Two years ago, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, an association of infertility specialists, issued an optimistic report about advances in oöcyte cryopreservation—egg freezing, in common parlance. For many years, the practice was an elusive grail among women and their doctors. While the successful freezing of human semen and embryos had been possible for decades, eggs proved much more fragile, prone to forming ice crystals that rendered them unviable. In the past five years, however, more refined freezing methods have been developed and made available to some women whose fertility has been compromised by chemotherapy or premature menopause. By 2012, the evidence was in: scientists determined that, for young women, eggs that have been frozen using these methods are just as likely to result in pregnancy and the birth of a healthy child as ones freshly harvested in a cycle of in-vitro fertilization. The A.S.R.M. report announced that the technology should no longer be considered experimental, and while its authors sounded a note of caution—“we cannot at this time endorse its widespread elective use to delay childbearing”—the report tacitly acknowledged that such would be the inevitable result.
Equally inevitably, perhaps, this advance in reproductive technology has been embraced by corporations that pride themselves on being forward thinking. Earlier this year, Facebook began offering twenty thousand dollars’ worth of oöcyte cryopreservation to female employees as part of its health-insurance plan. Next year, Apple will offer its employees a comparable package. (A single cycle of egg extraction can cost between ten and fifteen thousand dollars, and more than one cycle is advised for many women; cold storage is about five hundred dollars a year.)
Despite the caveat included in the A.S.R.M. report, it seems unlikely that the only women taking their employers up on this option will be those who are about to undergo a chemotherapy regimen, or those who have tipped over into perimenopause fifteen years early. More likely, it will appeal to women who are experiencing no immediate threat to their fertility—no threat, that is, beyond their participation in a competitive workplace in which the bearing and rearing of children is perceived as an aberrant inconvenience. To such women, egg freezing might seem to offer liberation from those wearying dictates of biology by which their older sisters, no matter how successful their careers, were bound. Better an iBaby than no baby at all.
Deferring childbearing from one’s twenties or early thirties until one’s later thirties or forties certainly has its appeal for the woman with ambitions beyond motherhood. Lots of women have chanced it, even before egg freezing came along and supplied a possible, if not entirely reliable, form of counter-infertility insurance. Still, even with this tantalizing suggestion of reproductive liberty, it’s hard to figure out exactly how long to postpone. A woman might skip having children in her twenties or thirties in order to focus on her career, only to discover by her forties that its demands—not to mention the encroachment of middle age—make motherhood even less manageable than it appeared at twenty-five or thirty.
And it seems overly optimistic to hope that, with nature’s deadlines subverted, a woman’s decision about whether or when to bear children might become an entirely autonomous choice—hers alone to make, independent of cultural and professional pressures as well as biological ones. Might Apple and Facebook’s offers of egg freezing be, in fact, the kind of employee benefit whose principal beneficiary is the company? What if, rather than being a means of empowerment—whereby a young woman is no longer subject to anything so quaintly analog as the ticking of a biological clock—freezing one’s eggs is understood as a surrender to the larger, more invisibly pervasive force of corporate control?
Such skepticism is buttressed by a defining paradox of contemporary life, which is that while most of us have willingly surrendered a large measure of our privacy and even our decision-making to tech companies for the sake of convenience or pleasure, many of us remain queasily uncomfortable with the terms of the tradeoff. We may tolerate the disconcerting specificity of Facebook’s targeted ads as they appear alongside our friends’ latest photos; we may even, on occasion, find ourselves grateful for the suggestion, and make an online purchase with which we are afterward quite delighted. But we remain alive to the conviction that Facebook’s best interests and our own are unlikely to be in alignment. We feel ourselves to be uneasily balanced between submission and suspicion. The suggestion that such companies might, through an apparently generous employee benefit, obliquely engineer the reproductive choices of their employees is unsettling in its devil’s-bargain familiarity.
The inclusion of egg freezing as an employee benefit partakes of the techno-utopian fantasy on which companies like Facebook and Apple subsist—the conviction that there must be a solution to every problem, an answer to every question, a response to every need, if only the right algorithm can be found. But the difficulties that an American woman continues to face in her efforts to reconcile having a career with being a mother are more than faulty code to be debugged. Rather, they are vast and systemic: the limited availability of subsidized care for preschool children, the resistance of corporate culture to flexible or reduced hours for the parents of young children, the lack of federally mandated, paid family leave. The United States keeps the dubious company of Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and Liberia in its failure to guarantee paid maternity leave; and while the fortunate employees of Apple and Facebook enjoy relatively generous family-leave packages—Apple offers expectant mothers four weeks of paid leave before the birth, and upward of fourteen weeks afterward—these are the exception rather than the standard. They are also no substitute for policy reform that might, on its own, begin to obviate the need for a young woman to think about whether freezing her eggs is something she should do. There is never a convenient time to have a baby if you also have a job, as anyone who has ever had a job and a baby can attest. But so long as not having a baby yet is presented as a would-be mother’s best option, her choices are unlikely to get much easier.
