Labor of Love (29 page)

Many studies have shown that as middle-class women entered the workforce, they continued to do the vast majority of the housework that full-time wives and mothers once performed. Families that were able to afford help hired other women to assist with housework and provide child care for them. These contractors were usually poorer immigrants and women of color, who were expected to be grateful for the opportunity to leave their own homes and children untended.

In an ideal world, having to pay strangers to do the things that wives and mothers had done all along might have led society to recognize the value of that care and honor it accordingly. Instead, it heightened the impression that care was drudgery and did not deserve much compensation.

The rise of a select group of women in corporate workplaces did not do much to change the belief that housework was women's work. The hysteria over the biological clock helped make it seem natural that every individual had to do her best to overcome the liability of being female if she wanted to have a career. It made the clash between the needs of human reproduction and corporate work seem like a personal problem—a pathology that struck certain women (“withering womb syndrome”). In the process, it distracted attention from the obvious truth that the real problem was social.

In a country that mandates almost no parental leave and provides no support for child care, it is impossible for women who elect to become mothers to participate equally in the economy. The biological clock hysteria, with its image of a time bomb lodged in every woman's ovaries, made each woman personally responsible for dealing with that handicap. At the same time, the emphasis that the media placed on motherhood told career women that not having biological children was a devastating failure. Many of them bought it. At least they did not opt out of motherhood en masse or organize to demand better maternity leave or state subsidized child care. Instead, they listened to experts who told them what experts always tell women.
There is something terribly wrong with you! But luckily, there is also something expensive you can buy to fix it.

*   *   *

The assisted reproductive technology industry emerged in the 1970s. It started with sperm banks. During that decade, the development of liquid nitrogen had made it possible to transport and store human sperm for extended periods. Entrepreneurs saw the opportunity to accumulate and trade on human genetic material. Following the lead of farmers, who had been doing this with the semen of prize bulls for several decades already, the first banks called the product they sold “stock.”

It did not take long for them to start opening near prestigious universities. Ads joked that they were offering undergrads the easiest gig in the world. “UC Men, get paid for something you are already doing! Call the Sperm Bank of California.” In fact, a sperm donor could not just spend five minutes in a cubby with smutty magazines, take his money, and run. Most banks required the “contractors” they worked with to commit to donating regularly for at least twelve to eighteen months, provide a clean bill of health, and promise to abstain from alcohol, drugs, and sex for days or weeks before each donation. And of course they held the legal rights to keep a contractor's stock long after he finished coming in.

Originally marketed as a solution for couples who could not conceive, sperm banks soon began appealing to Career Women who could not find partners to reproduce with. Whether you were uninterested in men, or simply unlucky in dating, sperm banks sold you a chance to “do it on your own.” Comedians joked that customers were likely to get screwed in the process. A
New Yorker
cartoon from the 1970s showed a glamorous woman in flapperish garb standing in front of an Artificial Insemination Clinic. She watches, aghast, as a diminutive bum slinks out cradling a small pouch marked “$.”

In the 1993 romantic comedy
Made in America
, Whoopi Goldberg plays a forward-thinking professor who used an anonymous sperm donation to conceive her daughter years ago. When the daughter, who is now a teenager, sets out to find her father, she is shocked to discover that even though her mother requested “black,” she ended up with the sperm of a goonish car salesman played by Ted Danson.

“What do you mean he's white? Like,
white
white?” Whoopi demands, when the girl breaks the news.

“
White, white, white
.” She nods in tears.

In fact, sperm banks closely monitored their stock. They allowed their customers to shop for particular traits in a targeted fashion. Of course, you wanted to know the kinds of things you might learn by flirting with someone in a bar, like height, body type, and “dental regularity.” Sperm banks kept computer databases that listed the physical and psychological qualities of each donor. But they also offered information that would be harder to pick up by simply going out on a date with someone, like his ethnic background and SAT scores. Banks kept baby pictures of donors on hand to show to prospective clients.

