These are rather interesting times but it is something that career oriented women consider – my career or a family. Women who have focused on their careers have woken up too late to find out that they cannot have children any more. According to specialist’s reports, a woman’s fertility begins to fall in her early to mid thirties. This gradual change in fertility is mostly due to a decrease in the number and quality of eggs in your ovaries. The loss of eggs begins even before you are born. An unborn female has 6 to 7 million eggs; at birth she has 1 to 2 million; by menopause, only a few hundred remain.
Extremetech gives a rather concise description of Egg freezing. Also known as or oocyte cryopreservation, it is a procedure that allows a woman to put aside some of her limited supply of eggs. The process generally involves hormone injections to stimulate the ovaries to produce multiple eggs, and then harvesting and cryonic freezing of those eggs. Like cryopreserved sperm, the eggs can be kept for a long time. Eventually, if the woman decides to use her eggs to get pregnant, they are fertilized in a test tube and implanted into the womb (IVF).
Well, two Silicon Valley giants – Apple and Facebook – now offer women a game-changing perk; they claim they will pay for employees to freeze their eggs. Spokespeople for the companies told NBC News that Facebook recently began covering egg freezing, and Apple will start in January, 2015. “Having a high-powered career and children is still a very hard thing to do,” said Brigitte Adams, an egg-freezing advocate and founder of the patient forum Eggsurance.com. By offering this benefit, companies are investing in women, she said, and supporting them in carving out the lives they want.
NBC reports that “When successful, egg freezing allows women to put their fertility on ice, so to speak, until they’re ready to become parents. But the procedure comes at a steep price: Costs typically add up to at least $10,000 for every round, plus $500 or more annually for storage. ”
Will this give comfort to those who decide to pursue their careers in favour of starting a family?
Shane Ferro of Business Insider thinks that paying for egg freezing is great news for women. She says this is a move that removes a major financial barrier to women being able to control their reproductive timelines, at a time in their careers when even the most well-off might not have an extra $20,000 laying around. However she also states that “practically, this isn’t about changing the system. It’s about making it easier for ambitious women to exist in the world we have. And we should applaud the companies that give women this choice.
Image Credits: Telegraph.co.uk
