Daybreak - Successful women are freezing their eggs. And that’s on men

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

If all the women of the world had a collective wallet where we could put in a penny for every time we heard the words “your biological clock is ticking,” we could move to Venus and run our own planet.But as unfair as it may be, it is true. There is an ideal time period in a woman’s life when she can have a baby. Or when she is the most “fertile.”Unlike men who are biologically not limited by such constraints, women are born with a limited number of eggs. And turns out, this number of eggs sees a drastic decline after the age of 37. And when we say drastic, we mean drastic.But in the 1980s, scientists figured out how to freeze women's eggs. They developed a process called oocyte cryopreservation. It took thirty years for the procedure to become widely available. Today, a growing number of women are opting for the procedure. Most people assume that women freeze their eggs so they can buy time to achieve professional success. Women who freeze their eggs are often envisioned as 'career-driven', 'power hungry', and ambitious. But, egg freezing is an intense process. It is invasive, it is painful. It takes a toll on women not just physically but mentally as well. Plus, it is expensive.So why do women freeze their eggs?Hosts Snigdha and Rahel went to Dr Marcia Inhorn, a professor at the University of Yale and author of Motherhood on Ice to find out.Tune in.Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at [phone]. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

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If all the women of the world had a collective wallet where we could put in a penny for every time we heard the words, your biological clock is ticking, we could have moved to Venus and run our own planet. But as unfair as it may be, it is true. There is an idea time period in a woman's life when she can have a baby or when she's most fertile.

Unlike men who are biologically not limited by such constraints, women are born with a limited number of eggs. And turns out, this number of eggs sees a drastic decline after the age of 37. And when we say drastic, we mean drastic. So it is no wonder then that so much of our society and culture is shaped around a woman's fertility. We exploit it, we worship it, and thanks to science, we've also been studying it. And then sometime in the 1980s, scientists figured out a way to preserve human eggs by freezing them. It's called Oocyte cryopreservation, quite a mouthful. But as you can imagine, this was huge. Because think about it. It's almost like a resting entropy, right? Like controlling time.

It took more than 30 years for this technology to become widely available. In the meantime, more and more women got educated, joined the workforce and became financially independent. So what is the next thing that you would expect to happen? That these women would come and take control of their own fertility, right? Take Rajna Ramchand, for instance. She is a 34-year-old professional currently working in the UK. Four years ago, she decided to free.

her ex when she was just 30 years old. But did Rajna just wake up one fine day and suddenly decide to take control of her fertility? For me, it was very much an insurance policy. That is, I know that for the next five years, at least I don't want kids. But what if, you know, 10 years later, what if when I'm in my late 30s, early 40s,

or whenever that decision changes in my mind? So why are more and more women freezing there? eggs. Well, because these are ambitious, career-driven women and now that they have the option to delay motherhood, they can dedicate their best years to climbing that corporate ladder or whatever work ladder, right? Or at least, this is what we all like to think of such women anyway. But we were not convinced. So they put the syringe inside your veins and, um, And then they start pumping something into you. And I remember that was excruciating pain.

But at the same time, and it was probably pain for like five, six seconds. And then I blank out. It was, I think, the second half when emotionally something just went out of whack. Yeah, the emotional overload is something that some people, many, many women face. You see, egg freezing is an indefinitely. intense process. It's invasive, it's painful and it takes a toll on a woman not just physically, but mentally as well. Plus, it's very expensive. Which is why we wanted to find out for short. So we ran a survey. Nearly 100 women responded

to us and the results were not quite what we expected. So we went to Dr. Marsha Inhon. She is an anthropology professor at the University of Yale and she's best known for her seminal work in the field of fertility. In her latest book, Motherhood on Ice, she went in with the same hypothesis about why more and more women around the world were choosing to freeze their eggs. Turns out, we were quite wrong.

Most women are not freezing their eggs because their career is the most important thing to them. They are doing it because they cannot find suitable men. They are unable to find educated, eligible, equal partners. who want to commit to building a family with them. Masha calls this the mating gap. So it's a new reproductive order out there.

There's a new world order of reproduction that's going on around the world. And I think egg freezing is also, in some senses, paving the way to that decision among women. Forget the mate. Forget the partner. I didn't find the right person. But I'm going to do this motherhood project on my own. Hello and welcome to another special episode of daybreak. I'm Snigda and I'm Rahil and every Friday we come together to talk about something in business and tech that interests the both of us.

