If you are approaching 30 like I am, or already past it, then I am sure you too can hear the loud and insistent tick of your biological clock. And it’s not just you. Even your parents, in-laws, ‘well meaning’ relatives and the aunty next-door seem to be able to hear it tick. Just as your career finally seems to be scaling the charts, the badgering back home too seems to rise a notch. If you are single, you are firmly shown the errors of your ways in not getting married at the earliest. And if you are already married, then suddenly your sex life and menstrual cycle become a topic of conversation over coffee.
Two months ago, Apple and Facebook made working for them even more desirable by offering to pay for egg-freezing. At first glance, this seems like an amazing perk as well as a solution for women to prioritise their career while maintaining their pre-defined role in the society as the Babymaker. It also seems to put to bed, that age-old debate of work versus family, momentarily at least.
And why not? With many companies offering only four months of maternity leave, juggling career with child care is a logistical nightmare, largely for women. Yes, some companies are more progressive and offer better benefits and flexible work schedule, but it still does bung a spanner in our performance ratings at the end of the day.
But tempting though it may be to put one’s ova on the ice until one is truly ready for it, there is something unsettling about this choice. Although the primary uneasiness maybe about tampering with a natural process, consider the gamble that one takes in doing so.
Despite fertility centres offering attractive statistics on conception, the fact remains that the chances of conception through egg freezing still remain only one in five. And this too, depends on the age at which the eggs were frozen and one’s physical state of health at that point.
Egg freezing as a process requires us to be injected with fertility drugs to produce 25-30 matured eggs in a month that are extracted instead of the one egg that we shed every month as part of the menstrual cycle. The eggs extracted are frozen until you are ready to have a baby, then thawed and combined with sperm to form an embryo. The embryo is implanted in the uterus.
Of the ten eggs extracted and frozen, only seven are likely to survive the thawing process and only 3-4 eggs would accept the sperm to turn into embryos.
Eggs do not respond very well to cryopreservation unlike embryos. The real purpose for inventing this process is to help cancer patients freeze their eggs before chemotherapy as the treatment destroys the reserve of eggs in the body.
There is also a chance that the freezing process may not work out at all for a select few, by which time, they are on the wrong side of forty with low fertility and very few options left to have a baby.
Freezing eggs, say doctors, work best when one freezes them in their early twenties or before. But who is interested in freezing eggs in the early twenties when we are still trying to land the right job, study further or get that cute guy in your office to ask you out. Never mind marriage and family plans.
Despite all the odds, there are about 5,000 babies born through frozen eggs. But consider the difficulties and complications in raising a young child, while still juggling work, in your forties and fifties. It’s a tough choice for women to make, but are any of these dreams worth subjecting our bodies and lives to so many difficult changes? Men will continue to steadily climb the ladder, while women will still miss a few rungs when they start a family, regardless of the time they choose to have a baby and with or without egg freezing.
The solution to this ever popping question – work or family – does not lie in freezing eggs, but striving to change workplace attitudes to working mothers. While some companies have progressed significantly in providing support for working mothers, in general, they have a long way to go in being more sensitive about it. Yes, it is a slower process and it may not happen in our lifetime. But it still sounds better than a parenthood that’s revived from ice.
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