Egg freezing is not all it’s cracked up to be
by Philippa Taylor, TCW:
A Daily Telegraph article last week asked: ‘Motherhood on ice: has the egg-freezing generation of working women been misled?’
That’s an easy question to answer: Yes!
The massively profitable egg-freezing industry has an appallingly low ‘success’ rate, yet still tempts thousands of women to take this route because they know their ‘biological clock’ is running down.
Both the number and quality of a woman’s eggs reduce over time. So freezing eggs for future use, while a woman is younger but not ready to have a child (most commonly, because of a lack of a partner), is heavily marketed as a solution to bypass the ‘biological clock’ of motherhood or, as this Lancet article says, to ‘overcome an age-related decline in fertility’. The Lancet also proposes it as a solution to preserve fertility in patients with cancer.
Some companies now offer to freeze women’s eggs as part of their work package (to save the standard cost of £3,000 for three years storage). There have been media campaigns encouraging women to freeze their eggs to bypass the ‘biological clock’, such as a pop-up shop last year set up in central London ‘in response to a growing interest in social egg freezing’. The organisers of the pop-up shop (the Wellcome Trust and London School of Economics) claimed that: ‘Social egg freezing is a relatively new offer but one that could soon become as revolutionary to women’s life choices as the Pill’.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
