The Monumental Myth of Egg Freezing
Beyond the physical and financial costs, there is a more insidious myth at work—one that speaks to our deepest assumptions about time, control, and what gives life meaning.
The problem of egg freezing cannot be solved by safer methods or better policies. Beyond the physical and financial costs, there is a more insidious myth at work—one that speaks to our deepest assumptions about time, control, and what gives life meaning.
In only a decade since tech giants Facebook and Apple began offering the perk, egg freezing benefits have risen exponentially such that Bloomberg has declared, “Egg freezing is no longer a novelty perk, but a must-have.” While employers bill the coverage as an additional option to expand the range of family-building choices, feminists and other critics remain skeptical about the rising trend of egg freezing, questioning not only its safety and efficacy, but also whom this option truly benefits.
As corporate attorney Lauren Geisser points out, widespread use of this practice is likely to become coercive, reinforcing a male-centered workplace that views motherhood as “incompatible with work,” something to be delayed. Geisser argues for the high probability that such programs will increase already problematic workplace discrimination against women, warning that far from being beneficial to women, this “benefit” may actually be “a ploy in favor of employers to reinforce the male-oriented workplace leading women to choose the employer over motherhood.” This critique gets to the heart of a deeper problem: egg freezing isn’t just a workplace policy—it’s built on a set of cultural myths about time, autonomy, and what constitutes a meaningful life.
The Mirage of Expanding Choices
On the face of it, a broader range of options appears to offer women more choices; in actuality, the egg freezing “option” pressures women into certain kinds of choices. Egg freezing benefits are deceptively “family-friendly” policies that in truth coerce women and narrow options for those who desire to become mothers.
The choice to delay childbearing ultimately benefits corporations and the fertility industry more than women themselves. From a corporate perspective, it is cheaper to fund egg freezing than to offer paid maternity leave, and it’s simpler than reshaping workplace norms to support mothers. But this approach nudges women toward timelines that conform to male-biased work structures—timelines that are biologically mismatched with female fertility. If more women are subtly pressured to delay motherhood, fewer will become mothers at all, and workplaces will face even less incentive to adapt to family life.
Corporate perks billed as “family-friendly” often conceal a quiet coercion, a redefinition of motherhood that demands professional allegiance above all. Consider the case of a personal friend I’ll call “Lisa,” an executive assistant on Wall Street, whose benefits package included on-call nursing care for her sick children—seemingly a gesture of support. Yet the underlying message was unmistakable: her presence was expected at the office, regardless of her child’s needs. In the guise of empowerment, these policies subtly shift maternal responsibility away from mothers, not to relieve their burden, but to ensure uninterrupted productivity. In contrast, companies like Patagonia have taken a different approach. Instead of encouraging women to delay childbearing, Patagonia has implemented policies like on-site childcare and generous family leave—efforts that respect women’s biological timelines and support genuine work–life integration.
Fertility clinics profit twice—first from enticing young women to freeze their eggs (and donate them as a source of the raw material that becomes their product), and then when those same women are beholden to these companies to make use of them. The promise of “extended fertility” comes at a steep cost: women who rely on this “failsafe” to delay childbearing will find that the delay itself diminishes their natural fertility, increases pregnancy risks, and shortens the window of time in their lives in which children can be conceived at all. What is sold as freedom narrows women’s future to include fewer children and more dependence on the fertility industry.
A Bad Bargain
Egg freezing offers a deceptively false sense of security. Many women are led to believe that this procedure “preserves” their fertility, effectively pausing the biological clock. Fertility clinics capitalize on this hope, promising that a woman’s ovarian reserve and future fertility will remain “unaffected.” But this claim is deeply misleading; the biological clock never stops ticking.
Even if, in the best-case scenario, the process of egg retrieval does not harm a woman’s natural fertility, the reality remains: fertility declines with age. Time itself is a crucial and irreversible factor. In trying to avoid infertility with a store of “backup” eggs, a woman may ironically and unintentionally increase the likelihood of fertility issues. The narrative that we can freeze time is not just biologically flawed. It subtly shapes the choices women make in ways that they are likely to regret down the road.
Moreover, freezing eggs does not—and cannot—guarantee a baby. In order to make use of frozen eggs, women become dependent on expensive, physically taxing, emotionally draining, and statistically uncertain in vitro fertilization. Success rates decline with age (as low as 0.7 percent at age 45), and children conceived through assisted reproductive technologies face increased risks, including higher rates of premature birth and even childhood cancer.
