Should She Freeze Her Eggs?

For the past five decades feminists have argued that the greatest impediment to women’s career success was motherhood. Thus, they told young women to delay pregnancy as long as possible. If a woman became pregnant before her feminist matriarchs said was the right time, she needed but have an abortion—safe, legal and rare.

The argument continued that a fully self-actualized successful professional woman in her mid-thirties would easily find an appropriate husband… because, not being a needy clinger, should could be loved for herself and not for her looks. A good Darwinian could have told her that she was writing herself out of the marriage market, but feminists would not let themselves be tied down by male scientists. The fact that female fertility declined precipitously after age 35 was well known and scrupulously ignored.

While feminists are marching in the streets for reproductive rights they do not realize that their life plan has deprived many women of the free choice, to have or not to have children. Reproductive endocrinology has solved some of the problem, but it is certainly not a foolproof solution.

In the meantime the great feminist minds of Silicon Valley and elsewhere decided that they could extend a women’s fertility and keep them on the job. They would pay for women to freeze their eggs. Using frozen eggs a woman could wait to find the perfect husband and could have children at just about any age.

Companies like Facebook and Apple even offered to pay for the freezing. Anything to make a good feminist point… and to trick women out of their fertility.

The poster child for the movement was named Brigitte Adams. She appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek several years back, to tout the fact that she had frozen her eggs and was merely awaiting the arrival of Prince Charming.

As it happened, Prince Charming never arrived, so Adams decided at the age of 45 to unfreeze her eggs and to have a child. What followed was tragic. The Washington Post reports:

Brigitte Adams caused a sensation four years ago when she appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek under the headline, “Freeze your eggs, Free your career.” She was single and blond, a Vassar graduate who spoke fluent Italian, and was working in tech marketing for a number of prestigious companies. Her story was one of empowerment, how a new fertility procedure was giving women more choices, as the magazine noted provocatively, “in the quest to have it all.”

Adams remembers feeling a wonderful sense of freedom after she froze her eggs in her late 30s, despite the $19,000 cost. Her plan was to work a few more years, find a great guy to marry and still have a house full of her own children.

Things didn’t turn out the way she hoped.

In early 2017, with her 45th birthday looming and no sign of Mr. Right, she decided to start a family on her own. She excitedly unfroze the 11 eggs she had stored and selected a sperm donor.

Two eggs failed to survive the thawing process. Three more failed to fertilize. That left six embryos, of which five appeared to be abnormal. The last one was implanted in her uterus. On the morning of March 7, she got the devastating news that it, too, had failed.

Adams was not pregnant, and her chances of carrying her genetic child had just dropped to near zero. She remembers screaming like “a wild animal,” throwing books, papers, her laptop — and collapsing to the ground.

“It was one of the worst days of my life. There were so many emotions. I was sad. I was angry. I was ashamed,” she said. “I questioned, ‘Why me?’ ‘What did I do wrong?’ 

What did she do wrong? She bought into the feminist life plan, without realizing that biology and technology had a voice in her decision. She allowed herself to be duped by an ideology and lost her chance to have a child. She announced on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek that she had freed her career. Perhaps she did. But she paid a price.

Doubtless, you want to know the statistics. Surely, some women do conceive via frozen eggs.

The Post continues:

On average, a woman freezing 10 eggs at age 36 has a 30 to 60 percent chance of having a baby with them, according to published studies. The odds are higher for younger women, but they drop precipitously for older women. They also go up with the number of eggs stored (as does the cost). But the chance of success varies so wildly by individual that reproductive specialists say it’s nearly impossible to predict the outcome based on aggregate data.

In short, it’s a gamble. It’s also a gamble that a woman will find an appropriate suitor. Otherwise, she will need to find an appropriate sperm donor.

Fertility specialists are very clear:

James A. Grifo, a fertility specialist at NYU Langone Health who is one of the pioneers of the procedure, calls the whole notion of being able to “control” your fertility — perpetuated by the media and embraced by feminists — destructive.

“It’s total fiction. It’s incorrect,” Grifo said. “Your whole life it’s beaten into your head that you’re in control and if you can’t have a baby, you blame yourself. There has to be more dialogue about what women can be responsible for and what they are not responsible for.”

As for Adams, she is currently pregnant, with a donor egg and donor sperm. Not for an instant does she or any of the other women quoted in the story declare that this has anything to do with the feminist life plan. They blame it all on the fertility industry.