And it won't just be us. Depending on what we're talking about, we will have some really interesting people joining us on the show. This episode is all about egg freezing. Specifically why women choose to freeze their eggs. Okay, so Masha, let's talk about the main stereotype here, right? Which is also the hypothesis with which we went to. and that is that here in India, women who freeze their eggs are typically seen as career-oriented women. They want to prolong their fertility so they can focus on professional success right now.

Yeah, yeah. They're always portrayed as these hyper-ambitious, power-hungry women, you know, generally at the mid-career level, right? Exactly. They're seen as women who don't want to fall prey to the quote-unquote mommy track at this point in their careers, right? Because it could literally mean the risk of career staff. or possibly even worse, right, leaving the workforce entirely. Yeah, and that is a very, very real fear for us working women, no? Yeah, so, Masha, can we dig a little bit deeper here and kind of understand where these

assumptions come from, right? This assumption about women who take the step and actually go ahead and say, hey, you know what, I want to freeze my eggs. Yeah, I think that when egg freezing came into the world and in the United States, it was approved the experimental label on egg freezing. was lifted at the end of 2012. And so there was a lot of media attention and actually, you know, scholarly attention to what kind of women are going to be turning to egg freezing. And I'm going to say that here in the States, the assumption was perhaps exactly the same as what you're stating for

India, that, oh, this is going to be about, you know, women, ambitious, selfish career women, a term, by the way, that we don't have for men. There is no term career men, but that career women we're going to be using egg freezing as a tool to delay, defer, and postpone their fertility. Those were the three verbs used over and over, that this is going to be about women intentionally delaying childbearing, you know, for the pursuit of education and careers. And so it was all about career planning. This is going to help women, you know, plan their careers. And honestly, when I wrote my study proposal, I got a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to do this study. And sort of the first hypothesis in my proposal was that,

indeed, women are probably going to be using, you know, egg freezing or turning to egg freezing for educational and career planning purposes. But I did keep open this sort of alternative that, well, maybe that's not what it's about. We need to look at other considerations. So it did not take very long for Masha to realize that the career assumption was little more than just that. It was just an assumption. Over the span of a few years, Marsha spoke to 150 women from across the United States. And these were women from diverse, racial, regional and religious backgrounds. But what they did have in common was that they were all highly educated professionals and they had all decided to freeze their eggs. These are smart women that we're

talking about who have gone to good colleges, they have multiple degrees and they have seen professional success. They're all doing really well. So their decision to freeze their eggs didn't actually have a whole lot to do with prolonging their careers. Within about 10 interviews out of the 150 interviews I did, it became very clear to me that that hypothesis, that assumption or that stereotype is wrong. The problem for them was not their careers. It wasn't education. It was partnership problems. Indeed, 82% of women froze their eggs because they were partnerless. They wanted to have three things.

They wanted a partner. They wanted to be pregnant with that partner, and they wanted to become a parent with that partner. And the problem for them is that they couldn't find a stable, committed, reproductive partner. And, you know, honestly, it was just one story after another. There were women who were just single, single, You know, they hadn't dated for a while.

They hadn't, they had no partner in sight. They couldn't figure out why. There were women who had been in a partnership. Sometimes a really long partnership, but eventually the relationship broke up, often because the partner was unready to commit and become a father. And then there were divorces. You know, women who had been married hadn't had children with their partner, and then they were divorced.

They didn't know what to do. And so this was a very partnerless population of women who were very frustrated because they wanted partnership. They wanted to have children, you know, with a partner and they were having trouble. And even the 18% of women in my study who did freeze their eggs when they did have a partner, half of those partnerships are so 9% of the total. Those women felt that the partnership was just unstable. You know, it was either a new relationship or the partner, it was already a rock. hockey relationship or the partner was, you know, hesitating. So there was some instability. And even among the small percentage of women, 9% of the total, who felt that they were in a stable

partnership with a man when they froze their eggs, the reason they were freezing their eggs is because the partner was unready to become a parent. So we could call this the men as partner's problem. Masha calls this phenomenon the meeting gap. She said that this group of women that she spoke to, which again, we have to point out, was a small elite minority. They were all dealing with this gap. They wanted what Masha called the three P's, partnership, pregnancy, and parenthood. But they were lacking the three E's. Eligible, educated, and equal partners committed to building families with them. You know, we can talk about the reasons, like, why is this happening? But I'm going to argue that there are these massive and growing

educational disparities between men and women in this country that underlie the kind of gap, the mating gap, of being unable to find a partner who sort of matches you in terms of your educational and sort of professional aspirations, if you will. Needless to say, but still an important disclaimer here, is that we are talking about a very specific and small but growing demographic of women. While in the U.S., we know for a fact that There are more women than men at this point who have a university degree. In India, it is a little bit different. We still have the gender gap here, but women are actually catching up pretty fast.

