Maternal Desire by Daphne de Marneffe

Author:Daphne de Marneffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Egg Freezing as Liberation

Given all the emotional, medical, and economic benefits of bearing children neither very early nor very late, it seems we should be stumbling over ourselves trying to rearrange society, rather than women’s reproductive biology, to accommodate those timetables. But in this domain of central, passionate import, we are caught in a web of pressures and taboos that move us toward certain solutions and away from others.

In careers, powerful incentives exist to try to work within, rather than oppose, the status quo, even though the status quo tends to disadvantage women reproductively and economically. It is accordingly not hard to envision a world where, in the presence of inflexible work structures and aggressively marketed fertility treatments, we accept fertility interventions as more and more of a norm. Already, fertility technology is coming to be viewed not as a last resort but as an “opportunity” to postpone childbearing into one’s forties. Grimmest of all—shades of the futuristic movie Gattaca—by degrees we’re finding that assisted reproduction is acquiring a sheen as the newer and better “option,” glimmery in its vague association with celebrities and cutting-edge technologies, pointing somehow in the right direction because it’s about “freedom” and “choices.” Yet all the while, we are finding ourselves increasingly unable to analyze the constraining set of assumptions that got us into this way of thinking.

The normalization of these phenomena can be discerned in the way some critics recast the pain, unpredictability, and risk of fertility treatment as women’s ultimate opportunity. Over twenty years ago, the law professor Jane Cohen, who became a mother of IVF twins at age fifty, envisioned a “vanguard feminism” and the “dawn of a new consciousness” when eggs can be “frozen and put on the shelf.” That day has arrived, with companies such as Google, Apple, and Facebook paying for their employees’ egg-harvesting and freezing procedures. Despite the only 2 to 12 percent chance that a frozen egg will ultimately result in a birth, egg-freezing businesses such as Extend aggressively market their services by warning that “eggs are a nonrenewable resource,” and some clinics offer “let’s chill” egg-freezing parties, complete with champagne.

Behind the egg-freezing industry’s pretensions toward empowerment (“free your career,” “preserve your options”) lies another, more complicated story. The consumer advocate Judith Steinberg Turiel asks, “If the choice were up to them, how would women and their partners prefer to experience childbearing?” If they have the option, people prefer the lowest-tech method possible, preferably through having sex, preferably with someone they love. Research suggests that most women freeze their eggs not to prioritize their careers, but rather because they have not yet found a partner or don’t have a stable relationship. These goals are not always easy to achieve, but achieving them depends more on self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-compassion than the illusory hypercontrol that egg-freezing companies purport to sell.

Whatever the commercial motives of the fertility industry, ART is of extraordinary value to prospective parents who cannot or do not want to conceive babies in other ways—among them

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.