more compatible.

 

Valerie Yu is a junior majoring in English. She is also the editorial director of the Daily Trojan. “Point/Counterpoint” runs Tuesdays.