Feminism's Refusal to Save Humanity
Oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing) has become a crucial technology for women trying to navigate modern life (as shown by how spooked people got by the Alabama Supreme Court recently permitting wrongful death recovery for embryo destruction). Some women are even advocating subsidies for it. The arguments are perfectly lucid: women face a biological limitation on when they can have children; securing career success is increasingly dependent on delaying childbearing; men don’t face the same biological limitations; therefore, facilitating childbearing delays is necessary to avoid unfairly advantaging men in the upper echelons of the labor market.
Moreover, fertility rates are plummeting. The most likely number of children for women in the US (ages 25 - 44) to have is now zero. Relatedly, the average age of reproduction has been trending upward, especially among smarter women, who also face a massive discrepancy between how many children they want to have and how many they actually have. And it’s undeniable that many women are having to navigate difficult tradeoffs as they gravitate towards elite careers. Shouldn’t we want these women to be able to have kids? Wouldn’t opposing measures like subsidized egg freezing be tantamount to sexism?
Well, if these strategies are truly required to effect fairness between the sexes, I’ll endorse them, but I’m pretty doubtful whether that’s true. While I appreciate the reproductive headwinds encountered by ambitious, well-credentialed women, and I’m glad such technologies exist, I disagree entirely with the instinct to promote egg freezing and IVF as a policy solution to this crisis. It too quickly overlooks why women are having to delay childbearing so much. Closer inspection shows that these headwinds aren’t only unjustified, they’re a gratuitous symptom of larger social maladies that cannot be allowed to persist.
Reproductive opportunities aren’t just governed by a fertility window; they’re governed by a cultural window, too. Reproduction is constrained by social expectations and labor market realities more than biology these days: various housing, financial, educational, and career stability milestones are viewed as prerequisites for responsible procreation, and the shrinking overlap between this cultural window and the fertility window provides the only realistic chance for women to purposefully reproduce. I agree with the egg-freezing-subsidy proponents that biology and society need to be re-aligned, but why insist on tampering with the former rather than curtail the (also anti-biological) escalating timeline for adulthood, which is a pernicious trend anyway?
I’m not a conservative burdened with some trad lifestyle fetish, but we can’t afford to categorize any defense of the possibility for biologically appropriate childbearing as intrinsically retrograde. Whatever the origin or harrowing demographic implications, I think this collapse in fecundity is the signature of noisome cultural undercurrents, and I’m not nearly as worried about the wimpy fertility rates as I am about the teaming societal ills producing them.
Our Hellish Meritocratic Arms Race
Such extreme reproductive dillydallying isn’t a necessary byproduct of enabling female career success. Sure, increased control over childbearing coincided with greater educational and career opportunities, which required some change in expectations about childbearing, but this cultural evolution didn’t merely prolong women’s educational journey and career arc into parity with men—it catalyzed a nascent arms race between everyone in the expanding labor market. Also, women are exceptional students (they outperform boys in schools across the globe), and school has monopolized the process of allocating esteemed careers. So, not only did women begin protracting their pre-career phase of life, but the intensified competition and a newfound focus on merit/credentials caused the standards to shift further outward for everyone, doubly elongating this whole warmup routine. It’s not that women have outstretched male career trajectories—the time and effort needed to secure access to rewarding work has inflated for everyone, and even if it’s less obvious, I doubt that pushing back the gateways to adulthood for men is helping the fertility rate much, either.
Other factors also contributed to manufacturing our present hypercompetitive quasi-meritocratic dystopia; at least in the US, the avenues for accruing purpose and/or status outside of careerism have evaporated. Moreover, the variety of careers eligible for generating esteem and financial comfort has narrowed, and the culture has encouraged nearly everyone to funnel into a handful of prestigious occupations (see the overproduction of elites problem). I’ll dedicate more detailed analysis of this stuff elsewhere, but this arms race isn’t subtle: from the heightened admissions standards to the uptick in graduate degrees and multi-postdocs and the proliferation of unpaid internships, entering the high-end labor market has become an overcompetitive nightmare whereby people devote their most energetic and intelligent years to constructing elaborate résumés rather than improving the world. This lengthy ordeal has become a poisonous nexus of anxiety and effort for much of the population, and the demand for egg freezing is plainly connected to this.
Admittedly, women are needlessly having to traverse a chronological tightrope between biological constraints and the ballooning requirements for professional-managerial-class status, but I’m bewildered how the reaction to such a manifestly unhealthy situation can be to spend money exacerbating it. It’s not like the current environment isn’t crappy in other ways, and these gently rising career arcs aren’t unavoidable—careers are not blooming so late because it takes that much time to acquire useful skills.
