Women can now preserve their eggs on ice till they are ready to bear children at a later age through in vitro fertilization (IVF).
And it’s not just Apple and Facebook who are attempting to correct the imbalance in the IT industry. More than 80 per cent of the workforce in the IT industry in America is male. Other companies are in on the game as well. Citigroup and Morgan Chase offer coverage for preventive freezing, and so does Microsoft.
Google too is planning to take the plunge in 2015. It is a well-documented problem. The age when women can naturally bear children coincides with the years when they have the best opportunities to rise up the corporate ladder.
Putting their fertility on hold gives women control over their careers. The biological facts are incontrovertible.
All women are born with a lifetime’s supply of eggs. By the age of thirty-five, 95 per cent of these eggs are gone. The remaining eggs start to age.
Unlike in India, where marriage in one’s twenties is still very much the norm, in countries like America being single at 35 is not unusual. America today has the most number of single people than it has had at any other point in its history.
Young people now want to spend more time on themselves.
They like to travel, change jobs , even professions, develop their interests outside the profession, before they feel that they are ‘ready’ for marriage. And children.
In Europe, in the last fifty years, the average age when women have their first child has increased from twenty-five to thirty.
In the UK, female university graduates have their first child birth at thirty-five.
The trend is not limited to the west. Affluent, educated women across the world now delay having children to a later age.
Nature
There are obvious worries about ‘playing God’, messing with the ‘order of nature’.
Are companies genuinely interested in offering their employees choice, or is it another way of exercising control over their employee’s lives.
It also forces us to ask the question: how important are jobs? How does one balance personal growth with professional development? Concerns have been raised about the sinister, big brother implications of the move.
At one level, the companies are hinting to their female employees that pregnancy is an obstacle. It gets in the way of their productivity.
Babies should be put on the back-burner. The job comes first. Or does it? Corporations control not just the means of production but also the means of reproduction. But, on the other hand, there’s no denying the incredible freedom that this allows.
After all, there is no pressure on anyone to go down this road. It’s a matter of personal choice. It’s simply yet another option that can be exercised, given the miraculous advances in medical science.
This is possibly the most revolutionary turning point in human sexuality after the invention of the Pill. Coitus now stands definitively divorced from reproduction.
It’s a brave new world. Freezing eggs was initially an option offered to patients undergoing chemotherapy.
IVF was pioneered by British scientists way back in 1977.
Since then, the preservation of fertilized eggs by freezing has been used widely by infertile couples. It’s only recently that it’s become possible to freeze and thaw unfertilized eggs.
Thawed eggs can be fertilized at a later stage by a process called intracytoplasmic sperm injection.
The technique was invented in 1991, and has been used successfully in more than one million cases.
Miracle
This miracle option though doesn’t come without side effects.
It has to be done when one is in one’s early twenties.
Hormonal drugs are administered to induce superovulation.
The process is invasive and painful. Headaches and mood swings are common, as is swelling and tension in the abdominal and ovarian areas.
Several injections are administered over a period of two months which leads to bruising. India, of course, has a long way to go regarding this.
For one, the costs are prohibitive, although in several countries the costs of IVF are covered by health insurance.
There is also a cultural bias towards having children early. Besides, we are still struggling with basic issues in the workplace.
Here, the discourse is about better crèches, and negotiating paternity and maternity leave.
Diabolical
Egg freezing is not as diabolical as it’s made out to be. It’s simply one more benefit that companies can now offer their employees, just like laundry services or free meals. It helps companies retain female talent, and enables women to compete with their male colleagues on an even footing.