Long before people shopped online, these databases suggested a fantasy shopping spree on an Internet of Men. The Repository for Germinal Choice, better known as the “Genius Bank,” opened in Escondido, California, in 1980, claiming to traffic only in the spunk of Nobel laureates; it stayed in business until 1997.

Today, a growing number of banks use 3-D facial recognition software to help customers find donors who resemble whomever they please. The aggregator DonorMatchMe lets users search dozens of databases of both sperm and egg banks in order to find the best one for them. (“The best bank to search,” the website says, “is the one with the donor most like you.”) The website of Fairfax Cryobank, one of the largest sperm banks in the industry, recently added lists of celebrity look-alikes next to their donors' (baby) profiles.

If it was true, as an article in
Newsweek
said, that women only date in order to answer “the ancient Pleistocene call of the moon” and “salt in the blood” summoning them to reproduce, Fairfax Cryobank would seem to have made dating obsolete.
Why slog through drinks with strangers when you could just upload a picture and get down with a Cary Grant or George Clooney clone?

In fact, the industry quickly recognized that women who took longer to answer their “call” than the biological clock allowed them formed a growing potential market. Technologies for extracting eggs, or oocytes, and fertilizing them outside the human body soon followed.

*   *   *

Doctors performed the first successful in vitro fertilization (IVF) just months before reporters started clamoring about the biological clock. Richard Cohen's story on the clock ticking for Career Women ran in
The Washington Post
on March 16, 1978. On July 25, the world's first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in Manchester, England. Baby Louise briefly became a global celebrity. But if a marketing team had been trying to come up with an advertising campaign to sell a broader population of women on IVF for the longer term, they could hardly have done better than the spate of stories that Cohen launched.

IVF had been designed to solve a specific medical problem. The mother of Louise Brown had been unable to conceive because of a blockage in her fallopian tubes; her doctors intercepted an egg released during her menstrual cycle, fertilized it, and reinserted it into her uterus. By 1981, however, researchers had figured out how to use hormones to stimulate the ovaries of any woman to release many eggs at once. Soon they were selling IVF to women who had no fallopian tube problems at all.

Different national and local laws govern how many embryos a doctor is allowed to implant via IVF. To maximize the chances of a woman's carrying a baby to term, doctors usually want to use as many as possible and abort one or more of the fetuses if too many take hold. The chances that women who underwent the procedure might have to have abortions, and the fact that the procedure involved discarding fertilized embryos, led conservative political leaders to denounce it.

During the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Christians on whose votes the Republican Party depended pushed for the government to withdraw support for IVF research. They did not have to push hard. Government funding for the sciences was getting slashed across the board. The result was to create a massive market for assisted reproductive technologies that went almost entirely unregulated.

By the mid-1980s, clinics offering IVF treatments were opening across the country. While sperm banks encouraged women to contemplate having biological children without male partners, IVF let those who could afford it buy a little extra time to try to make their plans line up. But it was not a magic bullet for the problems that the biological clock posed. IVF is expensive; today, it can cost tens of thousands of dollars per cycle, and few health plans cover it. It is invasive. There have been few longitudinal studies of how the hormones IVF patients must take affect their bodies in the long term, and the most recent data suggests some cause for alarm. (In the fall of 2015, a team of British researchers who tracked over 250,000 IVF patients from 1991 to 2010 found that they were one-third more likely to develop ovarian cancer than women who had not.)

Finally, the risk is high that if you wait too long, IVF simply won't work. The most recent report by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, published in 2012, shows that for women over forty, the success rates of IVF are dismal. For women over forty-two, the likelihood that a cycle will result in their carrying a baby to term is 3.9 percent. Go down to the forty-one- and forty-two-year-olds and the number is 11.8.

For a woman who has been counting on these procedures to start a family, discovering that she cannot do so can be devastating. Particularly after going to such lengths, many women who do not become biological mothers may suffer from crushing depression, self-accusation, and regret.

