Labor of Love

by Moira Weigel

  It did not take long for them to start opening near prestigious universities. Ads joked that they were offering undergrads the easiest gig in the world. “UC Men, get paid for something you are already doing! Call the Sperm Bank of California.” In fact, a sperm donor could not just spend five minutes in a cubby with smutty magazines, take his money, and run. Most banks required the “contractors” they worked with to commit to donating regularly for at least twelve to eighteen months, provide a clean bill of health, and promise to abstain from alcohol, drugs, and sex for days or weeks before each donation. And of course they held the legal rights to keep a contractor’s stock long after he finished coming in.

  Originally marketed as a solution for couples who could not conceive, sperm banks soon began appealing to Career Women who could not find partners to reproduce with. Whether you were uninterested in men, or simply unlucky in dating, sperm banks sold you a chance to “do it on your own.” Comedians joked that customers were likely to get screwed in the process. A New Yorker cartoon from the 1970s showed a glamorous woman in flapperish garb standing in front of an Artificial Insemination Clinic. She watches, aghast, as a diminutive bum slinks out cradling a small pouch marked “$.”

  In the 1993 romantic comedy Made in America, Whoopi Goldberg plays a forward-thinking professor who used an anonymous sperm donation to conceive her daughter years ago. When the daughter, who is now a teenager, sets out to find her father, she is shocked to discover that even though her mother requested “black,” she ended up with the sperm of a goonish car salesman played by Ted Danson.

  “What do you mean he’s white? Like, white white?” Whoopi demands, when the girl breaks the news.

  “White, white, white.” She nods in tears.

  In fact, sperm banks closely monitored their stock. They allowed their customers to shop for particular traits in a targeted fashion. Of course, you wanted to know the kinds of things you might learn by flirting with someone in a bar, like height, body type, and “dental regularity.” Sperm banks kept computer databases that listed the physical and psychological qualities of each donor. But they also offered information that would be harder to pick up by simply going out on a date with someone, like his ethnic background and SAT scores. Banks kept baby pictures of donors on hand to show to prospective clients.

  Long before people shopped online, these databases suggested a fantasy shopping spree on an Internet of Men. The Repository for Germinal Choice, better known as the “Genius Bank,” opened in Escondido, California, in 1980, claiming to traffic only in the spunk of Nobel laureates; it stayed in business until 1997.

  Today, a growing number of banks use 3-D facial recognition software to help customers find donors who resemble whomever they please. The aggregator DonorMatchMe lets users search dozens of databases of both sperm and egg banks in order to find the best one for them. (“The best bank to search,” the website says, “is the one with the donor most like you.”) The website of Fairfax Cryobank, one of the largest sperm banks in the industry, recently added lists of celebrity look-alikes next to their donors’ (baby) profiles.

  If it was true, as an article in Newsweek said, that women only date in order to answer “the ancient Pleistocene call of the moon” and “salt in the blood” summoning them to reproduce, Fairfax Cryobank would seem to have made dating obsolete. Why slog through drinks with strangers when you could just upload a picture and get down with a Cary Grant or George Clooney clone?

  In fact, the industry quickly recognized that women who took longer to answer their “call” than the biological clock allowed them formed a growing potential market. Technologies for extracting eggs, or oocytes, and fertilizing them outside the human body soon followed.

  * * *

  Doctors performed the first successful in vitro fertilization (IVF) just months before reporters started clamoring about the biological clock. Richard Cohen’s story on the clock ticking for Career Women ran in The Washington Post on March 16, 1978. On July 25, the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in Manchester, England. Baby Louise briefly became a global celebrity. But if a marketing team had been trying to come up with an advertising campaign to sell a broader population of women on IVF for the longer term, they could hardly have done better than the spate of stories that Cohen launched.

  IVF had been designed to solve a specific medical problem. The mother of Louise Brown had been unable to conceive because of a blockage in her fallopian tubes; her doctors intercepted an egg released during her menstrual cycle, fertilized it, and reinserted it into her uterus. By 1981, however, researchers had figured out how to use hormones to stimulate the ovaries of any woman to release many eggs at once. Soon they were selling IVF to women who had no fallopian tube problems at all.

  Different national and local laws govern how many embryos a doctor is allowed to implant via IVF. To maximize the chances of a woman’s carrying a baby to term, doctors usually want to use as many as possible and abort one or more of the fetuses if too many take hold. The chances that women who underwent the procedure might have to have abortions, and the fact that the procedure involved discarding fertilized embryos, led conservative political leaders to denounce it.

  During the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Christians on whose votes the Republican Party depended pushed for the government to withdraw support for IVF research. They did not have to push hard. Government funding for the sciences was getting slashed across the board. The result was to create a massive market for assisted reproductive technologies that went almost entirely unregulated.

