Should You Freeze Your Eggs?

The cocktail party at the trendy Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo could have been a networking event for a hip New York investment bank or publishing house—a swarm of young women in their late 20s and 30s, mostly in business attire. But the attendees weren’t thinking about their careers. They were thinking about their ovaries. The event was hosted by a company called EggBanxx, and the women had come to drink free wine and learn about egg freezing, something their hosts were promoting as a way to stop the biological clock so they can have their babies later, whenever they damn well please.

Despite the positive vibe, egg freezing doesn’t necessarily stop the biological clock, not when the average age of egg freezing in the United States is 37.4. By that time, the eggs being frozen have already suffered a lot of the chromosomal breakage and genetic replication errors that make later childbearing iffy to begin with. Yet if the women at the cocktail party had their suspicions, they weren’t being addressed at the information session...