The Great Egg Freeze

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2018

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Freezing one's eggs seems the ultimate in planning a family and a career. It is now being offered as a benefit by a growing number of companies including Apple and Facebook, and some UK tech companies are discussing the option. So is this empowering or sinister? Is egg freezing a solution to what is often a social problem? And what do we really know about success rates? This is a complex story – morally and medically.

Fi Glover speaks to women who have frozen their eggs - both privately and through a company scheme. She follows the experience of Brigitte Adams, a marketing executive who froze her eggs at 39 and is about to have one of them fertilized and implanted at 45. Brigitte explains how the marketing of egg freezing took the fear out of it, but she has words of warning for women considering this route. We also hear from a former Apple employee who froze her eggs via the company's benefit scheme.

Professor Geeta Nargund is an expert in reproductive medicine and the director of Europe’s largest private fertility clinic. She explains why she views egg freezing as the second wave of emancipation for women after the contraceptive pill. Critics suggest though that employer-funded egg freezing sends a message that the corporate preference is for women to delay childbearing. Fi also speaks to obstetrician Susan Bewley who believes encouraging women to freeze their eggs is making risky and unreliable options seem desirable and routine.

Fi Glover is personally very familiar with the issues in this documentary. She considered freezing her own eggs and when she was living in the US almost a decade ago when it was still a niche technology.

Image: Human egg cell, Credit: Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello from the BBC World Service and welcome to the latest edition of the
0:05.1	documentary podcast. Every week we bring you a range of stories from our
0:10.0	presenters and reporters across the world. If you have the time please rate the
0:14.8	documentary on your podcast app and leave us a comment. Let us know what you think.
0:20.8	This is Madison Avenue, expensive midtown Manhattan, and if you saw a smart 30-something woman
0:27.3	striding up around East 59th Street, you might think she was heading for a hairdressing salon, there are many, or maybe buying some
0:34.8	high-end leather goods. I've just seen a carry-on case on sale for about $700.
0:39.7	$700. But it's also quite possible nowadays that she's heading to a fertility clinic where she can take control of her destiny.
0:48.0	At least that's what the adverts say.
0:50.0	And those adverts also promise she can choose to delay parenthood in pursuit of education, career or
0:56.1	other endeavors, and if she hasn't met the right partner yet, she can investigate egg-freezing
1:01.6	to utilize when a partner is attained and I do love that use of the word
1:06.8	Attained I'm Feig lover and in this the great egg freeze for the BBC World Service
1:11.9	I'm making a personal journey into the growing trend of egg freezing, a technology which first emerged in America in the 1980s, but is now available to women all over the world even via some work benefit schemes.
1:26.3	What do we really know about egg freezing both at a medical level and an emotional one?
1:32.2	I'm now outside one of New York's foremost fertility clinics here on Madison Avenue
1:36.6	and inside is Dr Alan Copperman. He's the team leader and he's observed the extraordinary growth of egg-freezing technology from the inside.
1:47.0	The first baby from egg-freezing was actually born decades ago, but it's really only the last seven or eight years that it's approached widespread clinical use.
1:57.0	The advances in freezing technologies have really enabled us to reliably freeze and re-warm or thaw eggs. The other major
2:05.2	advances in fertilizing the thawed egg. When you freeze an egg it loses some of its
2:09.9	ability to accept sperm to have the sperm easily enter.
2:13.4	So by performing IXI or intracideoplasmic sperm injection,
	...

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