Glass Eggs: Megan's Story
Megan, a 36-year-old therapist and executive coach living in New York, decided to freeze her eggs after a break-up at 35. But it wasn’t an easy decision. “This is such an empowering thing, and technology’s amazing,” she says the night before starting treatment. “But the primary feelings are not positive ones. They’re grief and anxiety and fear and shame, and those are really difficult feelings.”
A painting of Sisyphus, fated to eternally push a boulder uphill, hangs on Megan’s living room wall. She refers to it as a metaphor of the endless, evolving expectations on women — egg freezing the latest one. Newly single last year, she was shocked when several men on first dates asked if she’d frozen her eggs. It seems to have become a commodity, she says: “another thing you have to do to stay relevant.”
While egg freezing solves a very real problem for many women — the pressure of their declining fertility — it doesn’t address the underlying issues causing that pressure in the first place. In 2019, the Society for Assisted Reproduction recorded nearly 16,000 egg freezing cycles. Demand jumped again during the pandemic, with an increase of 55% between 2019 and 2021. Globally, similar trends exist from the United Kingdom to Australia. Singapore recently legalized the procedure and Japan’s government now subsidizes the process.
Marcia Inhorn, an anthropology professor at Yale University, embarked on a decade-long study to understand what drives healthy women to freeze their eggs. She expected to hear that it was about fitting their fertility around ambitions and careers. But the results, she says, were “astounding.”
“It was overwhelmingly about relationship issues,” Inhorn explains. “Amazing woman, after amazing woman, all without a partner.” She identified three main categories of people who froze their eggs: those freezing after a breakup or divorce, those still single despite years of dating and those with partners who weren’t ready for kids.
Many people blamed themselves for their situations, but Inhorn was clear that they shouldn’t, citing underlying demographic disparities, such as our changing gender ratios in higher education, as a factor. In 2012, there were only three male graduates in the United States for every four female ones, according to research by the writer Jon Birger. For educated women seeking an equal partner, their dating pool is lopsided.
Another factor may be changing attitudes toward fatherhood. In her recent book, “Motherhood on Ice,” Inhorn notes that it is often not women who want to delay child rearing, but men. American women, she writes, “are waiting to find a man who is ready to have children … we need to understand why many men are now waiting, or opting out of these pathways altogether.”
Of course, there are alternative ways to create a family, but many people who freeze their eggs are holding out hope for a traditional partnership. In this way, Inhorn believes egg freezing is simultaneously a “technology of hope” that buys time and “a technology of despair,” adopted as a last resort.
Read the full story for The Washington Post
