"Women are now using technology to try to make themselves seem as much like man as possible..."

"...so that they can have their children later after they have laid the groundwork for their career. It is absolutely true [that egg-freezing as a job benefit] is giving women options and it’s making it economically feasible. And it’s probably the most realistic thing for some women. But it is a shame that we haven’t started a better conversation, not only about the fixes like the day care that was just mentioned, but a deeper conversation about how to reorganize the work world, so you don’t need to be a superwoman at work and a superwoman at home at the same time. That’s never been realistic. And I think the egg freezing is a somewhat extreme response to it."

Said my law school colleague Alta Charo on PBS "Newshour" last night.

"What I find most disturbing is the implicit assumption in this article that women should have children."

"Even though the article is against egg freezing as a general practice, it makes no mention of the societal demand that women have children in the first place. Maybe if these women who decide to have children at 45 felt comfortable with their own desire to NOT have children, the practice would slowly become less popular."

A popular comment at a NYT op-ed titled "Don’t Depend on Those Frozen Eggs."

The "practice" that the commenter would like to see "slowly become less popular" is egg freezing, not — as one could easily misread — having children.

But the misreading is interesting, because the truth slips out. People tend to do what they want to do, and I think that egg-freezing, though promoted as a way to prolong life's window of fertility, is secretly a way to fulfill the desire not to have children at all, as the woman buys ease in the passage of time.

The longer she goes without finding a place in her life for a child, the clearer the picture becomes. She really doesn't want that child. And with that clarity, she finally sees her true and free choice, and she has been spared the old-fashioned anguish of the years of hearing the "ticking biological clock" that had, in the past, pressured women into having a baby as a bulwark against the regret that crystallizes after age wreaks infertility.

"Egg Freezing as a Work Benefit? Some Women See Darker Message."

Great headline for a column at the NYT by Claire Cain Miller. I hadn't quite yet gotten around to blogging about this new work benefit, which we've just heard is getting under way at Apple and Facebook, and already "some women" have not only detected a "darker message," they've gotten their message out to the general public. "Some women" are always getting the jump on me. I had my perceptions — not dark, but optimistic — and I voiced them, within the confines of this house, and I can't believe that even as I blog so consistently and so earnestly and I'm ever-ready to catch new issues like this and put my opinions instantly right out there on the internet, that "some women" beat me to the punch... if one is allowed to use that expression in this woman-friendly world anymore.

Miller writes:

For women whose circumstances have made it unrealistic to have a baby and who are considering egg freezing, the new benefit is likely to be a highly welcome surprise — even if in some sense it may seem a logical extension of employee-sponsored health plans that already cover pregnancy, childbirth and some infertility treatments.

Yet workplaces could be seen as paying women to put off childbearing. 

Isn't that what the required coverage of birth control also does? Or is the coverage of birth control not really an incentive to put off childbearing, but a trick to ease women unwittingly into a life of childlessness? I hadn't thought so. And if women need to use the young part of their lives to get educated and to advance their careers without sidetracks and distractions, then egg-freezing is exactly the benefit that supports workplace equality.

Women who choose to have babies earlier could be stigmatized as uncommitted to their careers.  Just as tech company benefits like free food and dry cleaning serve to keep employees at the office longer, so could egg freezing, by delaying maternity leave and child-care responsibilities.

But this stigma is already there to the extent that it is, and birth control (not to mention abortion) empowers women to show their commitment to their career by putting off pregnancy. At least the egg-freezing preserves the woman's option to undertake maternity when it finally (if ever) suits her idea of how she wants to live, just like a man. (Cue readers to their favorite sidetrack: Men don't get to choose paternity on their own terms. Here's a clue: Get a vasectomy. Freeze some sperm first.)

Egg freezing is a two-week process involving hormone injections and extraction under sedation, and it takes another two weeks to feel back to normal.... A cycle usually costs $10,000 to $15,000, and many women are encouraged to do more than one cycle to harvest more eggs. Storage costs about $500 a year. Insurance very rarely covers it....

If only you were allowed to sell these eggs, as men can sell their sperm. It's a much bigger deal to extract female genetic material, and there's a big expense that's not there for the men at all. Those costs could be defrayed by allowing sales of some of the extracted eggs. The column goes on to complain about the "class and race divides in egg freezing," because you know "the kind of people who work at Facebook and Apple." This sounds like a set-up for Senate hearings on how egg-extraction, freezing, and storage ought to be included in Obamacare cost-free, like birth control, more spoils for the victors in the war on women.

So maybe conservatives need to get the jump on the Obamacarers and propose a free market in human eggs. With same-sex marriage on the upswing, this should be a seller's market. Everybody wins, no?

About that 38-year-old woman extracting egg-freezing money as her husband disentangles himself from the marriage that didn't get her pregnant.

Robert Stacy McCain took issue with my use of the phrase "best fertility years":

Professor Althouse, “the best fertility years of a woman’s life,” from a strictly scientific view, are ages 18-24. After age 27, fertility begins to decline and, in your 30s, that decline accelerates. So by the time Lieberman’s client married at 30, she was past her prime.

I responded:

So, I should have said her last good fertility years. When a woman marries at age 30, she's right if she thinks she's comfortably on track for childbearing. But if she turns out to have difficulty getting pregnant, as this woman did, what seemed like plenty of time can turn into an anxious struggle. I don't know what led to this particular divorce, but needing fertility treatments and enduring them without success must create pressure that some people don't handle very well. There's something very sad about a woman's desire to continue her struggle by extracting support from the husband who failed to make her pregnant. I recommend handling divorce with grace and realism, but a lot of economic advantage-taking can ensue, and you rarely know the whole story of who did what to whom and why a stepped-up legal attack seemed like a good idea. This is, above all, a failed relationship, and you can never see the ground level of that failure.

A divorcing woman seeks "$20,000 to cover her egg-freezing procedure, medication costs and several years of egg storage."

She put the last 8 years into a marriage, within which she expected to have babies and did not. Now, she's 38, and her window of fertility is almost closed.

Actually, in this particular case, the couple had used in vitro fertilization to attempt pregnancy, so there's some of this argument that she should be maintained in the style she'd become accustomed to. It's not just a matter of a man taking up the best fertility years of a woman's life and somehow owing her the nearest thing to giving back her youth.

ADDED: Robert Stacy McCain takes issue with my use of the phrase "best fertility years":

Professor Althouse, “the best fertility years of a woman’s life,” from a strictly scientific view, are ages 18-24. After age 27, fertility begins to decline and, in your 30s, that decline accelerates. So by the time Lieberman’s client married at 30, she was past her prime.

So, I should have said her last good fertility years. When a woman marries at age 30, she's right if she thinks she's comfortably on track for childbearing. But if she turns out to have difficulty getting pregnant, as this woman did, what seemed like plenty of time can turn into an anxious struggle. I don't know what led to this particular divorce, but needing fertility treatments and enduring them without success must create pressure that some people don't handle very well. There's something very sad about a woman's desire to continue her struggle by extracting support from the husband who failed to make her pregnant. I recommend handling divorce with grace and realism, but a lot of economic advantage-taking can ensue, and you rarely know the whole story of who did what to whom and why a stepped-up legal attack seemed like a good idea. This is, above all, a failed relationship, and you can never see the ground level of that failure.