
Ask HN: Does your work offer to freeze your eggs? What are your benefits? - uptownfunk
What $ amount does your work offer, do they pay for other services for families (childcare, breastmilk shipping, birth control, etc.)
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burfog
This is just another way to get you to prioritize work (them) over family
(you).

Putting things off for later tends to mean putting them off forever. You
aren't getting any healthier. Running after little ones isn't easier when you
are old. Maybe you freeze a few... but is that enough? Maybe you will really
like having kids.

Also, freezers fail. I think it was just a few months back that a large
facility had a huge failure that wiped things out for a huge number of
couples. Oopsie, so sorry! Getting a refund is unsatisfying when you were
expecting a child born of your own flesh and blood.

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jxub
Maybe there's a niche in the market for an egg freezing company with multiple
availability zones, like AWS or GCP. Hope they adopt good SRE practices and
don't screw up their uptime ;)

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whatsstolat
Back up your DNA. Will for on a USB drive and you could store it in multiple
zones.

Or outsource the DNA production and birth delivery for no cost by adopting.

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BjoernKW
I can't answer the question and I certainly don't want to judge someone else's
family planning.

However, I think this particular perk raises some interesting questions:

My first thought was that this is the ultimate in deferred life plans.

However, it also allows people to keep their options open and not sacrifice
one opportunity for the other.

Perhaps, it's even a good counter argument to rationalising judging people by
their sex rather than skill ("She can get pregnant so we better hire the male
candidate.").

Nevertheless, it's in some way representative of a traditional work culture
that values time over outcome and that considers time spent outside of work as
something inherently bad or at least questionable.

It shows that the employer in this case exerts some degree of control over not
just your working life but your life outside of work as well. At the very
least because freezing your eggs brings about the expectation that you won't
get pregnant all the same.

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Spooky23
The encouraging of egg freezing is a cynical play.

It’s offering young women a way to put what they want on hold, and few
understand the risks. IVF success rates start nosediving at 40, and implode
depending on different risk and health factors.

End of the day, it’s better, cheaper and lower risk for everyone to be in
healthy relationships and have kids in their 20s-30s. Sacrificing that to
generate more shareholder value is gross. Having been through something like
15 fertility procedures, I wouldn’t recommend the process to anyone who can do
it the fun way.

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drakonka
I don't think so; we do get about a year of parental leave though, when
someone wants a kid they just have one and their employer doesn't really have
a say in the timeline.

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segmondy
Freezing is no guarantee, it was on the news a few months ago, but a few
facilities that stored frozen eggs messed up and lost thousand of eggs.

[https://nypost.com/2018/03/09/fertility-clinic-disaster-
may-...](https://nypost.com/2018/03/09/fertility-clinic-disaster-may-have-
destroyed-thousands-of-frozen-eggs-embryos/)

[https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/03/11/freezing-failure-
at-s...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/03/11/freezing-failure-at-s-f-
fertility-clinic-eggs-may-be-damaged/)

~~~
abledon
the Seveneves (neal stephenson of snow crash fame) story has a great plot
dealing with this matter

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Spooky23
My employer pays up to $50k for fertility services like this and IVF.

You need pre-approval and many costs are waived if you use a designated center
of excellence.

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thisone
So instead of doing the work to figure out how women and men can have the
families they want and also the work they want without losing status (for lack
of a better word), these companies are throwing money at a social problem and
saying 'fixed!'?

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itronitron
I would think that employers would prefer to hire people that already have
children if they now have to subsidize their employees ability to procreate.

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copperx
I'm not a woman, but I'm single and middle age (36) and want to have healthy
children eventually. Are sperm freezing services offered to men as part of
work benefits anywhere?

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Spooky23
It is not necessary in most cases — your counts drop but most men can father
children into their 70s.

Don’t wait... the career impacts you fear are mostly myth. The one regret I
have in life is waiting for the “right” moment to have kids and thus waiting
too long.

~~~
copperx
You can still be fertile, but the quality of the sperm decreases. There's a
high risk of autism if you're fathering over 40.

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burfog
I think I'm safe. I won't be fathering over 40 unless I get several more
wives.

