Two of the world’s most influential companies, Apple and Facebook, plan to introduce an unusual perk to their female employees. Concerned about your declining fertility, while you pursue a career? No matter, because they’ll pay to freeze your eggs until you’re ready to use them.
On the face of it, it’s a brilliant idea. Women have long since bemoaned the impossibility of keeping up with their male counterparts, when starting a family means spending time away from work. At the very time when forging ahead at work is paramount, that pesky biological clock is tick tick ticking away. Work or kids? Kids or work? Now you can have both.
But can you? Because freezing eggs is no guarantee of conception. When your career is safe and you finally decide to defrost those eggs and have them inseminated, there’s a strong likelihood it won’t be successful. Thousands of women under the age of 35 have IVF every week, and out of those using fresh eggs just 32% will result in a live birth. After the age of 35, the figure drops to 27%, and if you’re using frozen eggs, the figure is even lower. Is that a risk you’d want to take? Remember, this might be your last shot at pregnancy.
Egg collection is an invasive procedure. Fertility drugs are used to stimulate the ovaries to produce additional follicles, which contain the eggs. Regular internal scans monitor follicle growth, and at the optimum time the eggs are retrieved under sedation or general anaesthetic. The side-effects are unpleasant: during the egg collection phase of IVF I experienced mood swings, hot flushes, cramps, fatigue and unbearable headaches. As the stimulation drugs kicked in I suffered from Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome – too many follicles growing at once. I had 24 eggs collected but the pain was excruciating.
Discomfort and success rates aside, there’s another reason why I think this new venture from Apple and Facebook is a terrible and ill-advised scheme. For a woman wanting children, and struggling to achieve a work/life balance, this is the ultimate golden handcuff. Indebted to her employer, how long must she work to ‘pay back’ such generosity, before she takes her eggs back and try to conceive? Dare she fall pregnant naturally in the meantime? What message is this sending to millions of young women across the globe? That work should come before family. That it is impossible to have a family and a career. That your fertility is something to gamble with.
Apple and Facebook might feel their innovative employee perk is a step forward in the fight for equality, but in my view it’s a giant step back. I wouldn’t put my eggs in their basket: would you?