Imagine that you meet someone new, there is a spark, you think this might be The One, your first kiss makes you go weak at the knees. At what point in this romantic rollercoaster do you tell them that you have frozen eggs you'd like them to inseminate?
This could be the kind of new, awkward situation that we will have to confront if the idea of "social egg-freezing" ever takes off (which of course it won't). Dr Gillian Lockwood, from the Midland Fertility Centre, suggested recently that as women are having babies later and later, young women should seriously consider freezing their ova in their early 20s for use in their late 30s – after their clichéd life of high-flying career, martini-swilling, cigarette-wafting and spanx-filling. Lockwood even goes so far as to suggest that egg-freezing "should be every dad's graduation present for his daughter". What happened to just buying them a car or accepting that they're going to move back in with you for the next five years? Practical and a lot less creepy.
Of course, this graduation/ovulation tie-in reveals the social class of potential ice babies. Nubile egg storage is the new "too posh to push". But as with the elective caesarean, there are massive health risks to go with your birthing fashion statements. Egg freezing and IVF have huge benefits for those that need them. It makes complete sense for a cancer patient to freeze her eggs before treatment. But it is a decision that comes with costs as well as benefits. A confidential inquiry into women dying in childbirth in the UK found that ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome (OHSS) – the negative effects of drugs used to over-stimulate the ovaries to produce more eggs for harvesting – is now one of the biggest causes of maternal mortality in England and Wales.
Having to put your eggs on ice and actively planning for your inevitable IVF treatment is just another thing to add to the "you're never going to win" list that comes with being a woman. You either have kids too early, or too late. You have a career which makes your ovaries shrivel up and drop off, or economically hamper yourself by spawning and working and therefore being blamed for everything that is wrong with society. Being in my early 30s means that people are already setting their watches to the tick of my biological clock – but now I find out that I should have harvested myself a decade ago, even if Lockwood herself does point to some of the drawbacks of such an approach of pre-pregnancy planning – that women will alter their life choices around it and that it may change demographics, with older grandparents not being able to see their grandchildren grow up.
I'm worried about the terrifying dystopian futures that this will create (or utopian, if you're a fan of Shulamith Firestone, who thought that cybernetics could emancipate women from the oppression of their own biology through creating artificial wombs). It will be a future where we will steadily develop a "harvest season" for our eggs and sperm, but won't stop there either: we'll start removing bits of ourselves for use at a later date. What about saving our hair for re-implantation in later life, or save one of our kidneys in case we need it?
And back to my original question: exactly when do you tell the love of your life that you've got some ice babies in the fridge? Will lab tests and screenings happen before the second date? Maybe I've watched too much sci-fi. Maybe Firestone's ideas need to be taken less literally and more in terms of what they reveal about how society arranges itself around women's fertility. Either way, dads should just give their daughters the cash – that's what they really want.
http://www.theguardian.com/
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