  By the mid-1980s, clinics offering IVF treatments were opening across the country. While sperm banks encouraged women to contemplate having biological children without male partners, IVF let those who could afford it buy a little extra time to try to make their plans line up. But it was not a magic bullet for the problems that the biological clock posed. IVF is expensive; today, it can cost tens of thousands of dollars per cycle, and few health plans cover it. It is invasive. There have been few longitudinal studies of how the hormones IVF patients must take affect their bodies in the long term, and the most recent data suggests some cause for alarm. (In the fall of 2015, a team of British researchers who tracked over 250,000 IVF patients from 1991 to 2010 found that they were one-third more likely to develop ovarian cancer than women who had not.)

  Finally, the risk is high that if you wait too long, IVF simply won’t work. The most recent report by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, published in 2012, shows that for women over forty, the success rates of IVF are dismal. For women over forty-two, the likelihood that a cycle will result in their carrying a baby to term is 3.9 percent. Go down to the forty-one- and forty-two-year-olds and the number is 11.8.

  For a woman who has been counting on these procedures to start a family, discovering that she cannot do so can be devastating. Particularly after going to such lengths, many women who do not become biological mothers may suffer from crushing depression, self-accusation, and regret.

  * * *

  Studies show that since the turn of the millennium, women have been growing anxious about their fertility at younger and younger ages. In 2002, the CDC’s National Survey of Family Growth reported that the number of women twenty-two to twenty-nine who had received fertility treatment had doubled over the previous seven years, to 23 percent. Conceive, a newly launched magazine aimed at women trying to get pregnant, found that 46 percent of readers were younger than thirty and 73 percent were younger than thirty-five. In 2006, The Wall Street Journal ran a story on women in their early twenties who were already seeking fertility treatments even if they had been off of hormonal birth control for only a few months.

  Earlier generations of working women had accepted that both their careers and their love lives would require them to work on themselves. Advertisements and advice books taught them to see this as an exciting opportunity. It would be difficult to make IVF sound as fun as diet fads and makeup and fashions tha
t the beauty manuals of the 1920s or the Cosmo articles of the 1960s touted. It is, rather, a fallback to which a woman can resort, if she has the means. Yet over the past decade, the ART industry has started marketing expensive interventions, to people who may not need them, as a luxury—or a chance to be proactive. Have you frozen your eggs yet?

  In contrast to the language of “stocks” and “gifts” that we use to talk about sperm and egg donation, insurance is the metaphor that dominates discussions of egg freezing. Clinics that offer the treatment often use the language of high finance in their advertisements. They joke about “frozen assets” and speak earnestly about the wisdom of “hedging against” risk. Egg freezing is both a choice and an “option,” in the specific sense that Wall Street traders use that term. When she freezes her eggs, a woman pays a certain amount of money—usually between $30,000 and $80,000, plus annual storage costs—in order to be able to get her eggs back for that price later.

  Like IVF, egg freezing was developed for a specific purpose: Young female cancer patients who had to undergo chemotherapy or surgery sometimes elected to freeze eggs before doing so. But in recent years, clinics have started offering the experimental treatment as an option for healthy women, too. Indeed, they encourage women to freeze their eggs as early as possible. If you can afford it, why not buy yourself time?

  The logic has convinced some of America’s most successful corporations. In 2012, when Google, Facebook, and Citibank announced that they were considering covering up to $20,000 of the cost of egg freezing as a health benefit for female employees, many people touted this move as a miracle fix for the gender inequality that continues to plague corporate workplaces.

  A Time magazine cover story on the subject declared that “Company-Paid Egg Freezing Will Be the Great Equalizer.” The reporter quoted a source who worked in tech. “I have insurance policies in every other area of my life: my condo, my car, work insurance,” she said. “This is my body, and arguably the most important thing that you could ever have in your life … Why wouldn’t I at least protect that asset?”

  Women who freeze their eggs report in overwhelming numbers that doing so has made them feel “empowered.” Yet many of them seem to be motivated by romantic, rather than professional, ambitions. They say they are less worried about climbing the career ladder than about finding love.

  In 2011, Vogue profiled “a willowy 35-year-old media company executive” who had just frozen her eggs. She stressed the benefits that doing so would bring her while dating. “Leah … knew she was coming dangerously close to the age when eligible men might search her eyes for desperation, that unseemly my-clock-is-ticking vibe. ‘Freezing my eggs is my little secret,’ she says. ‘I want to feel there’s a backup plan.’”

  In 2013, the journalist Sarah Elizabeth Richards published Motherhood, Rescheduled. The book follows five women through the process. The author says that she herself is overjoyed at the pressure that having done so takes off. “Egg freezing … soothed my pangs of regret for frittering away my 20s with a man I didn’t want to have children with, and for wasting more years in my 30s with a man who wasn’t sure he even wanted children. It took away the punishing pressure to seek a new mate and helped me find love again at age 42.” This makes egg freezing sound less like a tool for workplace equality than an expensive means to prolong the search for Prince Charming.

  Evangelists for egg freezing suggest that the ultimate empowerment for women would be to work hard enough to be able to consume conspicuously and wait, dating forever. Can we really trust that good things come to those who plan?

