“How Much For a Dozen?”

Not too long ago, I was regularly bombarded with advertisements from egg banks promising upwards of $30,000 for successful egg retrievals. Now that I’m officially over the age of 25, the ads I’m seeing have shifted toward fertility cultivation and hormone tracking rather than egg harvesting to pay off college debt. Clearly, online algorithms now see me as a seeker of fertility solutions rather than a supplier.

I’m no longer a chicken: I’m the customer ordering an omelet.

This shift in my position on the fertility market was reaffirmed during my recent visit to the gynecologist. I asked a few questions about fertility and hormone health, which seemed to puzzle the doctor since I wasn’t currently trying to get pregnant and had no known complications or medical red flags.

She quickly picked up on my interest in having children and confidently recommended, “You should consider freezing at least 20 eggs to give yourself more time.” Then I could just forget about it! How convenient!

Her suggestion wasn’t totally unfounded given my desire for children. But it was a jarring reminder of the strange, almost clinical approach Westerners now reflexively take toward family planning and women’s fertility. “There are no ethical concerns because it’s not an embryo,” she assured me in her egg freezing pitch. I wondered, if the point of egg freezing isn’t to create an embryo, then why do it at all?

After she repeated the “no ethical concerns” line for the third time, I felt moved to politely clarify. “Thank you for explaining, but I’m Catholic, so that’s not really an option for me.”

She was surprised that the Catholic Church doesn’t permit IVF and suggested, with a polite smile, “Well, sometimes the Pope changes his mind.” I hadn’t gone into this appointment looking to parse ecclesiology with my MD while sitting in a pink, open-front robe. I just wanted to know more about how my body works.

I also found it strange that a doctor who specializes in fertility and childbirth had no clue that fertility interventions are a cause of moral concern for many Americans. In vitro fertilization (IVF), egg freezing, surrogacy, and similar interventions are all off the table for many religious people, not just Catholics. Even if these procedures aren’t completely prohibited, all sorts of restrictions might apply depending on the tradition. For example, some branches of Orthodox Judaism do allow for types of fertility intervention, but those interventions must be in line with guiding principles of the faith. The same is true for Muslims.

Catholics are not reproductively oppressed. We follow a particular theology of the body. We are required to be open to the possibility of children in marriage, but we aren’t a breeding cult. Plenty of devout Catholics—nuns, monks, priests, and consecrated single people—take vows of celibacy and remain childless for life.

But within a marriage, the requirement of openness to children alleviates pressure around childbearing: you are quite literally commanded to just let what happens happen. Nothing could be further from drafting a plan to implant some set number of embryos. The idea of telling the man I fall in love with, “There’s no rush! I have a few dozen eggs on ice already!” feels uncomfortably clinical. It turns what should be a profoundly human experience into something more akin to project management.

Yet my doctor’s appointment reminded me of a dinner I attended with some friends shortly after moving to Washington, D.C. One woman in her early 30s, who worked for the White House, casually asked the table if we had looked into freezing our eggs. We all responded that we hadn’t, although another woman said she was planning to start the process later that year. The woman who worked in the White House said she was in the process of freezing her eggs, and expressed regret that she hasn’t started in her mid-20s.

As a recent Midwest transplant, I had thought IVF and egg freezing were for 50-year-old celebrities in a midlife crisis, or couples experiencing fertility hardship. Clearly, something has shifted in the culture since my early-2000s upbringing. The prevailing default is now to regard pregnancy and family formation as something that can, and should, be meticulously planned and managed.

This intense desire to delay, plan, and manage births and pregnancy contributes to the shrinking size of the average American family. It doesn’t help that the default setting for women is birth-controlled, and fertility is something that not only needs to be turned on, but perfectly planned for. The issue has become one of the hottest points of contention in the upcoming election: one party takes it for granted that abundantly growing families should be encouraged as a basic sign of natural and national health. The other party finds this position deranged, tapping into a deep-seated fear and anxiety that has been instilled into many women about how and when to have children. But this anti-child default will soon be an economic problem for our social welfare programs, which depend on a stable and growing tax base.

Egg freezing and IVF are not easy projects for women to undertake. They both involve months, potentially years, of hormone injections, doctors’ appointments, detailed health monitoring, and then implementation procedures. The miscarriage risk is also elevated. These interventions can be physically and emotionally brutal, which makes the sunny eagerness of my doctor and other women who plug these procedures even stranger.

This attitude shift raises important questions about how we value children and family in society. Why should pregnancy be the last thing on my mind, rather than at the forefront? Of course medicine should be a handmaiden to childbirth, but should it define and govern the entire process? Why is pouring money and attention into meticulously arranging the biological parameters of pregnancy smarter or saner than pouring them into raising whatever kids you have without such interventions?

We should reflect on the market conditions and incentives that our systems and public policies create. A 26-year-old who feels obliged to freeze her eggs for the sake of “backup options,” only to go through the hardship of failed implantations in her 30s or 40s, hasn’t been liberated. She’s been sold a bill of goods.

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