Freezing eggs: How mothers get the raw deal at work

The recent employee incentive given by Facebook and Apple for their female employees has raised many eyebrows. Both the companies have promised to fund egg-freezing for their women employees to facilitate a proactive, "healthier" approach towards families and work. However, such a move is related to the ways in which women continue to be treated within the perceived public "male" world of work and careers. Despite battling and overturning the glass-ceiling, the inequitable relations between male and female employees – the latest move by IT conglomerates to provide funding for their female employees to freeze their eggs is discriminatory and sexist.

Dangerous

Questions regarding reproductive choice keep coming into focus here, but we must remember that the provision of egg freezing is far from the exercise of any kind of choice. Instead, it positions women’s choice in the form of the work-family binary once again rather than doing away with it completely. In the form of an incentive is the double bind of having to do everything: work and family and making both a success.

Let us not forget that as a medical procedure, egg-freezing is invasive and can be fatal for women undergoing it. It requires the "prepping" of the ovaries through hormonal stimulations and then the procedure of egg extraction that is both painful and invasive. As a procedure that was once used for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy due to resultant infertility—it’s spread to infertility treatment and stem cell research is baffling and dangerous.

In all this, women continue to be the targets. Their bodies continue to be seen as reproductive havens, which are under threat from the public world of "work". As usual, this debate work itself is associated within a male preserve. Housework, reproductive work like surrogacy, care work, like nursing or nannies, are often devalued as feminine, altruistic or just not work. And it is in this vein that Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, endorses women never speaking out for a wage raise and trusting their karma to get one. (He apologised later for what he said.)

In the IT sector, where the woman-man ratio is overwhelmingly in favour of men, the salaries reflect this disparity. What happens when two global IT conglomerates offer egg-freezing to women as employee benefits? Who does this "benefit" benefit? Certainly, the companies in their desire to seek to keep women in the workforce for as long as possible without extending maternity leave or other parental benefits to them.

It is within this ambit that we need to view work and labour in a new light. Working in offices outside the home becomes not only a negotiated experience for women which may be rewarded or chastised, but is graded in relation to housework. Privileging of certain work against others is especially acute in case of women.

Maternity

But more importantly, this benefit is part of a pronatalist mandate, wherein a woman continues to be seen as incomplete unless she can become a mother. The overwhelming desire for progeny and the family means that women are expected per force to fulfil their reproductive duties. The practice of egg freezing, along with the other forms of infertility procedures available, also bring into sharp relief those who are unable to bear and have children.

Within such a discourse of overwhelming, eulogised maternity, women are forced to fulfil societal expectations, never being able to choose to renege on any. But, the new reproductive technologies, including IVF, egg-freezing and surrogacy are geared towards seeking to push for a patriarchal agenda, wherein women continue to be bound up in choices that are already made for them.

The illusion of choice that neo-liberal markets and reproductive technologies give women are dangerous enough to make us believe that Facebook and Apple are "looking out" for their female employees. Robyn Rowland mentions how reproductive technologies are embedded within the woman’s body using her reproductive self to its advantage. Emily Martin finds a gendered discourse as an essential part of medical training and practice—positioning women as submissive, passive and mere recipients.

Receivers

Such an ideology turns surrogate mothers into gift-givers and adoptive mothers and infertile women as receivers with no power to reject either of these roles. It also creates a work atmosphere wherein women employees are, and will be, continuously judged on the basis of the choices they make in favour of work or home. And in a society that is not less merciful, no amount of egg-freezing will free women from the shackles of taking everyone’s concerns and desires into consideration, except for their own.

Alas, reproductive technologies are here to stay — whether they facilitate reproduction or prevent conception — their reach has become deeply embedded in the social psyche. Their existence is not as problematic as is the way society views them and creates a discourse around them. IVF specialists will continuously espouse the "good" reproductive technologies render. Lawmakers will continue to fear their impact on family and interpersonal relationships as parenthood becomes convoluted and "alternative" families arise. However, the havoc these technologies cause on women’s bodies and their sense of self will always be mired in double-speak. Feminists and activists will have to always explain themselves to a larger audience that views opposition to scientific marvels negatively. So, while one technology (internet) endorses another (reproductive technologies), we need to stop and think whether we are not uncritically adapting to technological interventions.