Perhaps it was inevitable that the news that Facebook and Apple pay for their employees to have their eggs frozen – a procedure costing up to €15,000 – would be met with cynicism.
But to read some of the reactions last week you could be forgiven for thinking that what the tech giants were actually proposing was to strap female employees of child-bearing age down and forcibly harvest their eggs, before tethering them to their desks for the next decade.
"This latest offering from Apple and Facebook is a devil's deal in the guise of a gender equity perk," offered the New York Post. "Dear Facebook, please don't tell women to lean in to egg-freezing," said the Huffington Post. "Don't be fooled by Apple and Facebook. Egg-freezing isn't cool," the Daily Beast cautioned.
The Financial Times took a snarkier approach – because, of course, a subject as sensitive as fertility problems is the perfect fodder for satire. "Will an Apple-frozen egg still be compatible with its mother after a couple of years of new product releases?"
Here's a revolutionary idea: not everything that facilitates women to have both children and a career automatically has a darker, anti-woman or anti-family message. Maybe, just maybe, these initiatives by Apple and Facebook are not, as the Huffington Post warned, about "paying women not to have a family" but are designed to do precisely the opposite.
The two companies may simply be recognising the reality that women and men are starting their families later, and in response are offering their employees one more route to parenthood, a route that they might not otherwise be able to afford.
Facebook, in particular, has a good record of supporting families: it already offers financial support for surrogacy and IVF. Employees are eligible for more than €3,000 in cash when they become parents, and the company subsidises daycare and offers nursing rooms on campus.
Part of the reason for the negative reception is that “egg freezing” seems to have been adopted as a shorthand for everything that society has decided is wrong with the modern woman. Invariably, articles on the subject conjure up images of twenty- and thirtysomethings blithely popping a few eggs in the freezer, alongside their kale soup and Cosmopolitan-flavoured ice cubes, to store them until they find a window, between all the promotions and around-the-world trips, in which to have a baby. Or they focus on “egg-freezing cocktail parties”, apocryphal gatherings at which wealthy Manhattanites (they’re always Manhattanites) discuss baby names and preschools over Martinis and vials of hormones.
The reality for most women is very different. Egg-freezing is a complex and uncomfortable procedure that offers some hope of having a baby in the future to women and couples who, for whatever reason, know that their reproductive options are likely to be limited. Perhaps they’re about to undergo chemotherapy, or they already have fertility issues and want to maximise their chances of having more than one child, or maybe they haven’t found someone to have a baby with yet.
There may well be women who wake up one day in their late 30s and remember – with the same horror they realise they forgot to send a birthday card to their mother or to unplug their hair straightener – that they forgot to have a baby. But I’ve never come across one.
Egg-freezing is not a procedure any intelligent woman is likely to enter into lightly or without doing her research, let alone because her boss seems to think it’s a good idea. Aside from everything else, as the countless pieces on it this week have been so keen to point out, it is not a magic wand to preserve fertility. Data on success rates is still sketchy, but it’s thought that women who freeze their eggs before they are 35 have somewhere between a 10 per cent and a 12 per cent chance of giving birth per egg. Once they reach 35 the success rates fall to less than 8 per cent.
The process itself lasts two weeks and involves hormone injections and egg extraction under sedation, and it takes at least another two weeks to recover. It is not known whether the chemicals used in the freezing will have an adverse affect on the eggs.
According to the journal Nature, in 2011 fewer than 10 babies worldwide were born from eggs frozen for women aged 38 or older. The total number of babies born through egg-freezing is about 2,000.
But I’m willing to bet the women who choose to go through it – at a cost of about €12,000 a cycle – already know all this. They know it will be physically difficult and emotionally draining, with limited chance of success. They know that a wave of their credit card is not going to make Tinkerbell swoop down from the sky to sprinkle her magic baby-making dust on their eggs.
If they make the decision to go ahead with it, they’re not doing it because they want to secure a promotion, or because they fancy yachting around the world before they are lumbered down with children. They do it for the same reason other people put themselves through gruelling round after round of IVF: because it seems to offer them the best shot at parenthood.
