Without Children by Peggy O'Donnell Heffington

Author:Peggy O'Donnell Heffington [O’Donnell, Peggy Heffington]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2023-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

BECAUSE WE CAN’T

In April 2014, a woman named Brigitte Adams appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek. Her blond, shoulder-length hair was parted neatly on the side, and her long-sleeved black sheath dress and sensible-but-designer heels unmistakably labeled her a businesswoman, and probably a good one. Adams went to Vassar College, an elite institution in New York’s Hudson Valley. She spoke Italian fluently. She had more than a decade of experience in marketing for high-profile technology companies. And she’d spent $19,000 out of pocket to freeze her eggs. “Freeze Your Eggs, Free Your Career,” read the headline on the magazine’s cover. “A new fertility procedure gives women more choices in the quest to have it all.” In addition to Adams, the article featured a Manhattan doctor, a Los Angeles lawyer, a Wall Street investment banker, and an author, all of them frustrated about having to worry about fertility on top of their demanding jobs. “I just wanted to take the pressure off,” said Suzanne LaJoie, the doctor. “Men don’t have a biological clock, and I felt like it leveled the playing field a bit.” Emily, the investment banker, told Bloomberg that she had spent “more than a car but less than a house” to freeze her eggs, and that she found the experience “empowering.” Her mom was less impressed. “She told me,” Emily said, “only half-jokingly, ‘I’m glad you went to business school and work 100 hours a week—and don’t have time to meet anyone—so you can afford to freeze your eggs.’ Thanks, Mom.” But for the members of the “egg freezing generation,” as the Bloomberg writer calls them, the cost-benefit analysis made sense. “By freezing [your eggs],” one of the women featured in the article said, “you’re walking taller; your head is held higher. And that can pay off both in your work and your romantic lives.”

Adams made the decision to freeze her eggs after getting a divorce in her late thirties. Turning thirty-nine was “desperation level,” she remembered: it felt like now or never to do something about having kids. Egg freezing, she thought, would buy her valuable time. Adams remembered later that the procedure gave her a wonderful sense of freedom: suddenly unchained from the biological clock, she could focus on her career for a few more years, find the right guy to marry, and still end up with the big family she’d always wanted. “It’s not a sure thing,” Adams acknowledged, “but it’s a gamble I’m willing to take.”1 As one journalist put it later, Adams’s cover photo on Bloomberg made her “the poster child for freezing your eggs.”2

When it emerged in the late 1970s, in vitro fertilization, IVF for short, was nothing short of a revolution for women struggling with infertility. In vitro is Latin for “in glass,” a reference to the still kind of mind-boggling fact that scientists have figured out how to make conception take place in a glass petri dish on a laboratory table. Before the first IVF baby was born in the United Kingdom in 1978, every human ever born was conceived in vivo, in a living human body.

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