Egg-Freezing On The Company Dime, Ctd

Last week, we covered announcements from Facebook and Apple about covering the cost of female employees freezing their eggs. Megan McArdle raises an unaddressed concern:

What I haven’t seen anyone explain is when, exactly, you’ll be ready. For most people, your 40s and early 50s are your peak earning years — is that really going to be a good time to meet that special someone, or finally step back to invest some time in having kids? I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m already noticing that I have a lot less energy than I used to. It’s not that I can’t get my work done or anything like that. But it used to be that if I had to travel for six days straight and then deliver a 2,500-word essay on the 7th, I could dial up my reserves and power through it — miserable and cranky, to be sure, but functioning. Then one day, around the time I turned 40, I dialed down for more power and there just … wasn’t any. My body informed me that it was tired, and my brain would not be doing any more work today, and we were going to sleep whether I liked it or not.

Along similar lines, Rebecca Mead reflects:

[E]ven with this tantalizing suggestion of reproductive liberty, it’s hard to figure out exactly how long to postpone. A woman might skip having children in her twenties or thirties in order to focus on her career, only to discover by her forties that its demands—not to mention the encroachment of middle age—make motherhood even less manageable than it appeared at twenty-five or thirty.

And it seems overly optimistic to hope that, with nature’s deadlines subverted, a woman’s decision about whether or when to bear children might become an entirely autonomous choice—hers alone to make, independent of cultural and professional pressures as well as biological ones. Might Apple and Facebook’s offers of egg freezing be, in fact, the kind of employee benefit whose principal beneficiary is the company? What if, rather than being a means of empowerment—whereby a young woman is no longer subject to anything so quaintly analog as the ticking of a biological clock—freezing one’s eggs is understood as a surrender to the larger, more invisibly pervasive force of corporate control?

But Chavi Eve Karkowsky stands up for egg-freezing. She insists that it allows women to wait “until they can find a way to have the family they really want, with the partner they really want”:

When asked about delayed child-bearing in many studies, the two factors that come up again and again are financial stability and the availability of an appropriate partner. We really like to talk about that first factor, and tie reproductive lateness to hard-charging women who have their own career-centered, family-unfriendly priorities. But for a moment, let’s talk about that second factor: the appropriate partner. This is the one that I think creates the egg-freezing push. At some point, while dating, and waiting, and having hearts broken (or yes, breaking hearts), many women want to start working with what they have, and not waiting for the right XY chromosome carrier to come around. They want him to come around, they believe he’ll come around, but they don’t want to lose their chance at healthy, genetically related children while they wait for the father of those children.

Katie Benner also defends the corporations:

I know what informs some of the worries that got around after the Apple announcement: Big, technocratic companies might be using these perks to suck the best working years out of their female employees. Evil vampire geniuses at corporate HR ply us with fertility and adoption coverage, thus securing greater access to our young, alert minds.

What happens next? We become 40-something husks (because lord knows, women teeter on the verge of uselessness in every conceivable way at 40) and then and only then do our corporate masters allow us to finally procreate. As our weary 50-something bodies drag toddlers and teenagers from day care to soccer practice, somewhere a corporate overlord will smile with glee: “We got their best years. They never knew what hit ‘em. Heh, heh, heh.”

But you know what? That’s not what I think is happening here. For starters, it’s an insane scenario. And it’s also ageist and sexist.