A handful of eggs. Credit: Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images
A few summers ago I was sitting in my parents’ garden in Massachusetts with a couple of their friends, successful Americans working in science and technology and accustomed to dishing out their opinions with zest and data-driven backing. One such opinion — offered with startling intensity — was that I ought to waste no time in freezing my eggs.
Indeed, that I ought to have done it years ago; at 35, I was already over the hill, egg-quality wise. Their daughter, they said, had already frozen hers — aged 25, when the eggs are in prime health. In the UK, there is a 10-year storage limit on egg-freezing, which is why women here rarely consider it in their 20s; most aren’t ready to give up the ghost of finding a partner and conceiving naturally in their 30s. The US has no such limit.
The advice from my parents’ friends came at a time when I’d already considered egg-freezing or “oocyte cryopreservation”, in industry jargon. By the time 35 loomed, the message had reached me loud and clear that my fertility was about to hit a perilous cliff-edge. Should I act? I was just on the way out of a long-term relationship, was hungry for fun and freedom, and having children then held no appeal. I wasn’t sure I’d ever want kids. The only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to think about it. After a brief bit of research, which showed that less than 1% of frozen eggs end up becoming babies, I put the whole thing aside as too remote for serious consideration.
Now, in 2020, egg-freezing merits fresh thought. The pandemic has exacted revenge on those who planned to wait and see what unfolded. The clock has stopped — all the hurly burly of social life has been suspended — but bodies are still ageing. This has put particular pressure on single women in their late 30s, for whom in a stroke all possibilities of conception seemed to evaporate when in-person dating became lethally risky and fertility clinics had to be closed.
Clinics were able to apply to reopen in May, and I know a number of women who — feeling the dread and panic of a socially, professionally and quite possibly romantically aborted year or even two — are considering either egg-freezing or going ahead with sperm donor insemination. The option to “wait and see” has lost its air of promise.For those who don’t want to take the plunge of a pregnancy yet, the temptation to pay through the nose to freeze eggs — £8,000 per cycle, with three cycles recommended — is strong as the world becomes more uncertain.
In the past few years, the procedure has been glamorised by celebrities including Rita Ora and Sofía Vergara. American companies from Uber to Unilever now offer egg-freezing benefits to female staff. So far, so empowering. But despite the hype, egg-freezing remains a marginal practice in the UK. According to the fertility regulator, in 2017 there were just 1,463 egg freezing cycles (compared to 70,000 IVF treatment cycles) — up from 816 in 2014. Between 2010 and 2017, only 700 babies were born through frozen eggs in the UK — compared to 732,000 total live births per year. The number of “thaw cycles” of patients’ own eggs, rather than donor eggs, was only 178 in 2016. So this is still very far from being a mainstream salve for women unsure about the future, though that does appear to be changing.
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SubscribeWell, it is a hard reality for many women to face -the clock does tick, time passes and takes its toll, and as one grows older one becomes inexorably less fit to reproduce -male or female – but the odds of having a healthy baby are stacked far more against ageing women. An older man can do this successfully with a younger partner, but unfortunately this does not work the other way round.
I find it surprising that the writer can infer without irony that ‘reproductive anxiety’ is somehow not a very real thing; but more linked to an ‘insidious’ anti-woman idea. It is a very real thing -and it is dreadful to think that for many women it seems to come as a painful, often too late, surprise that ‘responsible decision making’ in managing their reproductive capacity is essential work for all women, and from a young age.
I feel great sorrow for women in this position, but I think it perfectly fair and appropriate to level some responsibility for this with aspects of feminism that have downgraded motherhood and baby rearing as a sort of lower level activity when set against the ‘far more important work’ of equality and gender struggle. I wonder if girls at school these days are even allowed to think hopefully and healthily about becoming a mother and raising a family -or are we, in our deluded politically correct insanity, pushing them all unswervingly towards the STEM subjects instead. If so, it is no wonder that the thinking in so many cases is done too late, and when it comes it is accompanied by very resentful thoughts and a wish to blame the ‘patriarchy’ once more.
