Facebook and Apple offer to female employees: eggs now, children later

Technology companies have for years used perks such as free on-site restaurants and dry cleaning to keep their staff happy – and to keep them at work for longer. Now Apple and Facebook have decided to pay female employees to freeze their eggs in order to postpone motherhood to a time of their choosing.

Egg freezing, or oocyte cryopreservation, has long been used by young women with cancer who are undergoing chemotherapy that could make them infertile. But in recent years the procedure has become increasingly popular among healthy women and advocates argue that it has the potential to be as liberating for women as the birth control pill.

The age at which women are giving birth is rising throughout the western world and it emerged this week that more than half the babies born in England and Wales are now born to women over 30. The most fertile years for women coincide with those that are crucial to career advancement and for some, egg freezing offers a welcome chance to focus on professional development during their twenties and thirties while keeping open the option of having children later.

If many women have reacted with scepticism to Apple and Facebook’s egg freezing subsidies, it is because US companies in general, and technology firms in particular, have a poor record in making the workplace friendlier to women. It is more convenient for employers to have 15 years of uninterrupted service from women employees than to have them take extended maternity breaks during their most productive years at work.

There is a legitimate fear that, if egg freezing becomes commonplace, women will feel stigmatised if they don’t postpone childbirth for the sake of their careers. Women need real choice – to use new reproductive technologies if they want to but also to have generous maternity leave, more flexible working arrangements and affordable childcare. And to feel confident their employer will support their choices about having children.