The news on Tuesday that Facebook (FB) and Apple (AAPL) will cover egg freezing for female employees has already received the requisite hashing and rehashing online. It has been alternately praised as forward-thinking empowerment and condemned for the implication that it will pressure young women to soldier on through their childbearing years. (You can have kids when you die. Promise.)
The two companies are offering up to $20,000—or the cost of two rounds of egg freezing, the casual term for oocyte cryopreservation—as part of already extensive benefits packages that include coverage for fertility procedures such as surrogacy and in vitro fertilization. Egg freezing isn’t covered by insurance, so this new perk could potentially save staff members tens of thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket expenses—no small thing. Yet based on reporting I did for a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story in April, the policy is likely to be remembered better as PR than as a boon to female employees. The idea that this coverage will entice women to casually freeze their eggs and get on with their 60-hour weeks is ludicrous.
For our cover story, I spoke to dozens of women in their early to late 30s who had frozen eggs and to a few whose unfrozen eggs had resulted in successful pregnancies. This is a relatively invasive procedure that has a success rate of only 20 percent—and that’s if you’re able to freeze enough viable eggs, which many women can’t do.
Most egg-freezing clinics require women to begin with a counseling session. Patients then take a course of almost two weeks of fertility drugs to prepare for the procedure; this makes them severely bloated, moody, and uncomfortable—like PMS times 1,000. And while the procedure is relatively painless, it often results in the heartbreak of learning that it didn’t work.
Given a choice, every woman I spoke to would prefer to have had children earlier and naturally. The hindrance in most cases was their not having found the right partner at the right time. Sure, most were working hard in their careers; this was part of why, they felt, they hadn’t settled down.
Not one of the women I interviewed took egg-freezing lightly. They didn’t want to have to do it. While it’s nice to have the option, I doubt that droves of young women in Silicon Valley will be lining up to collect that money.
