Silicon Valley’s Egg-Freezing Perk Is Bad for People Across the Board

News about Silicon Valley’s egg-freezing perk has ignited many much-needed conversations about the tech industry’s family-unfriendly workplaces and policies that make it hard to reconcile being a mother and having a job. But of dozens of articles and blog posts, only a few have noted that establishing egg freezing as an employee benefit for a small number of privileged women is a bad idea across the board. For women who opt to freeze their eggs, the procedure’s safety is dubious; for everyone else, the practice shifts the focus away from the social changes that working families urgently need.

Defenders of the egg-freezing offer have welcomed it as an “option” for women lucky enough to work for Facebook or Apple—itself a highly limited career path, as recently compiled statistics about the lack of diversity in high-tech companies can attest. Like its lexical sister “choice,” “option” often functions as a trump card in potentially fraught debates like this one. I’m not arguing that “choice” or “options” are unimportant, but we need to to situate them in broader social contexts, too, including those of...