Education levels here have steadily increased in the last few decades at a faster rate among females than among males, which has greatly decreased the gap between genders. Okay, now is a good time to bring in what we learned from our egg freezing survey. We realised that this mating gap that Marsha describes isn't actually unique to the United States. Like we mentioned earlier, a total of 95 women took this survey and they were from different parts of the country. Cities like Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and even some tier two cities

like Rajkot, Nagpur and Tirwananthpuram. We even had a handful of respondents from overseas. Five to be specific from the US, UK, Canada and the UAE. Now, like Marsha, we went in with two main hypotheses. One, that the women who were seriously considering opting for egg freezing were career-oriented. And second, that these women were in their 30s. And the responses that we received were quite interesting. We first asked them the obvious question.

Do you even want to freeze your eggs? More than 50 women said yes. 10 said that they had already done it. And 30 said no, egg freezing was not. for them. So then we went ahead and asked the women who said they would freeze their eggs why they thought this was the right option for them. And this is where things got really interesting. Because prioritizing their career was technically the third most popular reason, but by a very slim margin. You see, 17 women said they would freeze their eggs so they could

prioritize their career right now and work towards professional success. It was definitely a recurring theme in many of their answers. Another 19 women said they would do it for biological reasons. Basically, I don't want kids right now, but maybe somewhere in the future I might. And of course, taking charge of your fertility is always a good

thing, especially considering the current fertility rate here in India. But the remaining 19 said that the reason why they were thinking about freezing their eggs was because they had not found the right partner yet. Now, interestingly, these

women who gave this as an answer were in their 30s and they still didn't have a partner. The words eligible, suitable came up many times in their responses. So the obvious question here is, what happened to the eligible partners? The kind that, you know, want to lead the traditional picket fence life, meet these women, have babies, have a family. So we asked Marsha. Masha, of course, you know, we know that there are a lot of differences between Indian society and Western society and most of it is quite obvious. We don't need to get there. But there are also some very common things, right? For example, how the idea of a partner has kind of evolved from back in the day to, you know, the father of my children to now when we are looking for reproductive partners, you know,

which is also a term that you use in your book. So can you tell us a little bit about what is the ideal partner that women are now looking for? Right. You know, so, So, first of all, most of my research and most of my career has been taking place in the Middle East. I've worked for many years in a variety of Arab countries. And I actually in the preface to my book, I talk a little bit about the fact that, you know, in the Middle East, you know, marriage is still quite common. More than 90% of people will marry at some point in their adult lives. And, you know, men and women, they want to be parents. I mean, there's a lot of joy in having children and expectations, basically, to become parents.

And so, you know, in my work in the Middle East, I found both men and women very ardently desiring partnership and pregnancy and parenthood, the three-piece. That was sort of assumed. And honestly, in the older generation in the United States, you know, the generation of the parents of the women in my study, they said, you know, our parents never assumed that they wouldn't find a partner. It was expected that men and women married and had children. It was just part of what you did. It was the kind of heteronormative family norm.

And our dads, our dads wanted to be dads. They wanted to have children. And women said, you know, I'm at a loss because it doesn't seem like men of our generation necessarily want the same thing that the older generation, our parents' generation, wanted. And they talked, you know, about sort of the gender laments about, you know, having trouble. they said, first of all, women in America have been socialized to really want gender equality, both at work and at home. You know, women want equal pay.

They want to be in good positions. They want to have successful professional careers. And they also want that kind of equality and understanding at home. And we do know that globally, you know, marriage rates are declining globally. We know that, you know, childbearing is declining globally. And so this is a real phenomenon that, you know, people are just questioning whether they want to have children. So, you know, women talked about, I think, these new norms and social patterns that really are affecting their lives. But when women do want a partner and they do want to

be pregnant and they do want to have children and they're reaching their mid to late 30s and they haven't found the partner, you know, the question is, what am I going to do? Egg freezing is about holding open the potential to still have children by freezing your eggs. And that's a really what women were turning to out of the hope that, you know, if I freeze my eggs when I'm 35 or 36 or 37, it still gives me a chance to preserve and extend my fertility, you know, toward the end of my reproductive lifespan. So a majority of the women Marcia spoke to, and evidently most of the women who took a survey and said they would freeze their eggs, are all in search of stable partnership.

