Why Women Freeze Their Eggs
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For her new book Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs, Yale University professor Marcia C. Inhorn talked to more than 150 women who had pursued egg freezing. I chatted with Inhorn this week about what popular culture gets right and wrong about women freezing their eggs. Below is a portion of our conversation, edited for clarity and length.
Reason: When did egg freezing start being considered an effective technology?
Inhorn: It took until the first decade of this century for research scientists to successfully freeze human eggs. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine on October 19, 2012, issued a statement saying that egg freezing could be moved from the experimental category to the category of clinical use in American medicine. So, it’s been available in America since late 2012 and has taken off ever since then.
There’s this prevailing assumption that women who freeze their eggs do so because they want to continue climbing the career ladder before having kids. What did you find in your research about this?
That was basically my hypothesis. And there is still an assumption that women are doing this as selfish, ambitious career women. But that is so not what I found in my study. It ended up being very much about what I call “the mating gap.” Basically, women freezing their eggs tend already to be educated, successful professional women who…want partnership, pregnancy, parenthood. They want to be moms, with partners, but they’re lacking what I call the three Es: eligible, educated, and equal male partners.
It’s really about gender disparities. They cannot find men who are willing to partner with them and have children. Underlying that is a big demographic disparity now growing in our country, and in many countries around the world. Women are just getting more educated than men. Right now, in the critical reproductive years for women—from their early 20s to their late 30s—there are millions more women with a four-year college or university education than men.
What are some other common tropes or stereotypes about egg freezing that didn’t match what you found in your research?
The big problem with egg freezing [is] it’s just economically not accessible for so many people. It’s about $15,000 to
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