A lot of young girls ( I have a teenager) are already struggling with the issues of family planning. My daughter has jokingly discussed that a pregnancy in her gap year would be the perfect solution to family vs career -get the baby making out if the way at the beginning of adulthood.
Meanwhile in the real world, women strive and plan and wait, wait, wait in their cohabitating or various romantic holding patterns. Often it is a last minute gallop to the finish after years of worry, which perhaps takes the fun out of it a bit.
Then we have the quandary of adult women at their most educated, experienced and productive, off to do the dishes and wash the nappies. Sigh.
Sex education in schools still revolves around the prevention of families rather than the planning of them. The secret and intense emotional labour which many women must do relationally in the years leading up to conception is no joke.
“The secret and intense emotional labour which many women must do relationally in the years leading up to conception is no joke.”
Can you expand? Do you mean the labour of convincing some man that he should hang around and have kids? Seriously, not sure what you mean.
Let us ignore that in our thirties sperm and egg are both ‘old’ as far as Nature is concerned and robust human life resulting from their union, less likely.
The hubris of an age which believes people have a right to create life, at any price, and any cost to the child involved, is deeply concerning.
I’m inclined to agree. there are a number of circumstances where people who believe they have the right to create a child, whatever the circumstances, ignores what they may be inflicting on that yet to be created life. The ultimate in selfishness, thinking of one’s own wants before the impact on others.
A few years ago (7 or 8-ish perhaps), the American Medical Association having become aware of the number of women seemingly baffled about their difficulties getting or remaining pregnant in their late 30s or older, wanted to instigate an information campaign giving women the facts about declining fertility with age.
I believe It was to take the form of small posters and leaflets for the waiting-rooms of clinics and doctor’s surgeries, nothing massive, and had no intention of telling women to have children when young. They just wanted women to be able to make more informed decisions in planning out their lives – if they thought having children would likely be important to them, they needed to factor that in.
The National Organisation for Women (NOW) lobbied the government to block it, which they did. NOW said they couldn’t allow anything suggesting that a woman’s own choices might contribute to outcomes in her life with which she’s dissatisfied.
This article reminded me of that.
Do you think aging is any easier for men? Do you not realize the losses men face as they age are just as profound as women’s? Men are told to age gracefully – women’s whining is enshrined as scholarship. It’s galling, just in case nobody has made that 100% clear. Sure you make a good point but you have to start by empthathizing with the adult-child who wrote this article. Be clear, I have a daughter and a granddaughter and if she wrote something like this she’d get a stern talking to from me about her own agency and responsibility as a human being. I’m 58 and sympathizing with the plight of women has been crammed down my throat the entire time. There is no balance. When I see an article on male aging here, I’ll give you a million dollars…
While perusing this article the penny dropped immediately after reading that doozy of a phrase “overtly anti-feminist agenda in terrorising women about fertility”. The strategy of writing deliberately inflammatory articles in order to attain some notoriety in the twittersphere has become the avenue of choice for any aspiring media star. As such the kind of thoughtful, well-balanced article that might be of genuine use to a childless middle-aged woman will never see the light of day because it is not controversial enough to be discussed, shared and “liked” by the Twitterati.
I am considering submitting an article to the Guardian entitled “I’m an unhappy white middle-aged man and it’s all women’s fault” and watch my media career as the new male Katie Hopkins take off.
The difference between the admirable Unherd and the Guardian is that my fictitious article would never be published whereas Ms Strimpel’s has been here. I regard that as a victory for free speech and congratulations to the Unherd team for providing me with a mid-morning chuckle.
Wouldn’t it be far cheaper to just find a bloke, try to live together and have a kid. It would save lots of bother and save £17k. Or am I missing something? Oh, wokeness!
You are missing something
.My baby boomer brothers and sisters all got married and had children in their 20’s.
Today couples are reluctant to commit, instead going through their 20’s with a series of relationships ( serial monogamy) . When a woman hits her 30’s her choices suddenly contract as the men of similar age are now going for younger partners and younger men don’t want an older partner and are not ready for children. So it’s a double whammy for women who reach their 30’s with no children and no committed partner. . It’s nothing to do with the “patriarchy” and more to do with lifestyle.
