When Is The Right Time To Freeze Your Eggs?
The number of women opting to freeze their eggs is ever rising. Journalist and author Gina Rushton uncovers why
A woman sent an innocuous tweet from the frustration and isolation of the pandemic lockdown. “As a 35-year-old single woman who would like to have a family one day, these months dictate whether or not that can happen for me,” the July 2021 post lamented to the online world.
The fury came fast. People accused her of wasting 34 years before the pandemic. They told her to “stop whining” and freeze her eggs. One man replied with a story about his father in World War II, and another with a picture of Anne Frank to offer her “perspective”. There was little consideration for her possible medical situation, finances or relationship history and even less recognition of the fact that she might not have known for three decades whether she wanted to be a parent. Though we are led to believe the desire for children appears unbidden and then unwavering, for many people, the question comes way before they know the answer.
It’s an answer that can’t come from being locked up at home alone for weeks on end. It comes from the excitement of travelling the world and dancing in nightclubs as a child-free person; it comes from visiting friends and family and chasing their kids, whom you love; it comes from reclining on your best friend’s bed, admitting your hopes and fears. It comes from all the places we haven’t been allowed in recently, including IVF clinics, which have been variously open and closed depending on health orders. The vulgarity and vitriol this woman faced on Twitter was tempered by another group: hundreds of people just like her. (Fertility providers already knew this cohort existed – many clinics reported the rate of egg freezing increased during the pandemic, particularly among women aged 35 to 39.) The group responded, describing anger and fear: their hopes of starting a family were fading away with each passing lockdown week; their fertility was declining as the virus continued to spread and the vaccine rollout stalled.
One person I spoke to, who I will call Alice to preserve her privacy, didn’t decide to freeze her eggs during the pandemic because she had suddenly become aware of her ovarian reserve (though targeted fertility advertising had begun overtaking her social media feed). “There has always been a clock,” the 35-year-old says. “The cultural messaging around women ageing is just endless, and we are told time is running out when we are 20.” Looking into a woman’s relationship history, the notion that she is a soon-to-be-infertile time waster quickly diminishes. Even if she has always wanted to be a mother, the decision isn’t always within her control: there might have been the boyfriend who changed his mind; the non-committal one; the one who wanted to adopt but hadn’t thought about the logistics.
“I’ve had a few near misses with boyfriends in the past who weren’t good for me,” Alice says. “The reality of life with a child with that person would have been the end of who I was financially, creatively and emotionally,” she recounts.
Though the pre-treatment psychologist warned her the procedure wasn’t a “guarantee”, when Alice froze her eggs last year, she felt as though she was “evening the playing field”. She was buying herself the one thing people without a uterus have over her: longer to choose. “I feel like it has shifted my whole sense of self,” she says. “My desire for kids now won’t be panic-based.”
Jane, another woman who confided in me, was living alone, trying to date in a pandemic and asking herself, ‘What do I want from my life? If I’m constrained to a five-kilometre radius, what can I do to make it better?’ The pride she has in her relationships and her career hasn’t inoculated her against the cultural narrative she has been exposed to since she was a child. “There’s that social conditioning telling you to find a boyfriend, get engaged, throw an engagement party, throw a wedding, buy a house, have a baby, have another baby,” she says. While she still oscillates about whether she wants to be a mother, she has decided to freeze her eggs. “[Some days], I will be so certain I want children, and then other days I’m worried about climate change, the pandemic, the insane cost of housing and the fact that I haven’t met someone amazing,” she admits.
She hadn’t been wasting time. In fact, the choice to delay her decision was an opportunity to take a step back from the question for a moment. “I’ve thought so deeply about it that I felt like I needed to take a break from contemplating it,” she says. “It is literally the one choice you can’t take back… It is a lifelong decision.”
I, personally, was laid off from my job on my 28th birthday as the pandemic began to escalate. An endometriosis diagnosis and warning of how it might affect my fertility had turned a sand timer inside of me, challenging the certainty of my decision not to have children. I did not have loud enough answers for the questions I had barely whispered. I tried to give myself what I needed, what Alice and Jane and the thousands of other people who rushed to freeze their eggs were trying to buy for themselves, what my body would never give back, what the endometrial tissue stitching it’s way beyond my uterus could cost me, what the pandemic had was already stealing: time.
So I began the process of writing my book, The Most Important Job in the World. I investigated and interviewed. I read, reflected and wrote, giving myself a deadline more specific than my body had: nine months.
None of the people I spoke to were wasting time. Instead, I found they were trying to answer the same questions I was. How do we imagine a future without being overpowered by despair or manipulated by hope? How do we let ourselves want something for the future in the middle of a pandemic that’s unfolding alongside a climate crisis? What do we owe to our children who will fall heir to a planet different to the one we grew up in? How do we test assumptions and expectations about love and labour? How do we find symmetry in care and in communication that feels sustainable enough to hold a third human?
These decisions look different than they did for our parents, many of whom grew their families when houses cost far less, there wasn’t a widespread fear of a climate apocalypse, when fertility was rarely assisted and when gender roles were more rigid.
Parenthood hasn’t always been a choice – expectations and obligations have been mercifully trampled with time – but the environment in which we decide can feel pressurised, coercive and confusing. Taking seriously when and with whom we want children, if at all, isn’t time wasted, it is just time spent.
The Most Important Job in the World, by Gina Rushton is out now.
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.