Putting your family in suspended animation

[astra_nomer]

Here's a radical idea: freeze your eggs so you can have your career now, and family later.

I can see why this could be appealing for a competitive career like science, where you're expected to work like a dog until you get tenure. At the same time, is it really healthy for a mother to undergo pregnancy and labor in her 50s? or even 60s? Besides, if you're a downtrodden postdoc, you're unlikely to have the money to extract and freeze your eggs anyway.

Is it really so hard to balance family and career that you have to resort to such extreme measures? Possibly. But it shouldn't be that way.

Comments

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

I realize that the extreme case is 50's and 60's, but I think it's valuable in general.

I think it's a clever technology for women who plan on getting pregnant in their thirties. Freeze some eggs just after college when you know they're still fresh.

There are a lot of reasons besides career to know that you want kids, but that five years from now is better than now. (Medical issues, relationship problems, dealing with ailing relatives.) The insurance policy of knowing that if something happens to your body you've banked some eggs for later makes good sense to me.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

Considering how expensive it is, it seems unlikely to be a viable option for most women right out of college. And it seems unfair for the woman to be bearing the brunt of the expense. Yes, I know women bear the brunt of the burden for childbearing in general, but this only seems to add to the burden, rather than lightening it.

[veryhappykayla.livejournal.com]

Even aside from issues of mother's health... If a parent (female or male) has a kid at 55, she or he will probably be using a wheelchair at college graduation and have died before grandchildren ever appear. It doesn't seem so great for the kids, knowing they'll be orphaned before they're 30, and possibly having to support (financially/logistically/emotionally) an elderly parent in their 20s.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

You know, that's very much a part of the reason I decided to have kids as a grad student rather than waiting until I got tenure.

[arcanology.livejournal.com]

There's clearly some sort of clever exchange program you could do where you take a year off before school to have a kid, put them into the pool, and that entitles you to get a fresh kid from the pool when you're ready for one.

Maybe the world isn't ready.

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

Hee!

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

You know, I was just telling my third-years today about the Roman take-a-baby, leave-a-baby system.

It wasn't really called that, though.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

I don't know, arcanology... then I'd run the risk of ending up with, say, YOUR kid, and I fear what your progeny might turn out like.

[arcanology.livejournal.com]

You should be so lucky. :P

Elective surgery

[(Anonymous)]

It's an expensive surgery that one is having for no particular reason. (except in the case that one is about to have some medical treatment that will render it necessary) So this is a very expensive surgery involving drugs that will do strange things to your body, done just in case in fifteen years your eggs aren't any good. And you have to pay storage fees for the eggs, and will later have to pay for fertilization and implantation.

And this next to the fact that I'm already feeling too old for pregnancy and childrearing and I'm well under forty, much less in my sixties.

An interesting idea, but I think it doesn't quite make sense for most people.

-Erin

Re: Elective surgery

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

I agree -- you have to be pretty wealthy and pretty desperate to get this done. Considering that there seems to be a market for it, that tells me that there's something wrong about our culture.