Sophia Wushanley | Putting life on hold

Another Look | Egg-freezing to delay parenthood is a symptom of our tendency to prioritize work over other meaningful pursuits

By Sophia Wushanley 10/20/14 10:37pm

A pple and Facebook’s recent announcements that they will be offering egg freezing as part of their benefit packages for female workers has caused a lot of controversy.

Firstly, people are wondering what this does for gender equality in the workforce. Though it’s tempting to see the benefit in this light, it can’t do anything that guaranteed paid paternity leave wouldn’t do better. Delaying childbirth may help women advance their careers early in life, but if child rearing responsibilities still fall on them, not much has changed.

Secondly, we want to know what it says about our culture. Egg freezing sounds extreme because it seems futuristic, even dystopian. It prompts us to imagine a sterilized, ultra-regulated world in which test tube babies are the norm and not the exception. However, there’s nothing futuristic about the values it reflects, and it’s these values and not their technological manifestations that we should take a moment to think about.

The culture of work in America, which has its roots in the virtue of labor extolled by the Puritan work ethic, is a culture of “never enough.” Even as college students, we divide our time into two categories: productive and not productive. Spending another hour studying for an exam is productive. Using that hour to catch up with a friend or read something non-course-related or take a walk outside is not productive.

To pass any length of time doing something with no clear link to your resume or career prospects is all right, but it would be better if you had the mental fortitude to power through another practice exam. If you’re not working as much as you possibly can, you’re probably not working enough. The work of success is all-consuming.

It’s no surprise, then, that this leads us to arrange our priorities in a such a way that we’re willing to make serious sacrifices in our personal lives for marginal benefits in our work lives. There’s a persistent mindset that non-career-related personal goals and relationships are something we’ll get a chance to do over, but that possibilities for career advancement are the real once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. The biological clock doesn’t tick as loudly as the countdown to final exams or a quarterly review.

It’s the belief that if we put in enough work now, at some undetermined point in the future, we’ll finally have the time to do all the things we always wanted to do but could never schedule in. Life is what we’ll do after we turn in that final exam, or snag that promotion.

But will that moment ever arrive? Before retirement, probably not. When you live your life without time for the personal or sentimental, you set yourself up for a life in which you’ll never be able to have time for it, or at least, not until it’s almost too late.

Apple and Facebook’s egg freezing benefit attempts to circumvent this problem in the specific instance of the desire to have children. But, as with all of our attempts to address the symptoms of our problematic work culture without changing it, it doesn’t seem like a real solution.

The technology is not foolproof — chances of successfully having a baby with a surgically removed and preserved egg are significantly lower than chances of having one the old fashioned way . And even if the procedure were successful, there are plenty of compelling reasons not to put off having babies until after your 40s. Younger parents have more energy and the real possibility of getting to know their grandchildren.

If egg freezing is a choice, it’s a choice that involves a lot of sacrifice and an unsure outcome. It treats career advancement as a non-negotiable priority and meaningful relationships as worth the risk of forgoing. It’s just another example of what happens in the kind of culture that overvalues work and undervalues relationships, one that tells people a successful career is a career that leaves no room for anything else.

I could make an economic argument as to why this is bad for society — overworked people are less productive and creative , etc. — but we shouldn’t need one. Relationships are intrinsically valuable, not for the GDP, but for the purpose of having meaningful lives. There’s a value in human connection that can’t b e measured in the shareholder divid e nds.

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