New Study Says Women Are Freezing Their Eggs Because Men Are Unstable
LatestThe popular wisdom is that a growing number of women are freezing their eggs because they are canny careerists who want to climb the professional ladder before having a baby. It’s a fair enough guess, I suppose, given how shoddily we treat working parents, and moms especially. But a new study suggests that the real issue driving the egg-freezing phenomenon is, according to researchers, “a lack of stable partnerships with men committed to marriage and parenting.”
Researchers surveyed women seeking egg-freezing services at more than half a dozen fertility clinics in the United States and Israel. Marcia Inhorn, an anthropologist from Yale University, explained in a press release, “Most of the women had already pursued and completed their educational and career goals, but by their late thirties had been unable to find a lasting reproductive relationship with a stable partner.”
A lasting reproductive relationship with a stable partner. If Craigslist Personals was still around, that would deserve its own acronym: W4LRRSP. (Feel free to add to your Tinder bio.)
The overwhelming majority of surveyed women—85 percent—were unpartnered and chose egg-freezing for one of six reasons: “being single, divorced or divorcing, broken up from a relationship, working overseas, single mother by choice or circumstance, and career planning,” as the press release puts it. But career concerns were the least common reason cited—and that was true even among women whose employer’s insurance plans covered egg freezing.