*   *   *

Studies show that since the turn of the millennium, women have been growing anxious about their fertility at younger and younger ages. In 2002, the CDC's National Survey of Family Growth reported that the number of women twenty-two to twenty-nine who had received fertility treatment had doubled over the previous seven years, to 23 percent.
Conceive
, a newly launched magazine aimed at women trying to get pregnant, found that 46 percent of readers were younger than thirty and 73 percent were younger than thirty-five. In 2006,
The Wall Street Journal
ran a story on women in their early twenties who were already seeking fertility treatments even if they had been off of hormonal birth control for only a few months.

Earlier generations of working women had accepted that both their careers and their love lives would require them to work on themselves. Advertisements and advice books taught them to see this as an exciting opportunity. It would be difficult to make IVF sound as fun as diet fads and makeup and fashions that the beauty manuals of the 1920s or the
Cosmo
articles of the 1960s touted. It is, rather, a fallback to which a woman can resort, if she has the means. Yet over the past decade, the ART industry has started marketing expensive interventions, to people who may not need them, as a luxury—or a chance to be proactive.
Have you frozen your eggs yet?

In contrast to the language of “stocks” and “gifts” that we use to talk about sperm and egg donation, insurance is the metaphor that dominates discussions of egg freezing. Clinics that offer the treatment often use the language of high finance in their advertisements. They joke about “frozen assets” and speak earnestly about the wisdom of “hedging against” risk. Egg freezing is both a choice and an “option,” in the specific sense that Wall Street traders use that term. When she freezes her eggs, a woman pays a certain amount of money—usually between $30,000 and $80,000, plus annual storage costs—in order to be able to get her eggs back for that price later.

Like IVF, egg freezing was developed for a specific purpose: Young female cancer patients who had to undergo chemotherapy or surgery sometimes elected to freeze eggs before doing so. But in recent years, clinics have started offering the experimental treatment as an option for healthy women, too. Indeed, they encourage women to freeze their eggs as early as possible. If you can afford it, why not buy yourself time?

The logic has convinced some of America's most successful corporations. In 2012, when Google, Facebook, and Citibank announced that they were considering covering up to $20,000 of the cost of egg freezing as a health benefit for female employees, many people touted this move as a miracle fix for the gender inequality that continues to plague corporate workplaces.

A
Time
magazine cover story on the subject declared that “Company-Paid Egg Freezing Will Be the Great Equalizer.” The reporter quoted a source who worked in tech. “I have insurance policies in every other area of my life: my condo, my car, work insurance,” she said. “This is my body, and arguably the most important thing that you could ever have in your life … Why wouldn't I at least protect that asset?”

Women who freeze their eggs report in overwhelming numbers that doing so has made them feel “empowered.” Yet many of them seem to be motivated by romantic, rather than professional, ambitions. They say they are less worried about climbing the career ladder than about finding love.

In 2011,
Vogue
profiled “a willowy 35-year-old media company executive” who had just frozen her eggs. She stressed the benefits that doing so would bring her while dating. “Leah … knew she was coming dangerously close to the age when eligible men might search her eyes for desperation, that unseemly my-clock-is-ticking vibe. ‘Freezing my eggs is my little secret,' she says. ‘I want to feel there's a backup plan.'”

In 2013, the journalist Sarah Elizabeth Richards published
Motherhood, Rescheduled
. The book follows five women through the process. The author says that she herself is overjoyed at the pressure that having done so takes off. “Egg freezing … soothed my pangs of regret for frittering away my 20s with a man I didn't want to have children with, and for wasting more years in my 30s with a man who wasn't sure he even wanted children. It took away the punishing pressure to seek a new mate and helped me find love again at age 42.” This makes egg freezing sound less like a tool for workplace equality than an expensive means to prolong the search for Prince Charming.