Ask HN: Does your work offer to freeze your eggs? What are your benefits?
What $ amount does your work offer, do they pay for other services for families (childcare, breastmilk shipping, birth control, etc.)
Putting things off for later tends to mean putting them off forever. You aren't getting any healthier. Running after little ones isn't easier when you are old. Maybe you freeze a few... but is that enough? Maybe you will really like having kids.
Also, freezers fail. I think it was just a few months back that a large facility had a huge failure that wiped things out for a huge number of couples. Oopsie, so sorry! Getting a refund is unsatisfying when you were expecting a child born of your own flesh and blood.
Or outsource the DNA production and birth delivery for no cost by adopting.
However, I think this particular perk raises some interesting questions:
My first thought was that this is the ultimate in deferred life plans.
However, it also allows people to keep their options open and not sacrifice one opportunity for the other.
Perhaps, it's even a good counter argument to rationalising judging people by their sex rather than skill ("She can get pregnant so we better hire the male candidate.").
Nevertheless, it's in some way representative of a traditional work culture that values time over outcome and that considers time spent outside of work as something inherently bad or at least questionable.
It shows that the employer in this case exerts some degree of control over not just your working life but your life outside of work as well. At the very least because freezing your eggs brings about the expectation that you won't get pregnant all the same.
I know women who have gone through chemotherapy, and froze their eggs before their treatment. I imagine there are a lot of other drugs and medical produces that adversely effect eggs and aren't covered by traditional health insurance. There's also family obligations, rather than career 'obligations', or simply working now to save money for family later. I don't think this benefit is a one-sided item.
It’s offering young women a way to put what they want on hold, and few understand the risks. IVF success rates start nosediving at 40, and implode depending on different risk and health factors.
End of the day, it’s better, cheaper and lower risk for everyone to be in healthy relationships and have kids in their 20s-30s. Sacrificing that to generate more shareholder value is gross. Having been through something like 15 fertility procedures, I wouldn’t recommend the process to anyone who can do it the fun way.
https://nypost.com/2018/03/09/fertility-clinic-disaster-may-...
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/03/11/freezing-failure-at-s...
You need pre-approval and many costs are waived if you use a designated center of excellence.
Don’t wait... the career impacts you fear are mostly myth. The one regret I have in life is waiting for the “right” moment to have kids and thus waiting too long.