Add to this the well-documented medical risks of advanced maternal age. Beginning at age thirty-five, pregnant women face higher chances of miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, preeclampsia, and maternal mortality. While many women go on to have healthy pregnancies later in life, it is crucial that they do so with full awareness of the increased risks, not under the illusion that science can pause biology.
What employers offer is not the chance to preserve fertility, but a demand to postpone and mitigate its effects on their bottom line. Consider a cutting-edge development from the field of oncology. As cancer treatments improve and patients are diagnosed at younger ages, fertility preservation has become an increasing concern. For these women, reproductive technology offers a promising option: ovarian tissue can be removed, frozen, and later re-implanted—a procedure that results in successful pregnancy in about 30 percent of cases. This medical breakthrough highlights a crucial distinction: ovarian tissue freezing to preserve fertility in the face of its potential destruction is distinct from egg freezing to postpone it. One is a response to an immediate and unavoidable loss; the other is a calculated delay driven by external pressures and false promises of control. Only one is truly an act of preservation.
The Monumental Myth
Even if all these myths were not falsehoods, the problem of egg freezing cannot be solved by safer methods or better policies. Beyond the physical and financial costs, there is a more insidious myth at work—one that speaks to our deepest assumptions about time, control, and what gives life meaning. This myth has its roots in the modern misconception that we are the designers of our own lives and the sole authors of our happiness. Behind the push for egg freezing is the illusion that we can freeze time itself.
In his essay “Your Real Biological Clock Is You’re Going to Die,” Tom Socca diagnoses this cultural delusion. People postpone childbearing as though time were a bankable asset, when the reality is that “you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children.” Leah Libresco Sargeant expands on this with the image of our lives as overlapping ribbons. The earlier we have children, the longer our lives will overlap with theirs (and with those of their children). Even more than time (which, as the precondition for the meaning and happiness we derive from relationships, ought not be downplayed), this cultural paradigm is a myth that defines life incorrectly.
As Sargeant explains, “If one’s ‘real life’ is defined as the periods when we have the greatest independence, the weakest ties to others, and the most potential futures still open to us, then parenthood pushes both men and women—but especially women—out of this class.” Yet, as she goes to say, one’s real life doesn’t start after some ambiguous amount of time in neutral. In trying to store up vague and exciting “experiences” that are better without children to ruin them, or to advance our careers without familial obligations impeding our achievement, or even to achieve a comfortable standard of living before bearing children, we overlook the incalculable opportunity cost. We sacrifice meaning for money, trading the renewable resource of time with our families for the illusion of security.
Behind the push for egg freezing is the illusion that we can freeze time itself.
This is not a relative tradeoff. Human beings are inherently relational creatures. At our core, we find meaning and joy in the gift of self to one another. As Fr. Robert Spitzer explains in his book Finding True Happiness: Satisfying Our Restless Hearts, empirical research demonstrates that once a modest standard of living is met, increased pleasure, wealth, or success does not correlate with deeper happiness. Across time and cultures, true human happiness is found in the meaning we derive from loving relationships and serving something beyond ourselves. This isn’t merely a religious insight; Harvard’s Grant Study—one of the longest-running longitudinal studies on human happiness—concluded, “Happiness is Love. Full Stop.”
If both centuries-old wisdom and cutting-edge research affirm that the good life is rooted in lasting, loving relationships, especially with our children, then we must ask: who truly benefits when we devote our most vital years to serving an employer above all else? Is what we gain by postponing parenthood truly worth what we lose—time in our children’s lives, the possibility of having a child at all, or even future grandchildren?
Our real biological clock is an hourglass, one whose top half remains opaque; no one knows how many grains of sand he has left. Our real life isn’t measured by how free we are from commitments, but by how deeply we invest ourselves in those commitments that matter most. The push for egg freezing is clearly a bid to keep women’s investment in the corporation. It’s nothing sinister; it’s mere economics. Our response ought to be resistance in favor of policies beyond economics that lead to true human flourishing. As Flannery O’Connor exhorts: “Push back against the age as hard as it pushes on you.”
What does that pushback look like in an age that emphasizes economic gain over the pursuit of meaning?
It means that the company can wait. Your grains of sand are falling.
Books: Mama Prays | Reclaiming Motherhood from a Culture Gone Mad
Podcast: Brave New Us
Web: www.snstephenson.com