Young Women Are Being Told to Lean In, but Freeze First

Only a few years ago, my girlfriends and I sat around a table laughing about the possibility that we might not find a partner to have kids with before it was, well, too late.

"If I get to 30 and nobody wants this thing," one of my friends announced, gesturing at her uterus, "I'm totally throwing an egg-freezing party and you're all invited."

But several 30th birthdays later, the idea that a young, healthy woman might freeze her eggs is less hilarious. Now it's something people actually do, often in the name of "empowerment".

Egg-freezing, originally developed to give cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy a shot at preserving their fertility, has been around for decades. But with more women delaying parenthood, a growing number are opting to put their eggs on ice as a type of insurance policy against their ticking biological clocks.

Indeed, since the American Society of Reproductive Medicine lifted the "experimental" label off egg-freezing in 2012, many fertility specialists have been spruiking climbing success rates of the procedure; the slow-freezing method used only a few years ago has been replaced with a new snap-freezing technique called vitrification, which significantly improves egg survival rates. Statistics vary, but some fertility clinics claim frozen eggs share similar success rates to fresh eggs in term of producing pregnancy resulting in live birth.

For some women, egg-freezing is seen as an opportunity to postpone starting a family in order to focus on their career. EggBanxx, a US startup that sells finance for egg-freezing, is one of many companies to have realised this, and markets its services with the Sheryl Sandberg-inspired slogan: "Lean in. But freeze first".

And who could forget the fuss Apple and Facebook stirred up last year when they offered to pay handsomely for their female staff to have their eggs frozen? "We want to empower women at Apple to do the best work of their lives as they care for loved ones and raise their families," Apple said. In other words, kids can wait – you've got career goals to kick.

Perhaps worryingly, however, many have come to see egg-freezing as a guarantee against ageing. In a new study of how the availability of IVF and egg-freezing technologies influence women's education and careers, economists Naomi Gershoni and Corinne Low liken egg-freezing to taking out an insurance policy.

"By giving people a form of insurance against later-life infertility, women who wanted to pursue a career were able to do so without having to worry as much about whether this would prevent them from having a family," Gershoni and Low say in their paper.

"Our findings show that the beneficiaries of IVF and other assisted-reproduction technologies extend to young women who have been otherwise discouraged from making significant career investments."

But according to Fertility Society of Australia president Associate Professor Mark Bowman, the chance that a healthy 33-year-old woman who freezes her eggs will be able to give birth to a baby later on is at best 40-50 percent. The best chance of falling pregnant, Bowman says, is to "have good, old-fashioned sex and see what happens." (For same-sex couples, this may present a roadblock.)

Still, about half of the women who visit him at his Sydney fertility clinic, Genea, go ahead with the procedure, which, at $10,000 per cycle of egg collection, is not cheap.

What's more, "You'll only find out 10 years later," – when you do start trying to conceive – "whether your decision to freeze your eggs was a good one or a bad one," Bowman told VICE. "And it's a bit late then to find out that you fell in the 50 percent on the wrong side. I don't think that's a very good insurance policy at all."

Gemma Crighton, a 30-year-old fashion designer from Port Kembla, New South Wales, says she has seriously considered freezing her eggs. Her mum even offered to pay for her to do it.

"I think [mum] saw it on a documentary once and at the time I was in that 'complicated phase' of my relationship and she just offered. I initially shook it off and laughed… I thought it was a little crazy, but it's a few years on now and I feel like the old 'clock' is ticking away," she told VICE.

Having just begun her first full-time job, Gemma says starting a family right now isn't an option, but putting her eggs on ice might take some of the pressure off. "If I could freeze any [eggs] at least I'd be more at ease," she explained. "I get really stressed out and emotional about it. A lot of my friends are having babies now and when I'm in their company I'm fine, but once I leave I get a case of the green-eyed monster. I start arguments with my partner about it, hassling him for a timeline of when he's ready for kids and when we should start trying."

