Frozen Fertility: the Illusion of "Buying Time"

Photo by Diego San on Unsplash

I don’t have any data on this, but based on anecdotal evidence, I believe there are four types of people who resort to freezing their fertility, whether it’s sperm, eggs, or embryos:

1. People with health issues: like cancer patients who freeze their fertility before undertaking aggressive treatment that might render them infertile, or that makes having children too risky or even impossible before treatment is completely over. By the way, preserving the fertility of women with cancer was one of the main reasons oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing) technology was invented in the first place.

2. Planners: people who plan every step of their lives, especially around education and career aspirations, for example, a person or a couple who knows they want a doctorate, a post-PhD, and a few years of experience in their field before having children. These people aren’t procrastinators, they plan their entire lives, individually and as a couple, ensuring everything falls into place exactly as it should. If they decide they’re having kids at 40, they’re having kids at 40, end of story.

3. People who follow the hype: mostly young women who don’t necessarily have a rigid plan for their lives, but hear it’s better to be safe than sorry and freeze your eggs at age 29 because you never know. Besides, everyone is doing it these days, so they might as well get on board and not feel like they’re missing out on their generation’s brand-new rite of passage.

4. Avoidants: individuals or couples who have trouble negotiating what they want for their lives together, and buy into the illusion that all they need to make the right decision is more time. You’ll notice these people have a hard time making decisions in general, like what to order at a restaurant or what career to pursue, because they subconsciously want to avoid the difficult feelings involved in making a choice. It’s unusual that both partners are equally undecided. Usually, the more decisive partner pulls the other along, nudging them toward what they believe is the right direction, and the couple arrives at frozen fertility as a compromise that seems to alleviate the tension around deciding but that only raises the stakes for that decision later on.

In this article, I discuss the intersection of frozen fertility, indecisiveness, and avoidance, and why more time isn’t always conducive to a confident decision.