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This article is part of\u00a0<\/i>Upstream,<\/i><\/a>\u00a0The Daily Wire\u2019s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories \u2014 from our featured writers to you.<\/i><\/p>\n ***<\/i><\/p>\n Dax Shepherd made headlines<\/a><\/span> earlier this year for telling his 11-year-old daughter that he\u2019d pay for her to freeze her eggs when she turns 18 so she won\u2019t \u201chave to think about that.\u201d By \u201cthat,\u201d what the actor presumably meant was any trade-offs at all.<\/span><\/p>\n A woman\u2019s window for having children is biologically determined, starting in her adolescence and ending in her forties, with declines in fertility beginning on average in her mid-to-late thirties. Egg freezing, proponents tell us, is a way to extend that window as much as possible and stave off any declines. The idea is that if a woman freezes her eggs at the peak of her fertility \u2014 in her twenties, or perhaps even earlier \u2014 she can buy herself time in her thirties and forties, and maybe even beyond that if she\u2019s willing to use a surrogate. Clearly, more and more people find it compelling: Between 2014 and 2021, the number of women undergoing egg freezing <\/span>nearly quadrupled<\/span><\/a>, and many employers now <\/span>offer<\/span><\/a> it as a health benefit.<\/span><\/p>\n Egg freezing, in other words, has been successfully presented in the culture as a trade-off-free solution to trade-offs that have traditionally been forced by biology and social mores. There\u2019s no rush to date, or marry, or have kids; <\/span>your eggs are frozen, you can relax, you have all the time in the world<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n The problem is that no matter the cultural narrative that has formed around egg freezing, technology has yet to supersede biology. Egg freezing, like any other treatment, comes with real trade-offs and potential side effects, and it should be treated as the medical procedure it is, rather than a means of prolonging family formation indefinitely.<\/span><\/p>\n To be clear, there are cases where egg freezing has obvious pros: For instance, <\/span>ovarian cancer patients<\/span><\/a> can freeze their eggs prior to chemotherapy to help preserve their fertility. Women with endometriosis or polycystic ovarian syndrome can also often benefit from egg freezing at younger ages, as those conditions often make natural conception more difficult. It is a great blessing of the modern world that we can avail ourselves of these options.<\/span><\/p>\n That said, there are also cons to egg freezing that almost no one talks about. Julie Fredrickson, a venture capitalist in Montana, <\/span>wrote<\/span><\/a> on her blog that she chose to freeze her eggs in her early 30s as \u201can insurance policy\u201d when she and her husband were struggling to establish their careers. But by the time the invasive egg extraction procedure was over, Fredrickson began to develop an autoimmune condition that left her too sick to be able to carry a pregnancy. Her rheumatologist believes it was caused by the egg freezing process itself.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m honestly astonished no one said a f*cking thing,\u201d she wrote. \u201cNo maybe you should talk to a counselor. No here is what could go wrong. No here is how you might feel. No disclosure or discussions of some of the outlier cases of how these hormones might impact me \u2026 I\u2019d struggled with some inflammatory conditions as a kid \u2026 But no one ever brought up that being stimulated to produce eggs for harvesting might set off a chain reaction with my latent autoimmune complaints.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Fredrickson\u2019s story, while perhaps rare, shows the importance of informed consent that is often glossed over by free advertising from stories in the mainstream media. Dismissing possible side effects while overselling efficacy rates is ultimately harmful to women, whether they choose to freeze their eggs or not.<\/span><\/p>\n Take Brigitte Adams, who went viral in 2014 for being on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek on an issue titled \u201cFreeze your eggs, Free your career.\u201d At the time, the idea was new, even revolutionary. And yet, per a <\/span>Washington Post article<\/span><\/a> that profiled her four years later, when she was in her mid 40s, she was unable to have a child from any of the 11 eggs she had frozen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Unfortunately, her story is not uncommon: The <\/span>overall chance<\/span><\/a> of a live birth from frozen eggs is just 39%, which is lower than the overall chance of a live birth from embryo transfer.<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s not even considering the logistical challenges. Women who freeze their eggs not only pay the cost of the medical procedure, but the steep cost of keeping their eggs frozen, often entailing two or three decades worth of subscription fees. They are also physically storing their potential futures in an external space that\u2019s out of their control, which entails real risk, too; there have been cases, including in <\/span>California<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>Ohio<\/span><\/a>, where eggs and embryos have been lost or destroyed by clinics.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Additionally, because frozen eggs have to be fertilized in vitro, and embryos have to be created outside the womb, women should also consider how they might feel about having frozen embryos down the line that they might never implant. For some women, it\u2019s no problem at all, but for other women, it can become (sometimes unexpectedly) a cause of <\/span>real moral concern<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n None of this is to say that egg freezing is inherently a bad decision, just that it\u2019s a more serious one than the media and industry make it out to be. Beyond that, <\/span>only 6% of patients<\/span><\/a> use their eggs within five to seven years, with higher rates of use among older women. While there may be many reasons for this \u2014 including the possibility that many women with frozen eggs wind up getting pregnant naturally \u2014 it implies that at least some of these women are having difficulty getting to a place in life where they feel prepared to have children. Given the steep cost of egg freezing, it\u2019s less likely that most of these women feel unprepared financially, and more likely that even with what has been touted as an \u201cinsurance policy\u201d and \u201cextra time,\u201d they are still having difficulty meeting men and settling down. <\/span><\/p>\n Acknowledging this shouldn\u2019t entail shaming single women; rather, it should make us consider just how much contemporary dating culture is failing women. We expect women to tolerate what Hadley Heath Manning, in a <\/span>report for Independent Women<\/span><\/a>, calls \u201cthe decade of dating \u2014 often a decade of drifting through life \u2014 that the average American experiences today between their late teens and late twenties.\u201d This expectation of \u201cdrifting\u201d hurts men, too, but ultimately it is women who have the most to lose in the precious years of their youth.<\/span><\/p>\n Rather than encouraging egg freezing as a means to enable even more wasted time among men and women alike, we should encourage young people to align themselves with biological reality. At its best, egg freezing can be a means to work with that reality, but it should not be seen as a way to escape the very real choices that all humans inevitably face. After all, the ultimate biological clock, for men and women alike, is death. Even if modern technology gives us a wider array of reproductive choices than people had in the past, we can only kick down the can for so long.<\/span><\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n