Yes, I Froze My Eggs, But am I a Victim of a New Fertility Racket?
By Jemma Kennedy,
The Guardian
| 10. 18. 2014
Women, there’s a new perk in town. Last week, Apple joined ranks with Facebook in offering free egg-freezing to staff who want to delay having children. It will, the companies argue, help the women exert more control over both careers and ovaries while protecting their unalienable right to post baby photos on social media. Is this a step towards equality in the workplace or a machiavellian form of social engineering?
For me, it’s all part of the privatisation of reproduction– the final frontier of 21st-century capitalism. This year, I underwent egg-freezing myself. Three weeks of hormone injections, panic attacks and volcanic rows with my boyfriend, at a cost of £4,500. Given the statistics – only 21 babies born, it seems, from defrosted eggs in the same number of years in the UK – it is a high-risk venture. In fact, the private clinic I chose recommended I didn’t do it, as I’m over 40 with low egg reserve. They calculated a 5% chance of success.
But I insisted, using all the cliches that fell smugly out of the brochures. I...
Related Articles
By Jason Kehe, Wired | 04.11.2024
God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have a regular baby or have an Orchid baby. A regular baby might grow up and get cancer. Or be born...
By Neel Shah, The PrePrint | 04.11.2024
Years ago, I interviewed for a residency position at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Standing before the domed Victorian building at the campus entrance, I couldn’t help but be in awe of the history of the place, the great...
By Eleanor Hayward and Joanna Crawford, The Times | 03.29.2024
Gazing out at the Mediterranean from an idyllic rocky mountaintop, Sophie Hermann announced to her half a million Instagram followers that she had decided to freeze her eggs. Since that post in August, the 37-year-old former Made in Chelsea star...
By Judith Levine, The Intercept | 04.04.2024
WHEN THE ALABAMA Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of in vitro fertilization in Alabama and, potentially, the U.S. The ruling, on the claimed “wrongful death” of frozen embryos...