We are living in an age of apparent contradictions. On the one hand, U.S. birthrates are at an all time low, well below replacement rate. And yet, “between 2009 and 2022, nearly 115,000 healthy women in the United States underwent egg freezing.” Annually, their numbers swell, rising by 95% in some clinics during the 2020 shutdown. If people are choosing to have fewer children than ever, why are they investing so much in reproduction-enhancing technology?
For half a decade, journalist Natalie Lampert investigated the recent egg freezing boom and what it means for our society’s view of women, fertility, and motherhood. She reports her results in her new book, The Big Freeze. Ultimately, the story she uncovers presents a sobering addition to journalist Timothy P. Carney’s argument that America today is deeply Family Unfriendly.
Carney argues that the extreme declines in U.S. birthrates are increasingly a feature, not a bug, of a system that for over the past half-century has made it much more difficult for families to flourish than before. Neighborhoods are not built for walkability, with families and children in mind; expectations for “helicopter parenting” that includes weekend sports burn parents out and result in fewer children per family; dating in the online age is a hot mess, which makes it more difficult to get married to begin with; and there is the basic lack of tolerance for children or surprise at their presence in increasingly more spaces (“are these all yours?” is a question that many a mother of three or more has received at some point from random strangers in the grocery store). No wonder we are ending up with fewer babies.
And yet, the egg freezing industry is through the roof. What gives?
The journey into this research and book for Lampert is personal: she lost one ovary in a medical emergency at age twelve and then almost lost the other one at twenty. She firmly believes that she would like to be a mother someday, even if the precise when that someday will be is uncertain.
Enter egg freezing: the promise of controlling one’s fertility even over the unpredictable vicissitudes of life. After all, eggs frozen with the latest technique of vitrification, available since 2012, could be kept in prime condition indefinitely, buying a woman valuable time to meet a partner with whom she would like to have children, make enough money to afford raising children, and to cross off various other items from her bucket list before undertaking the responsibilities of motherhood.
The whole thing feels, at first glance, like freezing dreams to be defrosted at a woman’s convenience: “For many women, being able to have children when they want them is the ultimate sign of independence. This symbol of autonomy is more central to a modern woman’s sense of self than perhaps anything else.” More than that, egg freezing is “even being marketed as a form of self-care.”
But can dreams of children and family really be frozen so as to be conveniently retrieved from storage at a moment’s notice? And are these dreams worth the exceedingly high financial cost, which drives many women to take out massive long-term loans to pay for egg freezing and IVF? Control of this sort, it appears, comes with a hefty price tag. But is total control over reproduction really so easily commodifiable, or is this all an illusion; a lie banking on women’s deepest-held desire for motherhood, a desire that the modern world too often tells them to ignore and ‘lean in’ instead?
As she digs deeper into the research, Lampert uncovers the alarming truth. The procedures of egg retrieval carry more risks than many women realize and have not been adequately studied—cue the incidence of certain cancers in women who had just undergone egg retrieval, possibly the result of the extreme hormonal injections the process requires. Correlation or causation? Unclear. Second, there is no guarantee that the eggs, when defrosted and fertilized, will result in healthy babies. Sure, the more eggs a woman freezes, the higher the odds of future success. Still, this is far from an insurance policy. And then there are the various human errors—fertility clinics where cryo-storage failed, destroying all frozen eggs and embryos at the facility; the occasions where a woman’s stored eggs were lost; and that time when two women’s embryos were accidentally switched during IVF, so each one had the other one’s baby.
The promises of science seem enticing and extraordinary. They make us feel like gods—and they involve, really, playing God. Instead of the “old-fashioned” process of forming the baby in the womb, trained professionals harvest a woman’s eggs, select the best and the fittest, freeze them for the desired amount of time, defrost them upon request, inseminate them with the desired sperm, test them for any abnormalities (and possibly edit the resulting embryos for or against certain characteristics), and finally implant them in the womb. How romantic.
Considering her research and whether to freeze her own eggs in her late twenties and early thirties (ultimately, she chooses not to), Lampert ruminates towards the end of her journey:
“we’re rapidly embracing egg freezing without pausing to consider, for one thing, how society is changing as more and more people postpone childbearing. Or what it means—what it says about our modern culture, about us—that so many women, myself included, do not feel free to be pregnant when we are fertile and young.”
This is, indeed, the key question: What do such developments as the rise of egg freezing and its allure for so many women mean? And how does this connect to Tim Carney’s research on our family-unfriendly culture?
Quite closely, I contend. We are dealing here with theological problems, and the scientific solutions only show the shortcomings of the secular make-your-own-life-as-you-will approach. Specifically, without a clear understanding of the purpose of the body, sexuality, marriage, and family, the open-ended answers that Lampert presents—based on meticulous research—really are the best we can do. And those answers, by the way, suggest other future scientific advancements:
“there are people like Stanford bioethicist Henry Greely, who predicts that in the next twenty to forty years, people with good healthcare coverage will no longer rely on sex to have babies; instead, most children will be conceived in labs.”
This definitely doesn’t sound family friendly.
So what does? How might our culture address the problem that Lampert rightly identifies as the culprit—that “so many women… do not feel free to be pregnant when we are fertile and young”? The answer is certainly not better access to egg-freezing—employers who are now gleefully offering this perk to their employees are merely facilitating what Carney calls the religion of “workism,” the practice of placing work über alles. Rather, the answer lies in healthy community, in rediscovering the beauty and wonder of families, in delighting in the blessing of friendships with other people, in welcoming the chaos of children all around. In other words, perhaps one of the most obvious answers to reforming this throw-away culture starts in the work of the church and in families banding together to delight in every image-bearer as a whole person.
Does this mean that every single woman will and should have children? No. Motherhood, like marriage, is a calling. Singleness and celibacy are a calling for some as well. All of these paths are rooted in a rich theological tradition and deserve to be celebrated. Indeed, in my forthcoming book on recovering the value of children and motherhood that our post-Christian society seems to be losing, I note the emphasis of the early church in caring for single women. Looking down on mothers and looking down on single women are two sides of the same coin—both involve the devaluing of image-bearers.
The ultimate dream each person has, deep down, is to be known and loved by God and by other people. This dream is to be found in community rather than in isolation. And this is a dream that cannot be frozen or sold.
