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Entity decides if freezing eggs is a cool fad or our hope for the future.

Do you have dreams of raising a family? Maybe you’re excited to be a mother one day but you know that you’re just not ready yet. What if you could freeze the clock – and your fertility?

That’s what is promised with egg freezing; a new reproductive strategy that is marketed toward women who want to focus on their careers without the worry of infertility treatment later in life. However, several sources are pointing to the treatment’s potential to harm – or at least mislead – future mothers.

As strange as it may sound at first, the idea of egg freezing represents the intersection of many cultural trends regarding women, their families and their work. While more women are pursuing careers, this doesn’t mean that they want to give up on a family. For some women, striking that balance means putting off having children until later in life.

But women’s biological clocks don’t have snooze buttons to accommodate their work schedules. As a result, women who start families later often have more difficulty conceiving. They are often forced to undergo expensive fertility treatments, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), which has a low success rate, costs a great deal of money and often results in emotional turmoil.

But egg freezing, a new fertility solution newly off the “experimental” list in 2012, allows women to save their eggs while they’re young and use them later if desired. In its short history, egg freezing has approximately the same success as IVF, depending on the study. For some, egg freezing solves ethical issues about discarding embryos in IVF since all eggs are used in egg freezing.

Egg freezing has become a craze thanks to companies like EggBanx, which markets this reproduction strategy to urban businesswomen, promising women that they could have it all – complete with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres. The process costs around $6000 and the customers are mostly affluent white women, although egg freezing banks are opening worldwide. For example, Japan recently encouraged women to freeze their eggs in an attempt to raise low birth rates.

However, the treatment doesn’t come without its fair share of criticism.

For Jennifer Lahl, President of the Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC), egg freezing may pose serious health issues. In a letter directed at hopeful mothers, she claims that egg freezing hasn’t been adequately tested and could lead to cancer and other diseases for children.

“All women need to be very aware of the risks and dangers of fertility drugs and ovarian stimulation. They need to be told that never once have we done any long-term studies on healthy women who undergo these procedures for egg extraction,” she said.

Despite the unknown effects of egg freezing on women and society, the popularity of egg freezing is rising. In an attempt to support women in the workplace, Facebook and Apple added egg freezing options to company health care plans in 2015. Until the further health effects are known, egg freezing remains a cool promise for work now and family later.

Edited by Ellena Kilgallon
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