On February 28, the University of Chicago MBA program’s Women in Business group held a question-and-answer session on egg-freezing with Cofertility, a feminist egg-freezing startup. The event highlighted tensions between the rosy rhetoric of career-first feminism and the reality that many of University of Chicago’s female MBA students are delaying childbirth until they are at risk of losing the ability to naturally conceive.
The official announcement framed the event as feminist, calling the info session an “informative and empowering event on fertility planning.” The workshop advertised itself as an “egg-cellent” chance to raise “fertility awareness.” While the description included the words “allies welcome,” all 51 sign-ups at the time of this writing were women.
The traditional MBA career track makes it very challenging for women to have kids. The average age of an entering University of Chicago MBA student is 28 years old.
An MBA takes two years, and traditional employers of top-tier MBAs (consulting firms and investment banks) have structured their career paths so that employees only have time to be involved parents after reaching the vice president level, which happens about four years after being hired.
This means that a woman following the typical top-tier MBA timeline will not be able to give birth until age 34, unless she is willing to work 60-hour weeks while nursing a newborn.
Cofertility offers women two options: “keep” or “split.” “Keep” allows women to freeze their eggs for up to $20,000 in fees, plus up to $1,000 per year in freezing costs. “Split” allows women to freeze and store their eggs for free, as long as they donate half of them, often to a gay couple looking to conceive through a surrogate.
Neither “keep” nor “split” includes the cost of in-vitro fertilization itself, which can be up to $30,000 for one round. Often, IVF parents require multiple rounds to successfully conceive.
Cofertility’s business model is built around elite women delaying childbirth to further their careers. Under the website heading, “Our Stance,” Cofertility states:“We believe egg freezing can contribute to gender equality.” That page also states that “egg freezing promotes social justice by reducing the obstacles women currently face because their reproductive window is smaller than men’s.”
To help parents afford the steep cost of IVF, Cofertility has partnered with fertility loan shark startup Sunfish to offer clients fertility loans. Sunfish’s partners charge interest rates of up to 35.99%; interest rates over 36% would cause the company to run afoul of state anti-usury laws.
Most obstetricians consider pregnancies where the mother is older than 35 years old to be “high risk.” After age 35, infertility rates increase markedly, and so do the rates of certain birth defects, especially chromosomal abnormalities like Down’s Syndrome.
Using frozen eggs can help improve IVF success rates and avoid chromosomal birth defects, although the IVF process itself sometimes causes other types of birth defects. The current TFR (total fertility rate) of the U.S. is 1.64, significantly below the replacement rate of 2.1. Women with bachelor’s degrees or higher have markedly fewer children than women without bachelor’s degrees, a driver of below-replacement fertility.
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Author: Ben Ogilvie
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