  In order to earn their happy ending, the women in these stories must be willing to go to any length to make things easy on the men they get involved with, just as they must in order to succeed professionally. The American workforce is now more than half female. Is egg freezing really the best fix that we can come up with for the problems that workplace conventions created for men cause for women? Is it not slightly incredible that between policy changes—say, health care and maternity leave policies like those in other developed countries—and an experimental “time-freezing” technology, American business leaders seem to think that freezing time is the more realistic fix?

  In romance, the final step of planning is to make it seem spontaneous. Whatever she does, a woman on a date must not let her plan show. Richards, the evangelist of egg freezing, rhapsodizes about how the procedure made it possible for her to feel normal on dates. At least it let her feel normal enough to act normal on them. “It’s a buzz kill on dates when you feel compelled to ask the guy sitting across from you, clutching his craft beer, ‘So do you think you might want kids someday?’” she wrote.

  The go-getting women who are cited as advertisements for egg freezing use the language of choice and self-empowerment—the same language that Helen Gurley Brown and Virginia Slims used in the 1960s. You’ve come a long way, indeed, when you can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars in order to make your date more comfortable. But in practice, the only choice that egg freezing gives women seems to be the choice to buy into stereotypes that perpetuate gender inequality. Specifically, to be the one who does all the work of courtship and then hides the effort it costs her.

  It is easy to understand why individual women might want to freeze their eggs. But freezing is never a solution to a problem. On the contrary, it is a way to prolong the existence of a problem. Any apparent problem that a society allows to go on and on must somehow be productive. The purpose of the biological clock has been to make it seem only natural—indeed, inevitable—that the burdens of reproducing the world fall almost entirely on women.

  Another group of women, who were also receiving a lot of media attention during the heyday of the Clock-Watchers, prove it.

  * * *

  While 1980s Career Women fretted about fitting marriage and childbearing into their life plans, authorities constantly criticized other, younger women for failing to time pregnancy properly.

  Enter the Teen Mom.

  Around the same time that the story of the biological clock broke, policy makers and media outlets started reporting an “epidemic” of teen pregnancies. A press release from the President’s Commission on Population Growth and the American Future announced that the rate of teen pregnancies tripled between 1971 and 1976. The number of teens who became pregnant every year hovered around one million for most of the 1980s, then spiked by about 20 percent around the turn of the decade.

  In policy circles, and in the press, the panic escalated. Yet almost all the mainstream reports on these shocking statistics omitted one important detail. Teen birthrates were falling. While nearly 10 percent of girls who were teens in the 1950s had their first child before reaching twenty, in the 1980s, this figure was closer to 5 percent. It was actually the rate of teen marriage that was going down.

  What was shocking was not that teens were having sex but that girlfriends were not staying with the boyfriends who fathered their children. In 1950, 13 percent of teen births were nonmarital. In 2000, 79 percent were. A culture of increasing sexual permissiveness may have played a role. But the economy surely did, too. In the 1970s, the shotgun wedding option that so many teens had been forced to take in the 1950s was no longer on the table. If a girl got pregnant in the Steady Era, the father could reasonably expect to find a job that could support her and their family. No longer. In a decade of double-digit inflation, stagnating wages, and unemployment, the solution to teen pregnancy was not marriage. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the conservatives who gained political power during the Reagan and Bush years insisted that it was also not comprehensive sex education or access to contraception and abortion. Republicans systematically blocked access to any of the means that have been shown to reduce teen pregnancy.

  A consensus emerged that instead the best way to solve the crisis was to teach young women to manage their lives better. And so authorities started telling teen girls growing up in poor households that they had something in common
with well-heeled Career Women. They, too, had to plan. Only, for the opposite outcome.

  There is a long and troubling history of advocates of birth control appealing to eugenics. In the 1910s, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, tried to persuade authorities to legalize contraception by arguing that it would stop undesirable immigrants from reproducing. In the 1950s, the biologists who invented the oral contraceptive pill conducted dangerous clinical trials in Puerto Rico; they justified this choice by saying that the population needed to be reduced. In the 1970s, Latina activists claimed that 35 percent of that generation had been sterilized.

  Campaigns against teen pregnancy may have been less overtly exploitative, but they had similar aims. While rich women were told that they would never be happy if they deprived themselves of the joys of motherhood, poor women were warned not to have children no matter what.

  * * *

  In 1980, the Girls Club of Santa Barbara decided that the mostly black and Latina teen girls they served were in dire need of instruction in “life planning.” The board members decided that they had to “raise the level of their consciousness of today’s world as it really is.” In that world, these young women were extremely unlikely to marry men who would be able to support them. They would earn 59 cents to every dollar that their male peers earned, and if they headed their own households, they faced 70 percent odds of living in poverty. To make the most of their slim chance at a good life, they needed to develop a “flexible and aware mentality.” To help them do so, the directors of the Girls Club developed a life-planning curriculum called Choices.