As an anecdote I have 3 children in their late 20’s early 30’s . Eldest has been in a relationship for 6 years, middle has had 2 partners each for about for 5 years, and youngest has had 3 live in partners each lasting about a year. None of them have children.
i think you’ve hit the nail on the head. sticking together, creating a nurturing environment and learing what love is really about…. didnt Stan Barstow write about it?
I can’t say I found this article either useful or well-written.
***
This is terrible anecdotal journalism. I felt as though I were reading a Private Eye pastiche.
Women are not “hounded” about it. Most women value having children, and therefore they are naturally concerned about how best to do so, and wish to read about it and discuss it.
The article goes directly from suggesting it is an anti-feminist outrage that women end up freezing their eggs when they have aged too much for those eggs to be optimally viable, to suggesting that it is an anti-feminist outrage that women’s media discusses the problem of age leading to suboptimally viable eggs, which is a way to tackle the first problem. If x = anti-feminist and ¬x = anti-feminist, then x = ¬x, and by the Principle of Explosion, all propositions follow.
This kind of lunatic hyperbole might fly in The Grauniad, but I expect better from UnHerd. Disappointing quality control here.
***
I don’t blame the author per se, because as “a historian of gender and intimacy in modern Britain” she is who she is, and cannot be otherwise. But to the editors: in future, fewer articles like this, please.
I disagree, Chris, I think we need more articles like this which show the convoluted thinking of feminist inspired women who are facing probably 50% + of their lives in a state of regret & loneliness.
Zoe, I enjoyed your piece, which I found well-considered and thought-provoking. There was one issue you didn’t address though: if women approaching 40 freeze their eggs for a maximum of 10 years, they are therefore contemplating undergoing a pregnancy at the age of 50. This will not be a fun experience.
Neither will dealing with a stroppy teenager while in their mid-sixties, especially if they are a single parent. Have you really thought this through, ladies?
Is it just a coincidence that Zoe is 38 years old, the same age at which women are most likely to freeze their eggs?
No, it isn’t. Read the first three paragraphs of the article, in which she discusses how the topic is directly relevant to her circumstances.
The more closely I listen to the left, the more every complaint and whinge sounds like it’s about either grabbing new privileges from society based on “victimhood” or about denigrating some “other” ingroup that is oppressing them. What is the complaint of this author, exactly? That egg storage – a freaking miracle of science – is an option at all? Or that her old eggs are likely to not result in the birth of a child in any event? Or that she can’t have a baby whenever she wants?
Let’s say we could sort some kind of coherent gripe out of this rhetorical mess, does she offer any actual evidence of her claims that this is the result of a meta anti-feminism? What this looks like to sane people is female reproductive agency run amok, not oppression. It looks like the immature whining of an adult-child who cannot face the reality of a life that is full of tradeoffs.
That life involves tradeoffs isn’t news to men though. As a father and primary breadwinner in my family, I realized i was trading off time with my child to allow her and her mother the privilege of being a stay at home Mom, something my wife wanted dearly. She is much closer with our daughter as a result than I can ever be. We have a great relationship, no doubt, and I made that tradeoff with eyes wide open. It would never occur to me to complain about it or feel victimized by it. I did what I thought was best for my children, my family and ultimately me.
What is wrong with our society that it is infantilizing women such as this author, who seems to be utterly overwhelmed by the basic vicissitudes of life? Even more baffling is why she or the editors here would think preening such juvenile sophistry about is a good idea, or even interesting?
Thought provoking article about a little discussed but crucial topic. I believe Sweden has seen a trend where the sexes have close to equal opportunity to females choosing to follow their feminine instincts and become stay at home mothers. Something Jordan Peterson would often comment on being one of his many career women patients biggest regrets.
Sort of – the ‘Nordic Paradox’ as it’s sometimes called, usually refers to the job choices people make.
It seems the closer the equality, the more likely people are to go into stereotypically and traditionally sexed lines of study and work – higher proportion of engineers are men, more women in the various caring professions and choosing non–career or part-time office and shop jobs, and so on. Not striving for the directorships, STEM fields and other ‘power careers’ that feminists focus on.
