On Being 40 and 'Childless'

I froze my eggs at 36. Now I'm being told that women like me are dooming ourselves to being unfulfilled in life and sentencing humanity to extinction, but that IVF is also inherently immoral.

During the early days of the pandemic, at the ripe age of 36, I decided to freeze my eggs. 

Conventional wisdom tells us we should freeze our eggs by our late 20s or very early 30s if we don’t plan on having kids in our “prime childbearing years.” But A) I didn’t know that I didn’t plan to have children during those years, B) I couldn’t afford to freeze my eggs earlier than I did, and C) I didn’t anticipate that a global pandemic would hit in my late 30s, before I’d met a person who I wanted to make a family with at the right time for both of us to do so. 

By the spring of 2020, when I suddenly found myself confined to my 600-square-foot Brooklyn apartment for months on end, it became abundantly clear that the whole “marriage and kids” thing might not happen for me–at least not on the expected timeline. It was already hard to find lasting relationships in New York City, even when we were all free to canoodle in dark bars together. Sitting six feet across from some Bushwick man in a public park–both of us wearing medical-looking blue masks, holding our individual plastic cups and a shitty bottle of rose, trying to make small talk and scramble for chemistry–was not exactly the aphrodisiac that would launch me imminently into motherhood. So I made a few decisions I could control: froze my eggs, adopted a puppy for immediate companionship, and did the best I could to emotionally get by. 

To be clear, the egg-freezing process is a particular kind of psychological torture. You inject yourself daily in the lower abdomen with hormones for at least two weeks, incubate these eggs in your belly like a spider, and commute to the doctor's office every other morning for an invasive transvaginal ultrasound to monitor their growth. By the time you grow enough eggs large enough to harvest, your belly is protruding a bit as if you're actually pregnant. And at the end, you have to inject a new drug into your body that tricks it into thinking it really is pregnant. And the morning before the doctor puts you under anesthesia to retrieve the eggs, you have to pee on a stick from a drugstore pregnancy test and have it tell you you're actually pregnant, which is, to be sure, a mindfuck for anyone who fears they might never naturally conceive. But the end result, if you’re lucky enough to harvest a few viable eggs, is a certain freedom and relief that comes with having choices that you might have had a decade ago. 

Lately, I find myself constantly thinking about Glynnis MacNicol’s fantastic 2018 memoir, No One Tells You This, which grapples with the feeling of turning 40 in New York with no partner or children. MacNicol wonders in the book whether she's "officially become the wrong answer to the question of what made a woman's life worth living,” which will forever be a resonant question for many of us in the same situation, whether we’ve actively chosen to be single and child-free at this age or life just happened to unfold that way. The world has always measured women in terms of what we can provide in a physical sense–our bodies as functional objects, either for eye candy or child-rearing–and we all know from a young age that there’s a ticking clock on our visibility and relevance. 

But a lot has also happened in the six years since MacNicol’s book came out. The rise of the "tradwife," who re-glorifies, for the digital age, a 1950s-era lifestyle of cleaning, baking, and bearing children for her breadwinner husband. The aforementioned pandemic. The bizarre, increasingly mainstream natalist movement among the far right, led by men like Elon Musk who incessantly scream at us online about the need to have more babies and raise the birth rate or humanity will implode. A growing openness among those same (mostly men) on the far right about their moral opposition to IVF and surrogacy, which is now creeping its way into American law in places like Alabama and Texas. 

So here I am now, at age 40, with a few eggs sitting in a freezer somewhere as an insurance policy, in case some future partner and I need to have a baby via IVF. And the first thing I see every day, via the online **discourse** that I have to monitor for my job, are men who know nothing about me or my life yelling that my very existence is a scourge on society. The unhinged billionaire who, in buying Twitter, purchased the power to thrust his views into our faces is constantly screeching that civilization is going to crumble if I don’t have babies. And this week, Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker–a conduit for the entire conservative movement, to be sure–gave a commencement speech to college kids declaring that "mother,” "homemaker" and "wife" are the most important roles women can have in this life. "Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values in media all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder,” Butker told students in Benedictine College’s graduating class in the speech heard ‘round the world. 

“Disorder” is an interesting word. It really says the quiet part out loud, which is that the conservative movement isn’t genuinely concerned with the birth rate, in general, or women’s happiness and fulfillment; it’s about controlling the kinds of families that should exist and the role of women within them. It’s about keeping women out of competition with men in the workforce and economically dependent on them. 

Of course, in reality, women can be happy and fulfilled–or likewise empty and miserable–with or without a spouse and children. Happiness and fulfillment and contentment are not remotely dependent on one’s marital or maternal status, and I’d never make the case that being a single, child-free career woman in New York is any better or worse than being married and/or a mother anywhere else. But one can surely imagine the cognitive dissonance of being told, as a single woman at 40, that I have already failed in some fundamental ways, that I’m doomed to be unfulfilled for the rest of my life, that I am personally sentencing humanity to extinction by not having babies myself…and also, simultaneously, that the ways I might still be able to have a biological baby–namely, via IVF or surrogacy–should not be options at all. 

Republicans would like us to think that the political debate over IVF only has to do with the genuinely-held religious belief that a fertilized egg has the same rights as a living person, and that because fertility clinics dispose of unwanted fertilized embryos, that this is a basic “pro-life” issue. They say the same about abortion, via fetal personhood laws: that a fertilized egg should have the same rights as a living person from the moment of conception. But the fact that a majority of Republicans and GOP politicians support abortion limits at least several weeks later in pregnancy, plus rape and incest exceptions, makes clear that few actually believe a fetus becomes a person at the moment of fertilization. 

The National Review, a revered paper among conservatives, said the quiet part out loud in its “pro-life” opposition piece to Sens. Roger Marshall and Cory Booker introducing a bill that would require health insurers to cover IVF: “The bill’s reference to age-induced infertility may give some conservatives pause, as it could mean that older couples or individuals would be able to ensure fertility coverage, past the normal age of reproduction.” We can reasonably translate that to suggest that it’s not acceptable for a woman to be picky in her love life and achieve success in her career and then decide to start a family, nor is it okay to create a family that isn’t straight and young. The point is to relegate women to mothers early in life, to prevent us from competing with men in the workforce and keep us economically dependent on them, and to make our central role in society wife and mother, alone. Older women and queer couples don’t fit into this retro ideal, and therefore the ways we might make families don’t count as a moral good. 

If these conservatives (men, in particular) are so concerned with the plummeting birth rate and women being forever unfulfilled, why is it not acceptable for women like myself to use scientific advancements to help us conceive? The answer feels equal parts obvious and devastating: They want to assert ultimate control over not just when and how we create our families, but the kinds of families we have, and women’s place in them.