Freezing Time
Posted by businesswom on July 7, 2009
Is it ever appropriate to ask a woman if she plans to freeze her eggs? In today’s changing times, many young women are focusing on pursuits like graduate school and mobilizing themselves in their professional careers. Shifting priorities among many younger women and the evolution of society that now permits women to work toward professional success has lead to some career-focused women to put off having children a bit. And, that is ok. Or, at least it should be.
With today’s technology, there are so many options from which single women and married couples can choose to ensure they have families – surrogates, adoption, in vitro fertilization, for example. However, women and couples should be given the option to discuss these decisions freely as they wish, or not. Society often appears to not be able to handle an older woman who wants to have a child, or a younger woman who doesn’t (at the moment). People are then pretty quick to lay on the pressure based on what conventional birthing-age standards may be.
With magazines reminding us that our peak fertilization age is 20 years old, our mothers playing with every toddler in sight, the enormous risk of birth defects after age 35-ish, and of course our hair stylists asking “So, are you just going to freeze your eggs?” – or maybe that was just my stylist – society and family opinions are creating undue pressure on younger women who really do have some time to develop professionally before they have a child. We all know that pressure and stress can’t be good for fertility, though, so everyone should think about just laying off a bit.
espressodog said
Some things are private and some things are apparently fair game for public discussion. Private – your credit card number, weight, natural hair color, your social security number. Public -your decision to have or not have children. Why is our society so interested in my womb? People feel free to ask women of a certain age who DON’T have children, why? No of your business and stop judging me! There was an interesting article on this in Salon –
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/06/15/childless_by_choice/index.html