In fact, one of the more depressing aspects of our meritocratic arms race is that so little of it involves equipping people with human capital: the predominant focus of the arms race is not to secure an esteemed career by genuinely out-skilling others but by broadcasting the clearest and most promising signal compared with the remainder of the applicant pool. I suspect the incoming workforce is often as clueless and green as their predecessors regarding their eventual jobs, except that they’re much older and more indebted. There’s a temptation to justify this situation as imparting necessary skills to an otherwise unprepared workforce, but something like eighty percent of university education is for signaling purposes, and the same career now requires several years more education, not because they’re more difficult to do, but because they’re more difficult to obtain.
Even if women really were accruing skills rather than curating résumés during that time, it’d still be worth questioning whether that process could be abbreviated or moved earlier. Unfortunately, second-guessing this stuff is pretty counterintuitive for people. We’ve been so conditioned to exalt meritocracy, that instead of the burgeoning necessity for egg freezing eliciting indignity from women, they’re clamoring for more—they’re agitating for quicker adoption of this dystopia rather than revolting against it.
Ceiling Feminism
The issue isn’t merely that folks will endorse hiking barriers to adulthood so long as it’s done under the aegis of merit, but also that feminists are likewise accustomed to this type of ceiling-heightening, even if those tactics promote dangerous and unnatural adjustments to the female reproductive schedule. It’s an understandable reflex: for decades, feminism’s crosshairs have targeted barrier-removal activities to protect women’s careers from unwarranted plateauing. It was a laudable and successful cause: no one is scandalized by the notion of female doctors or CEOs anymore, but increased competition for the most desirable occupations has extended the runway needed for career takeoff, and while feminism’s focus on careerism was a reasonable outgrowth of frustrations with dumb midcentury notions about housewives, society has struggled to re-expand the aperture of concern about female wellbeing beyond career accomplishments in the wake of victory.
The feminist preoccupation with ensuring parity for the very most elite careerists is increasingly suspect. Ultimately, we need to stop fixating on whether the zeniths of peoples’ careers are lofty enough and start brainstorming techniques for shifting those zeniths earlier. And unlike other hindrances to female success, these aren’t artifacts of the patriarchy; they’re artifacts of our bizarre, hybridized gerontocracy/meritocracy, and biology is working in tandem with it all to the particular disadvantage of women, but also it’s immiserating pretty much everyone else, too.
Weighing Solutions
There are also some more obvious counterarguments against the promotion of egg freezing, as reproducing at these ages is markedly more dangerous, and IVF isn’t guaranteed to be successful. Additionally, it’s important to consider whether we should risk erasing the very concept of grandparents from bourgeoisie culture. Do people not care about the possibility of being a grandparent? Do parents not care about the availability of grandparents to assist with childcare? Barring miraculous progress in anti-aging technology, continued delay of childbearing among the managerial-professional class will create a grandparent-less microculture, which will further accelerate declines in birthrate and worsen the lives of women encumbered by disproportionate childcare responsibilities.
Then there’s the problem of whether the intended effects of egg-freezing subsidies will match their actual effects. You’re supposed to subsidize stuff that you want more of, and
has argued that egg-freezing subsidies would encourage educated women to reproduce more. But subsidies for egg freezing and subsidies for educated women reproducing are different things, and I’m very skeptical that an uptick in egg freezing will straightforwardly translate to an uptick in fertility among educated women.Firstly, as I’ve mentioned, the labor supply is trapped in an arms race for credentials, so why wouldn’t egg-freezing subsidies just accelerate that further? There’s an underappreciated risk here that promoting egg freezing worsens the situation and wildly dangerous delays in childbirth become table stakes for ambitious women. Secondly, promoting egg freezing will normalize it, and people will more readily consider using it, and this will further ingrain ultra-late childbearing as a cultural norm. Thirdly, Arntz-Gray contends that egg-freezing subsidies would boost fertility by allowing reproduction for women who would otherwise be childless, but what about women who would have reproduced earlier (but would now capitalize on the subsidies)? The affordability and popularizing of egg freezing could lead to women de-prioritizing mate selection and/or reproduction for even longer, and it’s a brave supposition to think that women tossing these matters on the backburner with egg freezing will culminate in greater fecundity. Also, IVF is uncertain, and increased reliance on it could actually lower birth rates overall. In sum, it’s kind of like giving homebuyers money to make housing more affordable—it’ll make housing prices rise! Similarly, if we subsidize egg freezing to facilitate delayed childbearing, we’ll invite even more delays. Ultimately, it’ll subsidize these childbearing delays more than it’ll subsidize childbearing.
Also, while I’m personally unimpressed by people naysaying student loan forgiveness because it’d benefit wealthy people, these arguments must apply to egg-freezing subsidies, too. Presumably, the women who would benefit from this are postponing childbearing specifically to be more affluent, so arguing that we ought to give them even more money seems like an uphill battle. Alternatively, others have suggested subsidies for women to have children younger, but Arntz-Gray contends that this would be super expensive and awkward, and (ceteris paribus) I think that’s right. Ultimately, the solution can’t be to just out-bid the cultural/economic penalties for biologically appropriate maternal age; we should (1) mitigate those penalties and (2) make it so families can afford them.
