A startup called Cofertility lets young women freeze their eggs—for free. But in the United States, there’s no such thing as free health care.
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Clients must, in the company’s words, “donate half of the eggs retrieved to intended parents that need the help of an egg donor to have a baby.” It’s called egg sharing, and it hadn’t been commercialized widely in the US until Cofertility came along.
Unlike in traditional cash-pay egg-freezing, Cofertility covers the costs of egg freezing by selling aspiring parents on profiles showing donors’ height, weight, racial background, family medical history, and self-administered aptitude ratings. www.wired.com/story/egg-fr...
The egg-to-embryo-to-fetus-to-baby ratio is often described as an inverted pyramid—so when Cofertility donors give away half their frozen eggs, they don’t know if their best shot lies in the portion they kept.
To Eve Feinberg, a reproductive endocrinology specialist at Northwestern’s medical school, Cofertility's model is problematic because it undervalues the product that donors are selling.
It’s widely accepted that fertility declines over time, but it’s in the industry’s interest to convince women they’re closer to the cliff’s edge than they are. The procedure is also a lot for a person to put their body through.
“Three in five Gen Z women are concerned about their fertility,” Cofertility’s CEO Lauren Makler said on a podcast last year, citing a survey by a network of California fertility clinics. The oldest members of that generation are about to turn 30.
“When we have patients [in their twenties] in our clinic that come to us about freezing eggs, we actually counsel them against it,” says Lydia Hughes, a doctor who has argued against Cofertility’s model in the past.
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The way the egg-freezing industry sells the service, it’s one more box to check on women’s gamified quest to have it all, and not one day wake up 45 and infertile because they prioritized their careers.
The pitch is heavy on empowerment, but it might represent what sociologists call a “constrained choice,” where a person’s decisionmaking is limited by their circumstances. www.wired.com/story/egg-fr...
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