Can everyone just calm down about egg freezing please? Personally, I feel as if I have been talking, thinking and writing about it for a long time. I have egg freezing fatigue.
Yes, I think it’s great that Apple and Facebook are willing to cover the cost of this routine medical procedure for their employees. But, how does a story which is basically “company adds new benefit for staff” end up making headlines around the world?
Female fertility is the final taboo. Even among ourselves we talk openly and noisily about sex, orgasms, the latest toys, even BDSM has been added to the mix post 50 Shades of Grey, but there’s still more stigma attached to our decision over when, and even if, to have children. It feeds into an array of outdated and misogynistic social stereotypes; the lonely career woman who is buying off her biological clock, the desperate singleton on the prowl for a baby daddy, the baby-crazed female whose body has failed the ultimate test of womanhood. When are we going to get over this and start embracing women’s different life choices?
No, I don’t think companies footing the bill for elective egg freezing is “creepy corporatism” at its worst. And I wish the likes of Zoe Williams would stop trumpeting such negative and reductive views. It’s an innovative benefit for working women which might just help nudge us further along the path to gender equality. Egg freezing is expensive—it currently costs around £3,000 in the UK. To most of us, juggling the costs of urban living, that’s just too high a price tag. In the US, pioneering companies such as Eggbanxx are tackling both the prohibitive cost and the social stigma of it by hosting “egg freezing parties”, but in this country we are lagging painfully behind.
Read more on this story:
Apple, Facebook and egg-freezing—the good and the bad
If I was a Facebook employee, I would be delighted that they were willing to pay $20,000 to give me more control over my fertility. Surely, this is just a logical extension of existing healthcare plans which already cover pregnancy, childbirth and infertility treatments? I have one friend who has frozen her eggs, and she says it has freed her up to focus on her career in a guilt-free fashion and taken the pressure off new relationships. A good result all round.
“Egg freezing is one in a long line of innovative HR practices intended to be attractive to educated people…” James Hayton, professor of human resource management at the Warwick Business School in Coventry told HREOnline.com. “The positive PR will pay for itself by signaling these employers’ values with respect to women’s control over this important life choice to prospective female employees.”
As far as I can discern, opposition to this scheme is based on the notion that women will feel pressured into delaying motherhood in order to achieve their career goals. That by putting this offer on the table, along with an array of other tempting benefits such as free haircuts and massages (now you’re talking), Facebook and co are somehow implicitly saying that having babies is bad for a women’s career. This is coupled with the tedious notion that there is something creepy and “not natural” about the whole process, as Zoe Williams so irritatingly puts it “[the] whole thing sounds like a discarded plotline from sci-fi movie Gattaca.”
Yes, very funny. Not. No more cheap gags please. The fact is that egg freezing could be as influential as the birth control pill in terms of empowering women to make our own choices about how we procreate. The sooner society gets used to this idea and accepts it the better.
Modern women struggle with the realities of trying to juggle personal happiness with professional success on a daily basis. I have high-flying friends taking sabbaticals because they don’t want to miss their childbearing windows. I have friends who love being a mother, but are driven to despair by the inertia it has induced in their careers. I recently broke off my engagement and have faced comments such as “well, I’m sure your employer will be pleased. At least you won’t be getting pregnant any time soon.”
The idea that there could be some degree of professional support available to help us navigate these tricky, and often emotional, decisions can only be a positive. Yes, we still need equal pay and better childcare provision. But, allowing women to freeze their eggs on the company card is not going to overshadow these issues. It just gives us more opportunity to pursue our dreams on a more equal footing to men. Isn’t that what every feminist wants?
This is not a case of Apple and Facebook “playing God” as some writers have suggested. Nor is it “Neanderthal” (Zoe Williams, again). This is simply a case of them recognizing the needs of their talented female staff and responding to them. When is everyone going to realize that this is fundamentally no big deal? This is going to be the last article I write on egg freezing. I feel passionately about it, but how can we make progress if we keep going over and over the same old arguments? Society will only accept it as normal, if we stop seeing it as a newsworthy issue. So, I’m making my bid for progress and shutting up. I hope everyone else does the same.