The flip side of all this income/career strategizing is the matter of how successful people need to be before they’re comfortable reproducing—do they really need such a high-status career? This side of the equation has also been an utter disaster. I’ve written before about student loans and the irony of conservatives lacking appreciation for how stuff like that is suffocating the final embers of their coveted American-Dream lifestyle:
If you want people to establish the foothold necessary to marry and procreate and live in places other than NY and SF, you can’t hang an immovable fiscal albatross around the necks of newly minted university grads and then fold your arms and watch them desperately attempt to outpace their loan principal into their 40s. It just won’t do.
Every year in school isn’t just causing people to begin their career later, it’s replacing earnings with debt accumulation. The housing problems are maybe even worse. Inequality isn’t helping. The list goes on. We’ve somehow graduated to a society where potential parents are securing multiple postgraduate degrees just for the chance that someday their salary will rise enough that they can repay their school loans, fork over a downpayment on some insanely priced home, and continually fund the pricey childcare required to preserve the dual income stream needed to keep the whole machine twirling, while knowing even then that they’ll be disadvantaged in the labor market despite their massive outlays for childcare, given the endless availability required by the type of white collar work needed to pay for the titanic mortgage, pricey childcare, towering student loans, etc. It’s all a fucking mess.
Marrying Rich
A more obvious strategy for circumventing these biological limitations would be marrying rich. Practically, within the current gerontocratic/meritocratic environment outlined above, this means marrying someone who has already cleared the hurdles to career advancement (read: older) and acquired sufficient resources to sponsor their younger wife’s aspirations. Motherhood is so demanding, though, especially with younger children, that even deploying substantial funds to enlist professional childcare would still result in the mother being disadvantaged in the labor market vis-à-vis her childless counterparts. A recent essay in The Cut promoting age-gap relationships characterized the conundrum facing ambitious women like this:
She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one. The same-age partner, equally unsettled in his career, will take only the minimum time off, she guesses, or else pay some cost which will come back to bite her. Everything unfailingly does. If she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly — and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle.
The more we embrace modernity’s hellish meritocratic arms race and push back adulthood, the more resources will concentrate and skew towards older men, and temptations/pressures will accumulate for women to either (1) abandon the project of family-making altogether or (2) revert to retrograde marital practices like this (age-gap relationships), from eras wherein women were more financially dependent. Women will then be financially dependent again, but it’ll be because of their youth rather than their sex, so society is readily gearing up to celebrate this!
Conclusion
To be clear, I’m glad this technology exists, but it’s grotesque for using it to become anything like a requirement for ambitious women, and normalizing subsidies for it will unwittingly do just that. Even if this weren’t the case, I’d still hope that people—feminists included—would rebuke the invitation to be sucked further into the runaway quasi-meritocratic arms race that’s plaguing society. And it’s all so unnecessary. I don’t just disagree with these specific proposals, but with the attitude they exemplify. The last thing (or close to it) that society needs right now is women circumventing this sole remaining bulwark against the mayhem of a biologically unconstrained version of modernity.
We’ve created a scenario wherein the only strategically viable time for women to reproduce is a dangerous time for them to reproduce—what kind of perversion of feminism is that? The only defensible feminist position is to reverse this madcap credentialism, not to bankroll technologies that’ll endanger women and pour gasoline on a pre-existing cultural bonfire. How many women ought to die so we can preserve this loopy routine for allocating choice opportunities? Must we continue pretending that someone enduring useless unpaid internships and languishing endlessly in post-secondary education is an unbeatable demonstration of merit?
To the extent women genuinely want to delay childrearing, fine, but do women really want to be penalized for reproducing before their forties or to live in a world wherein something like that is viewed as an extravagance? Are women delaying childbearing because they want to per se or because society has made it especially advantageous to do so? How is the solution to careers being incompatible with children to freeze embryos and have children in our 40s rather than re-evaluate the labor market? There’s something rotten at the core of all this, and maybe any sort of efficacious remedy would be quite grand, but then the societal issues at play here are pretty sizeable, too.
Ultimately, the expansive demonstration of merit now required for elite work has been disastrous. The inclusion of new labor talent and narrowed cultural focus on white-collar careerism has over-generated barriers to entry for commencing careers. Rather than unflinchingly swallow that influx of labor supply with overwhelming opportunity, the economy has overtightened standards and excluded young people. And without the biological limitations of fertility supplying impetus to unwind the culture producing such wacky career strategies, we might lack the clarifying vantage and clout necessary to recover. Egg-freezing subsidies might sacrifice our last chance to reverse trend before either dooming civilization or re-advantaging men by continuing to embrace such prolix résumé-building exercises, and maybe men need the help these days, but it’s a strange cause for feminism to adopt.