The practice of women freezing their eggs for possible future use made headlines this week with Rep. Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez announced her decision to freeze her eggs in order to “feel more in control of my life.”According to the Daily Signal, Ocasio-Cortez, 36, announced in a social media video that she was in the process of harvesting and freezing her eggs. “This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life. If people want to make assumptions about my decision, let them make those assumptions. I feel empowered to make this choice.”
She didn’t give any personal reasons for making this decision, but did intimate in TV interview that she was open to running for either a Senate seat or the Presidency in 2028.
Although many women say they are considering egg freezing as a way to insure they’ll be able to have children after becoming financially and/or professionally secure, recent research has revealed a much bleaker reason why egg freezing is becoming an option for some women.
The Daily Signal cites a study of 114 women conducted by Yale University professor Marcia Inhorn. As Inhorn reports in her 2023 book, “Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs,” only one woman did it specifically for career-planning purposes.
Instead, “[d]espair, or the loss and absence of hope, is a running theme in many women’s egg freezing stories,” Inhorn found. She cites “heterosexual relationship troubles” as the driving force behind the decision to freeze their eggs because the “vast majority of women I interviewed found themselves in their late thirties without partners.”
Egg freezing was not about their careers, she writes, “It was about being single or in very unstable relationships with men who were unwilling to commit to them.”
Inhorn cites several examples of how the fairy tale ending of finding a life-long partner, settling down and having children, is not materializing for many women in the 21st century.
Instead, they’re experiencing what a woman named “Ruth” described when she told the man with whom she was in a serious relationship that if he didn’t want children she wanted to break up with him. He agreed to have children, married her and purchased a house. Not long afterward, he told he that he had changed his mind, that he “thinks he won’t enjoy it and then he’ll be depressed. And he’s fearful of, like, racing up his depression …”
Ruth decided to turn to egg freezing, hoping to buy time for him to change his mind once again.
“Ruth admitted to weeping on the ultrasound table, telling the technician, ‘I should be having sex with my husband, having a baby. And I’m here freezing my eggs,’” writes Inhorn.
Another woman named “Lily” was in a relationship with a man named Jack for almost a decade, beginning when she was 31. Over the years, she frequently talked about having children with Jack, but he always replied that he was not ready.
As the clock began to tick, the now 36-year-old Lily once again brought up the topic only to have Jack respond that as much as he liked to imagine himself playing ball with his kids, “in reality, I’m totally paralyzed with fear.” Two years later, she stopped taking birth control and Jack responded by refusing to have sex with her for 14 months. They broke up.
But that wasn’t the end of Lily’s story. Having frozen 16 eggs, she was in her mid-forties when she attempted to get pregnant by having the eggs fertilized by Jack’s sperm (although he refused to commit to parenting the child). The attempts were unsuccessful and she never became pregnant.
These women were encountering what science is calling the “mating gap” in America. According to an anthropological study of 150 American women who froze their eggs, it was due to the fact that highly educated, heterosexual, professional women are unable to find the three “P’s” – partnership, pregnancy and parenthood – because they’re missing the three “E’s” – eligible, education and equal male partners.
“Thus, they turn to egg freezing to preserve and extend their fertility while waiting for a mate who may or may not materialize,” the study states. “Gender-based educational disparities underlie this mating gap. Women around the world are significantly outperforming men in higher education, leaving a massive undersupply of educated male partners for women in their prime reproductive years. Furthermore, men’s lower commitments to partnership and family building are lamented by women, who face difficult choices regarding their reproductive futures.”
Even though some of these women believe egg freezing is their best option, studies show that only 5.7% of women who froze their eggs actually used them to reproduce.
Recent surveys have found that 39% of women want two children, and 37% want three, but the U.S. birthrate remains at a dismal 1.6 children per woman.
These statistics reveal an interesting truth – women want children – and they want them the old-fashioned way, with a loving and committed partner.
The Church, in her wisdom of the human heart, embraces these desires in women by declaring egg-freezing to be morally impermissible because procreation must not be separated from the physical expression of the marital act because the gift of life must “spring from the heart of that mutual giving.” This is precisely what women want but are unable to find in a culture that breeds egocentric relationships rather than the selfless love from which all children deserve to be born.
As Katrina Trinko concludes for the Daily Signal, “Rather than focusing on egg freezing, we’d be better served by creating a culture that encourages men to become great husbands and dads and embrace raising families.”
Amen!
© All Rights Reserved, Living His Life Abundantly®/Women of Grace® http://www.womenofgrace.com
