Now here’s news for women who want to put motherhood on hold. Healthy young women will soon be able to freeze their eggs and use them later even if they are past the child-bearing age. In other words, they can postpone motherhood for up to two decades or even longer and have their babies if and when they want to.

Until now, this procedure was usually only available to patients undergoing chemotherapy or other medical treatments, which could leave them infertile. This was because the success rate was very low. So low in fact that most experts believed it was unethical to offer this service more widely because they were worried that healthy women might freeze their eggs to delay pregnancy, only to find out too late that the eggs were damaged while thawing.
Now that apparently is no longer an issue. The latest freezing methods claim they ensure that 90 to 95 per cent of the eggs can be thawed out successfully. Two leading fertility clinics in the UK are in fact now all set to offer this service, at a cost of £2,500 to £3,000 per cycle.

Sounds almost like sci-fi, doesn’t it? Like one of those movies where whole human beings are thawed out of deep-freeze and emerge into a different era alive and kicking and full of action.
Except this is not sci-fi. It’s for real. And that’s what’s worrying. How do we know where fact ends and fiction begins? After all this is a commercial service they are offering. So surely there must be some hype involved.
The problem is if a young woman puts her eggs into deep freeze now, she won’t know how well they have survived until many years later when she wants them thawed out. And what if they haven’t survived? Wouldn’t it be quite devastating? All her hopes of finally becoming a mother would literally go down the drain. How many women would be willing to take this risk?

Then there’s the health issue. Women who have gone in for in-vitro fertilisation because of genuine infertility problems know that harvesting eggs is a painful and emotionally draining procedure that has its share of health hazards. Over stimulation of the ovaries to produce eggs, for instance, has been linked to ovarian cancer. Should women with absolutely no health or reproductive issues actually expose themselves to these hazards? And for what?
But egg-freezing does open up some tempting options to today’s independent woman who knows exactly what she wants to do with her life. Unlike her mother who put husband and children first, today’s urban educated woman is likely to put her social and career goals before marriage and motherhood. Putting her eggs into deep freeze ensures she does not have to juggle family and work during crucial phases of her career. She can work hard and play hard, she can travel and live life to the full before she settles down into motherhood. And she doesn’t have to panic that motherhood will pass her by just because she hasn’t found Mr Right in time or because she was too busy to have children when she was young.

Fertility clinics in the UK which have been offering this service to their patients for some years now say that around a quarter of their patients are healthy women who wish to freeze their eggs to give them more control over when they have children. They are generally women in their mid-30s who have just come out of a long-term relationship that they thought would result in children, but didn’t. Plus, medically speaking, the doctors find it easier to help a 42-year-old woman get pregnant with an egg that was frozen when she was 35 than with a less healthy egg produced in her 40s.

But is egg-freezing really a viable proposition or is it a non-issue, especially in the Indian context? Will career-conscious women in India really pop their eggs into the freezer to be defrosted when they are ready to have children? Will their families “allow” them to? Will their spouses agree? Most importantly, how many women can even afford such a procedure?
But think again. Once upon a time not so long ago, women had no control over the number of kids they had. They had no control over when they had them or when they could stop having them. Bearing children was part and parcel of being a woman. Some women died bearing too many children. Others thrived with huge families. Nature dictated the shape of their lives.

Thanks to technology, things changed and how. Families became smaller and smaller...and smaller. Today a growing number of young urban career women are openly opting out of marriage as well as motherhood either because they are unwilling to put their careers on a backburner or because they are not willing to compromise when it comes to choosing a partner. And they can do so because they have technology at their command.
When I was researching Disappearing Daughters, my book on female foeticide, a leading gynaecologist in Bangalore told me she gets the maximum number of requests for abortion from women in the IT industry. She said these women were very career conscious and they did not allow unwanted pregnancies to come in their way. Women in the middle of high-stress projects or with opportunities of promotion or work-related travel would come to her asking her for abortions. She even had requests from women who had just entered the industry. These were all healthy young women who were confident they could get pregnant again when they wanted to.

Contraception yesterday, abortion today… can egg freezing be far behind?
Once upon a time not so long ago, in India no one had even heard of that constantly ticking biological clock which determines up to what age a woman can aspire to become a mother. Women got married before they reached puberty and started bearing children when they were in their early teens. And they went on and on until they could bear no more. This affected their health and the quality of their lives.
So were these women without career aspirations? Did they just accept whatever fate and nature threw at them?
Of course not! They just had no choice.

The macho saying goes that the best way to keep a woman is barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, thus degrading at one go all the totally invaluable and irreplaceable contribution a woman makes to a household. The sad part is that women themselves have internalised this concept and begun to believe that pregnancy and motherhood are obstacles to personal freedom.
Take working women. Until recently, they did not even know they could have career aspirations. Through generations, women have worked… and worked very hard at that… outside their homes. Except for the privileged few who could afford not to work at all.
In most families women have been going out to work in the fields, in markets, in schools, in hospitals and in offices. They have brought up children side by side with their jobs. Maybe many of them were in dead end jobs but then so were most men.
The difference was that all along women knew they could get kicked out of an economically productive activity just for getting pregnant. So where could there be a career aspiration? They were always made to feel lucky to have even gained a foothold in this space.
Many battles later, working women have won certain rights which they can afford to take for granted. They can certainly stay in their jobs … pregnant or not. And they also have the right to choose not to get pregnant when it is inconvenient.

So quite apart from the safety of the eggs and the health risks, there are some other issues that bother me at this point. Nature did not intend women in their 40s to bear and rear children. They are certainly not at their physical peak. The healthy frozen eggs may thaw out fine, but what about their aging bodies? Is this kind of motherhood fair to the mothers or the children they may produce?
And what if it is misused? Like all other reproductive technology, egg freezing could also morph into a tool for gender selection in our country. Instead of undergoing multiple abortions to produce a son, a woman might be forced to have her eggs frozen and thawed out over a period of time to ensure she has a clutch of sons.
And finally, what bothers me most is the assumption that women need to put their careers on hold to have babies. So were all those battles fought by feminists in the past fought in vain? Even in this day and age do women need to justify their presence in the work space by opting out of motherhood?