I think the economic and cultural incentives towards responsible (Ie seeking relative sufficiency to have them) women leaving children later and later are both real and growing. And the impact of having time to raise children on careers and life time earnings is real and largely identifiable.
It’s one of the very few areas I’m genuinely open to large scale government Intervention / rebalancing of some kind as a counterpoint to something that is so societally harmful.
How can anyone think that meddling with nature in this way, artificial conception, will not carry with it a price? It is not possible for science to know the outcome of such a process until two generations have grown up to live relatively normal lives, the first giving birth to the second. With 70 as an average that is around 140 years before effects can be fully known and with the first artificially created humans in their thirties, we have another century to go.
We already have poorer health and higher mental health dysfunction in IVF humans. What price is worth paying for the delusion that a woman can ‘choose’ when to conceive and do so without a man in her life? What sort of life will any human created in this way have? If they die younger, which they may well do, was it worth it?
This is a process which mocks Nature and we do that at our peril. Synthetic hormones force a woman to produce more eggs than would EVER happen in Nature. They are collected, moved to a synthetic solution, sorted, selected, stored, frozen. None of which is found in Nature.
For conception, a similarly selected sperm, too weak to do the job, is forced into an egg – in nature the egg decides which sperm can enter. If conception takes place in the petrie dish in its synthetic bath, then more mechanical intervention picks it up and forces it into someone’s womb lining.
How anyone thinks such an artificial process can create a robust, normal human being is the real question.
“We already have poorer health and higher mental health dysfunction in IVF humans.”
I do not disagree that the process is artificial in multiple ways and thus concerning. Are you able to cite links to data or research on health and mental health outcomes in persons born via IVF?
I don’t really know but yes, it’s probably a scam. Most things are.
I’m waiting for the inevitable demand that the government pay the tab for any woman past 30 who wants to freeze her eggs on the grounds of “social justice” and “reproductive freedom”. No doubt this will be accompanied by claims that the real culprit is the “patriarchy” for forcing women to choose between their careers and reproduction.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the term “patriarchy” has assumed the role of the Great Satan in feminist discourse, the ultimate source of evil from which fountainhead all sin flows. In fact, the “patriarchy” is actually being used as a stand in for “the facts of biology”.
Before the pill, feminism remained a thought experiment only, because although a good idea, it was impossible in practice. The real reason why females were excluded from the higher professions was not sexism per se, but the reality that when a woman married, she often became pregnant, and after a period, was forced to stay home to raise the child. Therefore it made no sense to spend seven years to train her for a job that she might leave upon marriage. Men, on the other hand, were legally obliged to support their wives and children, and could be counted on to remain in servitude for life.
So now that women can use the pill to delay pregnancy, it makes perfect sense to allow them to work full-time in any profession, and that’s a good thing. But the inevitable consequence is that some women will discover that their window of opportunity has closed, that they remained single too long, and that freezing their eggs has become the only viable option.
None of this is helped by the fact that many young men have figured out that they no longer need to marry because there are so many young, horny women using the pill. By the time some women are ready to settle down, turns out the best mates have already been snagged by other women, who didn’t prioritize career over marriage, leaving only unsuitable men in the marriage pool.
All of this mess is the inevitable unforseen consequence of the pill plus feminism, resulting in hordes of women paying the price in their forties. But have no fear, for the “patriarchy” will no doubt be there to blame, somehow, for this situation, probably through “the overtly anti-feminst agenda in terrorizing women about fertility”.
You know: the facts of biology.
A modest proposal.
Rather than putting all this money and energy into allowing elderly career women to (possibly, if they are lucky) have children at an age when grandchildren would be more normal, why not just accept that some women are natural mothers and others just aren’t.
By extending the working hours of career women, abolishing the retirement age and using taxation from them to support mothers we could have a situation which is genuinely win-win. Many would-be mothers limit the children they have simply because they feel they can’t afford it, while career women seem to spend money on ridiculously expensive items just to make themselves feel better. Why not put it to better use?
Mothers could be encouraged to have slightly larger families so that the population is replaced, while Worker types would be able to work the long hours they love, while knowing that through taxation they were still contributing to the wider society.