Not all women who electively freeze their eggs do so because of career concerns. In a survey of 740 women by Cosmopolitan, 75 percent said they wanted to "take the pressure off finding a partner before a certain age", while recent Australian data reveal similar motivations. The Jean Hailes Research Unit at Monash University surveyed 200 clients of Melbourne IVF who froze their eggs for non-medical reasons and found most did so because they weren't in a relationship. "It's actually not having a partner that drives this more than anything," Monash senior research fellow Karin Hammarberg told Fairfax's Good Weekend.

It's not just thirty-something women who are hyper-aware of their fertility, either. Ninety percent of respondents in the Cosmopolitan survey said the ideal age for a woman to freeze her eggs was before 36, while a third said 25 was the best age. "The mentality of freezers is changing," said Christy Jones, the founder of egg-freezing referral service, Extend Fertility. "It's a different story when your back is up against the wall. But the younger women say, 'it's so empowering. It's liberating. It's a great backup'."

Syl Freedman, a 24-year-old student from Sydney, froze her eggs in October last year as a precautionary measure. As a sufferer of endometriosis, Syl knew her fertility might be affected by her illness, and saw freezing her eggs as a way to reclaim some sense of control over her future.

"I felt like [endo] was taking over my life, so if there was some way I could possibly preserve my fertility, then that would be doing something positive for my future," Syl told VICE. "The process was really intense, but overall I still do feel that the experience was really positive and empowering."

But Syl was under no impression that having the procedure—an exhausting, 12-day-long process of hormone injections and ultrasounds, which she documented on her blog—was a surefire way to have kids one day. "It's not a guarantee—I was never under that impression. But it was something proactive I could do in the meantime… It just felt like something more certain in spite of all the uncertainty I was facing," she said.

Young women's anxieties about their fertility are made worse by frequent alarmist media coverage of fertility issues. Earlier this year one of Britain's top NHS fertility specialists warned that women should start trying for a baby before they turn 30 "or risk never having children." The Mail on Sunday ran a headline declaring the UK was facing a " fertility timebomb." In other words: start panicking, ladies. (But don't really.)

Mark Bowman believes such press—together with Silicon Valley's "HR stunts"—encourages women to obsess too much over their fertility. That energy, he says, would be better invested in "fostering relationships". "I'm concerned that there's this engendering fear that gets subtly sold that drives women to pursue egg-freezing. As a doctor I am very concerned that it's creating an illness where none exists," Bowman said.

Professor Bill Ledger, Head of the School of Women's and Children's Health at the University of New South Wales, says the trend for young men and women to delay traditional markers of adulthood - marriage, mortgage, kids - is at odds with the fertility technology currently available, and women are perhaps expecting too much of medical science.

"From a societal point of view, what worries me is what demographer and social commentator Mark McCrindle refers to as the 'safety net syndrome' – the perception held that someone, whether it's the Government or medical science, will solve the problems that have arisen due to a person's own choices. When it comes to fertility, that's simply not possible," Professor Ledger said in June.

"I advise people to settle down with a partner young enough that they have some fertile years so they have a chance to have children," he added. "When you get older, children matter more than having houses and cars and money in the bank."

This begs the question: would this dilemma be quite so complex if society was more accommodating of women's career and family aspirations? If the glass ceiling didn't exist, if paid parental leave policies were more accessible and if childcare was more affordable, would women be choosing to delay pregnancy in the first place?

Still, there's no denying that many women will gain some peace of mind by forking out to have their eggs frozen. To have that option (albeit an expensive one) available is, in many ways, a positive thing—so long as they understand the odds of conceiving down the track are not stacked in their favour.

Until egg-freezing technology can offer a better guarantee of success, until workplaces stop seeing parenthood as a roadblock, Mark Bowman holds hope that the next generation of women will be "better at juggling their work-life balance" - perhaps that will reduce the number arriving in his office in a panic.

"If you get yourself into the right relationship, don't start using societal and work-related issues to put having a baby off," Bowman said. "That would be my message, at any point in life."

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