Freezing Eggs For the Future

In a Newsweek article adapted from her new book, In Her Own Sweet Time, Rachel Lehmann-Haupt says a controversial procedure to freeze a woman’s eggs for future fertilization might “change society” like the pill did. Dr. Eleanora Porcu, an Italian doctor who helped pioneer the procedure for cancer patients and other women with medical issues, believes healthy women shouldn’t freeze their eggs, because choosing fertility intervention “means that we're accepting a mentality of efficiency in which pregnancy and motherhood are marginalized... We have to be free to be pregnant when we are fertile and young.”

Lehmann-Haupt didn’t just visit Dr. Porcu to research her book. She was trying to decide whether to try the procedure herself. Ultimately, she underwent the hormone injections, blood tests and surgery, and froze several eggs. She’s honest about her fear of declining fertility, her career satisfaction, and her desire to beat her biological clock until she finds love. She also notes egg freezing is only an option for women with the means to pay for it. In Salon.com’s Broadsheet, Amy Benfer asks, “how feminist is a technology that, at least for now, is only available to wealthier women?”

Deciding to delay pregnancy is a gamble. Thawed eggs don’t always fertilize. Dr. Robert Rubino tells Big Think that women are aware of health risks for older mothers and their babies. He’s seeing women timing motherhood around peak fertility years even if that means “angst” over careers and other social pressures. He advises patients to “sequence” career and family.

Breakthroughs in reproductive medicine or family/work social policy are important (see my previous post on companies who allow parents to bring their babies to work), but feminism’s catch-22 is that choices require choosing. Whenever I've wrestled with big decisions, my mom always told me, “Just be yourself.” I'm hopeful feminism, science, and social policy will continue to evolve until that’s possible for everyone. On that note, have a wonderful Mothers’ Day!

(Photo by Matasha Mata via Flickr/Creative Commons)