Some bored scrolling on a Sunday afternoon brought this Mamma Mia article to my attention - 'I don’t want her to have the same regrets.' Why I'm paying for my daughter to freeze her eggs. In it, a woman details how she would like to pay for her daughter to freeze her eggs at 25 so that she can keep her options open and focus on her career until she's ready to be a mum at whatever age.
I understand that this is a very first-world millennial women's issue which is why the Metaverse keeps shoving articles like this in my face. I am the right gender, age group and Meta probably knows I just got married. But as with most things on Mamma Mia I couldn't help being kind of disappointed and suspicious of the content I was reading.
Amidst all the angst about gender inequality in its various forms (pay inequity, family violence, workplace harassment, lower lifetime earnings and super, "locker room talk", Trump talking about grabbing pussies, an empty fruit bowl in Julia Gillard's kitchen driving the nation nuts), the mainstream "feminist" and afflicted millennial's response is to double-down on capitalism's dying organising principle - you can "free choice" your way out of anything and it is the Best and the Rightest way to do something.
What does the market think is the millennial woman's solution to having kids and a career? Well, you can freeze your eggs when you're at uni and then you can drive your career for as long as you want and when you think you've done enough, or are tired of that, or have done everything you want for yourself and are ready to take on life's next challenge, you can take your eggs out and be a mum.(1)
By the way, while we're on that (and if this is the paradigm we want to work in) there needs to be more information out there about when is the best time to freeze your eggs. Women tend to start thinking about egg freezing in their late twenties, by which time the age in which their eggs are best is already past (under 25 is the best time).
Egg freezing is regarded as this liberalising technology that will allow a woman to prioritise her career and be a mum whenever she wants, thereby putting her In Control, but firmly stuck in a system whereby having a career and being a parent Must Be Mutually Exclusive Goals and you Cannot Have Both at the Same Time. Egg freezing gives you the misguided notion that you're exercising your agency in a world that was not built to actually support your agency at all. You want to be a mum? Sure go ahead and sacrifice a few years of income, hopefully you have a partner who can support you during those years. You want to drive your career? Sure do that, but don't expect to be competitive if you want to have kids, oh but if you don't want to have kids we'll also judge you forever.
Capitalism was really good at breaking every task into smaller and smaller, separate tasks so that labour could be more specialised. When you have more specialised labour you are generally more productive at one particular task which makes you more profitable. We applied that to market and non-market work as well, so that one person in the household is specialised in market work, and the other is specialised in non-market work. Our current set-up was not made for people who want to do both market and non-market work. There are economic consequences for those people, as well as social judgment.
But it is dismantling the system that will bring better outcomes for all. Egg freezing in your early twenties so that you can build your career until your late thirties will not win greater childcare subsidies, maternity and paternity leave policies, revolutionise how we think about work-life balance, flexible working and working parents etc., rather it will entrench our current system where you can either build your career or have kids, but only one at a time. In effect, a system where Career and Parenting are SEPARATE.
Governments want more people generating income because it lines their tax revenue and increases productivity (though there are issues with how we measure productivity - for a different rant), they also want a decent fertility rate because you don't want the population to die out. YET IS SOCIETY STRUCTURED TO MAKE PEOPLE CHOOSE ONE OR THE OTHER.
When you attach penalties to people who choose to work and parent (both economically and culturally) you are sending a message that society only values you if you do one or the other (not both). I know technically you have a "free choice", practically that is manifestly not the case. In fact nothing in our life is really that free, but this is a rant for another time.(2)
Egg freezing is not a way around this, it is just another way to entrench our system. It will not change the idea that career and parenting are "all or nothing" decisions, which in turn degrades the notion that both parents can share parenting. Our society forces each into a specialised role. However I recognise that egg freezing under 25 is possibly the last resort of a weary citizen of capitalism, merely a victim of the constraints of her society. To be honest, who isn't? But as Audre Lorde says "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house".
Notes:
(1) I have more to say about how being a mum has become a lifestyle choice but - you guessed it - that will be a rant for another day.
(2) This idea, within western democracies, that free choice is always morally right has been incredibly harmful to social unity and our conception of personal and civic responsibilities.
