At 46, my classmate was reasonably certain that she could not hope for a baby any longer. But a routine visit to her gynaecologist turned out to be an offer of hope in the shape of an egg donor and cryopreservation technology. Today, not only does she have a beautiful son, she also has a fertilized embryo in cold storage for a second baby in a year or two. It all sounds a bit like a zany sci-fi movie, but the technology is real, and so is my classmate’s complete bliss.
Cryopreservation is the same technology that today allows women in the most fertile stage of their life to extract and freeze their eggs for use at a later time. Also known as vitrification, it offers a viable (although still nascent) option to women who want to delay their pregnancy. Understandably, anything that involves test tubes, labs and liquid nitrogen makes most of us a bit squeamish and we start contemplating Frankensteinian scenarios but science, to paraphrase Omar Khayyam, invents and moves on. And once in-vitro fertilisation became an option some decades ago, the next step — and the next — became equally inevitable.
Late motherhood, surrogate motherhood, or motherhood with donor sperm and eggs… none of this was considered possible till even a couple of decades ago. Today, they all are. So, it’s a bit difficult to understand the controversy that has greeted tech giants Apple and Facebook’s recent announcement that they would foot the $20,000 or so bill for any female employee who wants to freeze her eggs. It’s a darned generous offer, especially when seen from India where even day-care allowances are hard to come by for working women.
The companies hope the move will prevent women from dropping out mid-career in order to raise families, but moral opponents say it interferes with the natural order of things. That’s a slippery slope. Do we approve of vitrification when it’s a solution for infertility but disapprove when it’s a lifestyle choice? At what point do we decide it has stopped being medicine and has become playing God? Catholic commentator Helen Alvare criticised the act of creating children “in a lab and not in an act of love”, but these are the same lobbies that also consider IVF, contraception and abortion immoral and unnatural; when the latter two are arguably the most empowering breakthroughs for women in the last century.
A woman’s fertility begins to taper off from the mid-30s, putting her under pressure to start a family before the biological clock stops ticking. Ironically, the 30s and 40s are also the peak periods for career building, when the big promotions and plum assignments are landed. Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In says that 43 per cent of highly qualified women leave their jobs to raise children — and not enough can on-ramp again successfully; one of the biggest reasons there aren’t more women at the top.
Having children later in life could solve this issue, but does promoting vitrification mean we are encouraging the insecurities of a generation of women being pushed to think they must ‘have it all’? I don’t think so. Already, men and women postpone marriage and children for other reasons, most notably to finish the business of ‘living’ — the backpacking, the dream promotion, sowing the wild sex oats — before they settle down to a more predictable rhythm. If late parenthood is acceptable for these reasons, we can hardly cavil if science pushes the boundary further, as long as the women are aware that the process is neither easy nor foolproof.
How relevant is this to India? Well, I for one don’t see our companies suddenly racing to pay for egg freezing, especially when plain vanilla welfare measures are still low on their priority lists. But such debates help put the spotlight back on all the other measures that employers must make mandatory in our country — the real solutions — such as flexitime, on-site crèches, lactating and nap rooms, paternity leave and sabbaticals. Facebook, for one, also pays for surrogacy and adoption, subsidises day-care costs and gives a €3,000 grant to new parents.
The bottom line is to give women the power to choose. There are women who want to follow their biological rhythm and be mothers before 30. There are others who are not excited by motherhood but by a directorship before 40. Then there are those like the 36-year-old British woman who has written about postponing pregnancy after a distressing break-up with her boyfriend. She has instead spent £14,000 to freeze her eggs because she is afraid that the right man might come too late or never. Either way, she wants a shot at a baby when she is ready.
That’s a hugely liberating alternative, and if science can allow women to take it safely and if companies are happy to pick up the tab, why all the fuss?
