Is Egg Freezing Really a Company Perk?

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Last year, a friend of mine decided to freeze her eggs. She was 34, she wasn’t in a relationship, she knew she wanted to have kids one day, but she wanted to wait until she was married to do so. “Freezing my eggs was an insurance policy to increase the odds of having a family at a later date,” she says. “It made me feel like I was doing something to help level my life’s circumstances.” The procedure, which could have run her up to $10,000, was instead $2,000, because it was almost entirely covered by her employer, a private university. “The fact that my insurance covered my egg freezing, to me, makes the school a better place to work.”

On Tuesday, Apple told NBC News that it will begin covering egg freezing for its employees. Facebook has the same benefit, one of a number of family-friendly perks that tech companies are increasingly offering their employees, like adoption benefits and fertility treatment coverage (Apple and Facebook offer both). But the announcement has sparked a debate regarding women and the workplace: Is the egg-freezing benefit a way to support female employees’ life choices? Or is this the company’s way of saying, “work now, procreate later”?

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“Anything that gives women more choice is a good thing,” Dr. Karen Rosene Montella, Director of Obstetric Medicine at Brown University’s Alpert School of Medicine, tells Yahoo Parenting. “But if women feel like it’s linked to coercion, not choice, that’s not okay. Will people be judged for wanting to start a family at 28? If they’re passed up for a promotion for that reason, that’s a problem. But one doesn’t necessarily mean the other.”

Kristin Maschka, author of “This Is Not How I Thought It Would Be: Remodeling Motherhood to Get the Lives We Want Today,” isn’t so sure. “Add freezing eggs to the long list of absurd extremes companies will go to … to avoid having to question the flawed assumption that it is reasonable and human to expect that each and every person will work 50 hours a week, 50-plus weeks a year, for 50 years of his or her life,” she writes on RoleReboot.org. “Individually these types of services probably provide real benefit to some employees, but in aggregate the message is that as a company — and a society — we will do whatever it takes so we don’t have to change how we define the ‘ideal worker.’”

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Another friend of mine, who works in Silicon Valley and doesn’t have kids, often tells me about the next big thing — paying for house-cleaning and dry cleaning, providing wifi on a free shuttle to and from work — in what NBC news describes as a “perks arms race.” So does she find these services freeing, or are they just another subtle mandate to work, work, work? “I can see how people think it sends the signal that you should postpone family to continue slaving away at your job, but at the end of the day, that’s the signal anyway in Silicon Valley culture,” she says. “It’s a gift to be able to make the decision that’s best for you and your family, without the stress of ‘how will I pay for it?’” The focus of the egg-freezing news, she points out, has been on women who are ready to have kids right now. “But what if she hasn’t found the right partner yet? Or the best living conditions? Or has health issues? This is especially great for someone who isn’t ready yet but wants options when she is.”

My friend Sara is one of those women, and admits she was jealous when she heard about Apple’s new perk. “If I worked at Apple I would do it in a second,” she says. “As someone who is unmarried, with a demanding job, and not sure when I want to have children, it would be amazing to be somewhat untethered from my biological clock.”

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But Dr. Rosene Montella points out that freezing your eggs doesn’t unequivocally mean you can ignore biology. “There are things other than your eggs that age,” she says. “Egg freezing may change whether or not you have fertile eggs available, but whether you’re able to use those eggs effectively depends on a number of factors.”

As for helping parents have families, one of the biggest sticking points for critics of the egg-freezing benefit is that it’s not a permanent solution for the difficulty of balancing work and career. When I mentioned the issue on Facebook, a father I know noted that maybe what companies across the board should be focusing on is supporting parents whenever they decide to have kids.

“Up to $20,000 is a hell of a lot cheaper than even one year of maternity or paternity leave,” he wrote, referencing the amount that Apple and Facebook will cover for egg-freezing. But it should be noted that both companies did recently extend their parental leave: Apple’s allows expectant mothers to take four weeks before delivery and 14 weeks after, according to AppleInsider.com. Facebook offers four months paid leave for both parents. Both are pretty generous, by U.S. standards — especially considering that ours is only one of two countries that doesn’t have government-mandated paid maternity leave. (The other is Papua New Guinea.) Yet another Facebook friend posted, “I TOTALLY hear: ‘Women, now you have no excuse, you can work ridiculously hard through your ‘so-called’ childbearing years, because we generously helped you save your eggs.’”

But Rosalind Barnett, a senior scientist at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Center and author of “The New Soft War on Women: How the Myth of Female Ascendance Is Hurting Women, Men—and Our Economy,” says it’s a stretch to look at this policy as anything less than a boon for female workers. “Women are getting more education and working towards careers that take a long time to achieve,” she tells Yahoo Parenting. “The question of when to have a child is a real anxiety, and women end up making compromises. Now that the technology is advanced enough that egg freezing has a high success rate, this benefit is something that makes people better able to focus on their work when they want to. That’s a very positive thing.”