Babies on ice? Don't do it, girls

Major Tom · #1 5th-September-2007

Quote:

Babies on ice? Don't do it, girls

Roll up, girls, get your skates on, it's time for Motherhood on Ice!

No need to worry about Mr Right showing up in time. No need to fret about a baby wrecking your career. Women can now have their eggs extracted in their 20s and stored in a freezer until they're ready to have them fertilised a quarter of a century later.

Just pop them in the microwave some time during the menopause, and bingo: Mum's your grandma!

Forget the use-by date that old spoilsport Mother Nature stamps on female eggs.

Forget the reproductive window that has guaranteed the fitness of the human species for, ooh, around 70,000 years.

Two British fertility clinics reckon they've come up with a better idea. Women who don't want to place their jobs on hold can put their future children on ice instead. At a cool £2,500 per cycle, plus storage.

Dr Simon Fishel, of Care Fertility, says: "It makes a lot of sense for women to have their own bank of eggs stored if they are considering not having a family until their late 30s."

I can see how seductive that creepy plan might sound to a young woman who can't figure out how to juggle career and family.

The statistics tell their own sad story of growing disillusion. Only one in ten women born in 1941 did not have kids. Of women born in 1961, one in five will remain childless.
That goes up to a staggering one in three among current female graduates. And no wonder. Some women are so stressed-out by work, the poor things last had sex when a BlackBerry was still a type of soft fruit.

Fertility remains a cruelly unlevel playing field. Men can always play on into extra time. A friend in her late 30s reports that all the prospective partners of her age on a dating website say they want children but "not yet".

How many nice women do you know who stuck by a boyfriend for years expecting he would be the father of her children, only to get traded in for a younger model who promptly had twins?

In the wise words of Dorothy Parker: "Don't put all your eggs in one bastard!"

Putting your eggs in a freezer may seem like a better bet to the new, steely generation of Do-It-Yourself girls.

So why does the prospect of 20-somethings freezing their eggs give me the shivers?

Well, for starters, relations between the sexes are in a pretty bad way if women find a deep freeze more attractive than a double bed.

If we want men to be decent dads, I'm not sure it's a good start to assign them a bit part with a warm test tube and a copy of Playboy.

Oh, and at what point with a new man would you slip into the conversation that you have a nice little pre-packaged clutch of eggs ready to receive his sperm? "Here's some I laid earlier, darling."

The second huge worry is health. Freezing eggs is yet another of those medical "breakthroughs", which, like IVF, will actually take the form of a long-term experiment on a female, and on any children she may have.

Doctors who rake in vast profits, even when they fail, are unlikely to counsel young women about the risk of over-stimulating their ovaries to harvest the eggs, although this has been linked to ovarian cancer.

Couples with genuine, heartbreaking fertility problems may understandably choose to run that risk. But how can it be ethical to sell such an untried treatment as a lifestyle option to a perfectly healthy young woman?

What about potential genetic damage to the unborn child? Personally, I would hesitate to have a baby from a defrosted egg, like some dodgy, ancient granular pack of mixed veg you find at the back of the freezer.

And this is the most damning fact of all. Instead of the world of work changing so that women feel they can take time off to have babies when Nature intended, it's women who are still working around the prejudice against mothers and reproducing when it suits male bosses.

Put motherhood on ice? Don't do it, girls. It's a slippery slope.

**pjanus** · #2 5th-September-2007

Allison Pearson is a die hard feminist who rarely has anything good to say about men.

Dr David Banner · #3 6th-September-2007

..pjanus...she is
She seems to a manage a thin veneer of "niceness" on screen.She was often on "late review" with other demented pc liberal buddies like Tom Paulin to discuss films albums and books and useless discourses on minute details about these things - his favourite word, like all libs was the word "misogynist".They talked talked talked with all the high flown esoteric language (still do)that "intellectuals" do and say ....absolutely nothing.
It mustbe a qualification for working in the media.I cannot think of a female journo in local press or national who is not in the pc thought police.I never buy any of the press for that reason.As for the men who write in the press they put the gina in mangina.They make me vomit what repulsive sycophantic toads they are.

SmtmsAlwys · #4 27th-September-2007

The idea is a bit creepy to me for numerous reasons. But I really hate to see women wait too long to have children - or men, for that matter. It's not fair to the kid if mom or dad is too old to play with them.

Yan Yan · #5 27th-September-2007

Quote:

The idea is a bit creepy to me for numerous reasons. But I really hate to see women wait too long to have children - or men, for that matter. It's not fair to the kid if mom or dad is too old to play with them.

Sez who?
Pretty narrow mindset you have there.
What's the definition of 'creepy'?

Women breed best when they're young. For men it's immaterial.
That's what feminists really hate. Try as they might, they can't compel the mangina politicians to legislate biology.

Women may lose their capacity to breed as they age. Men increase their capacity to provide for and teach their offspring.

Unfair?

Who gives a sh*t, that's how it is. The rest is just trivial entertainment for the sheep.

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Babies on ice? Don't do it, girls

Babies on ice? Don't do it, girls

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