The part that Cofertility keeps quiet about is that egg freezing doesn't work very well. If the intention is to have children later in life, the success rate goes down significantly as you age. The best approach with fewest complications is to have children earlier. Medical technology involving freezing eggs does not change this biological reality, so women are quite likely putting their bodies through a lot for nothing if they choose to do this.
For egg harvesting, this sort of company will want to extract dozens of eggs. Harvesting too few will be unlikely to result in the end product of a baby, so the idea is to put women's bodies through even more intrusive procedures to make the business profitable.
Cofertility is not even offering to pay money for this. Their deal is to scoop out as many eggs as they feasibly can, put half of them on ice for a baby that most probably won't be viable, all while they sell the eggs to those who have the money.
Even if women who do this decide later to use their frozen eggs, they'll have to pay for all the IVF procedures and so on. Cofertility are only agreeing to store them in the freezer.
If you change your mind, Cofertility will not return or destroy these eggs. Or if they do, it will involve having to pay them thousands of dollars. Also they'll only agree to freeze them for ten years, so it's not even a long lasting arrangement.
Those eggs are worth $10,000s, maybe even $100,000s if you consider the eugenics angle. Which is way more than just ten years of egg freezing payments at around $500 a year. And there are very real health and medical risks to the egg extraction procedure.
The fertility industry is incredibly predatory and this is yet another example of this.
This is exploitative.
The part that Cofertility keeps quiet about is that egg freezing doesn't work very well. If the intention is to have children later in life, the success rate goes down significantly as you age. The best approach with fewest complications is to have children earlier. Medical technology involving freezing eggs does not change this biological reality, so women are quite likely putting their bodies through a lot for nothing if they choose to do this.
For egg harvesting, this sort of company will want to extract dozens of eggs. Harvesting too few will be unlikely to result in the end product of a baby, so the idea is to put women's bodies through even more intrusive procedures to make the business profitable.
Cofertility is not even offering to pay money for this. Their deal is to scoop out as many eggs as they feasibly can, put half of them on ice for a baby that most probably won't be viable, all while they sell the eggs to those who have the money.
Even if women who do this decide later to use their frozen eggs, they'll have to pay for all the IVF procedures and so on. Cofertility are only agreeing to store them in the freezer.
If you change your mind, Cofertility will not return or destroy these eggs. Or if they do, it will involve having to pay them thousands of dollars. Also they'll only agree to freeze them for ten years, so it's not even a long lasting arrangement.
Those eggs are worth $10,000s, maybe even $100,000s if you consider the eugenics angle. Which is way more than just ten years of egg freezing payments at around $500 a year. And there are very real health and medical risks to the egg extraction procedure.
The fertility industry is incredibly predatory and this is yet another example of this.
This sounds like an excellent Black Mirror episode.
“Fork in the road”