I don't think it's a good idea to freeze your gametes and have babies at 45

I just don't see how anyone could think it's a good idea

Big businesses are offering their staff “free or subsidized fertility treatment worth up to £60,000,” including the freezing of both eggs and sperm, so that employees can have babies at some point later in their careers if they so choose. This doesn’t seem like a great idea, does it? I mean doesn’t that seem like a really pretty bad idea? Flash-freezing some of the most delicate, sensitive, critical cells in the body, and then thawing them out years later, combining them in a lab, and growing them in the womb of a woman who may or may not be well past her childbearing years? I just can’t see how anyone could consider that a sensible course of action. I’m serious.

This trend is growing in popularity for two interrelated reasons: A huge and growing number of young men and women are delaying childbearing years past when they should, and major corporations want to keep them working as long as they can. This is in effect a coincidence of wants: Young people want to start having babies in their late 30s or early 40s, and big businesses want to avoid any disruption to their workforce, particularly where female workers are concerned. If you can convince enough women to do this—via incentives, subsidies, all-expense-paid trips to freezing clinics in Clearwater—then you may have even ruled out the possibility of birth altogether: One study published earlier this year found that, of about 170 women who froze their eggs in a study cohort, just 16% of them “returned to use their frozen eggs.” Spoiler alert: Going to a lab to “unfreeze” your reproductive cells and undergo a medical procedure is a lot less fun than, you know, having sex. Women and men are naturally more drawn to the latter than the former, and if the only way to get a baby is via the laboratory, probably few of them will do it. Would you want to?

That’s the gamble that these corporations are wagering: Offer your employees tens of thousands of dollars in “fertility treatments” and maybe, hopefully, they won’t have any babies at all. Then you save even more money down the road—money on maternity costs, paid time off, health insurance, employee retraining, lactation rooms. All of those costs add up quickly and in the long run they’re far more expensive than a one-time $25,000 egg-freezing trip to Escondido. The gamble will pay off. There’s a business sense to all of it.

It doesn’t make much sense by any other metric. And it is something of a marvel that a growing number of women are being convinced that it is in any way remotely appealing to do this: That it is more appealing to work, indefinitely, and then have a baby someday—maybe—by way of a lab procedure. Is that considered desirable? Is this what women have been waiting on for thousands of years? A few decades of work then a baby you have to go to the lab to get? I can’t speak to it one way or the other, if that’s what women really want then it is what it is, but it’s a pretty surprising turn of events. I would not have called it.

None of this, of course, even addresses the brutal moral aspect of the process: A woman who freezes her eggs essentially submits to IVF, meaning when she’s ready to actually have a baby, the lab fertilizes several of her eggs and injects them into her uterus in the hopes that one of them will take. That means the lab is creating several new, distinct humans, and accepting that all but one of them will die. The egg-freezing craze will result in a large and growing number of human beings being so treated as cast-off medical waste. And the trade-off is, um, we all get to go to work more. What a deal! What could ever go wrong?