Reproductive technology has a new trend: egg-freezing. Medical egg-freezing had its first days in reproductive medicine for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, so they could use the frozen eggs to bear children later in life. In 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine announced that egg-freezing was no longer experimental, kicking off a new wave of social or elective egg freezing – whereby women had their eggs cryopreserved as insurance against infertility in the future.
In India, egg-freezing gained traction in 2016, when the actress and model Diana Hayden gave birth to a baby using eggs that she’d had frozen eight years before.
Cryopreserving eggs offers hope to many working women who don’t have time to bear or raise a child at a certain time in their lives but would like to later.
Delayed parenthood is often the result of women having to spend their 20s and 30s studying and looking for suitable employment. By the time they are ready to be parents, it is sometimes the case that they’re already faced with age-related infertility. One peer-reviewed study published in 2018 found that women are principally motivated to have their eggs frozen by the fear of running out of time to form a conventional family, a desire to avoid future regret and blame, a difficulty in finding partners and critical life events (in that order).
The public response to medical egg-freezing has been polarising. Those in favour of the technology believe it liberates women to order their lives how they will instead of being forced to march in step with their biological clocks.
Critics have advanced a variety of arguments. One, that the companies that incentivise egg-freezing see motherhood as a period of low productivity, and that they would prefer women to stay at work when they’re younger. Two, that older women could be less energetic parents as well as that children could lose their mothers at an earlier age. Finally, they have argued that egg-freezing together with in vitro fertilisation (IVF) has a low success rate (10-20%), leaving women susceptible to emotional trauma should they become unable to have children in the future.
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That said, egg-freezing is a viable alternative to embryo-freezing; women have to depend on men in the latter case to secure their reproductive insurance. Egg-freezing on the other hand is closer to the more individualistic approach in modern bioethics, which allows women to decide what to do with their bodies.
(The case of Evans v. the UK is instructive: Natallie Evans and Howard Johnston were engaged in 2000. In 2001, Evans was diagnosed with ovarian cancer; before her treatment began, the couple had six of their embryos frozen. The couple split up in 2002, and Johston wrote to the fertility clinic to destroy their embryos. Since IVF requires both partners to be onboard to continue, Evans was notified and began her legal challenge right away. Eventually, the courts ruled that IVF couldn’t continue because the technology was predicated on shared responsibility.)
Most countries, including France, Austria and Singapore, prohibit egg-freezing for non-medical purposes. India itself doesn’t have a law to regulate this area of reproductive health. The Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill of 2014 defined cryopreservation as the ‘freezing and storing of human gametes, zygotes and embryos’; section 52 of the Bill provided for the storage and handling of human gametes and embryos.
In a report on the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill of 2016, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare recommended the highest possible standards for the storage and handling of human gametes for a maximum of five years for fees prescribed by the government. It also recommended that after five years, these gametes should be destroyed or donated to a registered research organisation. However, the Lok Sabha passed neither Bill, so the need to regulate this technology, and its many personal, societal and scientific ramifications, remains.
Nuzhat Parveen Khan is dean and professor and Muzaffar Hussain Mir is senior research fellow – both in the Faculty of Law at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.