They're looking for the ideal partner. Of course, here we're largely referring to heteronormative relationships. But of course the world is changing. Some women, and sure they may even be a smaller minority, are freezing their eggs just so they can enjoy motherhood somewhere down the line. Even if it's on their own. Rajna, I think the first obvious question that we are going to ask you is what prompted you to freeze your eggs that to at 30, you know, which is quite young.

So, this is a question that I've reflected on. for many years now, and I think my narrative also does change. But I think at the time, I realized that I wasn't sure if I wanted kids or not. Growing up, especially in my early 20s, it was very much a given that one day, you know, I would have a family, I would have kids. It was my life's dream in a way. but I think through my late 20s, that image of what a perfect life looked like also started to change. And for me, I suddenly reached a point where I was like, I don't know if I want kids or not.

But at the same time, I know that I'm not fully averse to it. And that's when, you know, I stumbled upon egg freezing. I've always known about it. But there were a few bits of media that prompted me to think about it more. and I didn't think much into it. For me, it was very much an insurance policy. When Rachna decided to freeze her eggs at the age of 30, she wasn't seeing anyone.

She didn't have a partner. But for her, that wasn't make or break. She signed up for the process with the understanding that she may have to raise children on her own one day, as a single mom. And that was something she was totally fine with. I was inspired by someone I had worked with, and she was a solo parent of now two kids. And so having someone like her whom I could speak to, whom I could, you know, ask questions to also really did help me.

But it was very much a solo journey. And I think anyone who is considering egg freezing has to be open to that. Okay, right, but I'm just curious to know how important partnership is to you, right? Is finding a partner something that you would prioritize when it comes to raising a child? Like, okay, hypothetically, back when you were 30, say you did have a partner, someone you did see yourself kind of raising children with, would you still have frozen your eggs? Hmm. So I think my story and even my justification has also changed along the years. And I think each person is different. You know, we grew up with this narrative of

the perfect family, find a partner, after a few years, have kids. And I think moving to the UK, lockdown, especially, reading a lot more books, also changed the way I think about partnership. And the way I think about family also for that matter. During lockdown, I realized the importance of friends and friends becoming family, especially when you are in a different country. And as you said, you know, feel quite alien away from the people who gave birth to you. And one of the things I realized during lockdown is the importance of community, the importance of just people being present, being close to each other.

And that at the time became my narrative that if I were to be a solo parent, I'm not going to really be solo. I was very sure of that. I would be in a community and have friends around me. Like, there is no way. There was no way. There is no way. I would raise a child.

And this is just me personally. I know people are different, but there was no way that I would raise a child as just me without knowing or having people close to me. And I think for me, the second point, and this has been the case in the past, this is the case currently as well, that I would need, absolutely need my partner to be aligned with me in terms of how I think about my career, how I think about my life, how I think about my life, how I think about my space and how we both think about upbringing. But I think, you know, just for me, it's been a journey in my mind, breaking the way that I used to think about family and conventionality. And for me, again, I'm privileged to be in a place where I see examples around. me, including, as I mentioned, my colleague who is raising two kids by herself, that it indeed is possible. And you've got to figure out what is the journey, what is the kind of family,

the kind of partnership. Now, for Rachna, a big reason behind freezing her eggs was to have that option to have a child if she ever wanted to, somewhere down the line. From our survey results, it was quite clear that biological reasons, prolonging their fertility so that they could have a choice when they decided to have a kid, when they were ready, was very important. A total of 19 women told us that this was the reason why they would freeze their eggs. Independence is something that our survey respondents really valued. Again, just to remind you, when we conducted this survey, we went in thinking that the main reason women would choose to freeze their eggs

was to buy time to be able to achieve professional success. So one of the questions we asked them was to really, rank in order of importance. Professional success, independence, work-life balance and family. Now, we recognise that this was a tricky question because some of the options like independence were pretty weak. But we wanted to understand what women valued most. And surprisingly, independence was ranked number one

by a majority of the women who took our survey. Family was at number two on the list for most women and professional success was at number three. Now, in this context, it would be fair to say that for these women, egg freezing is independence. It allows them to take charge of their fertility, their body, and it would let them intentionally decide when and if they want to have children. But when it comes to the decision to eventually thaw their frozen eggs, a majority of these women that took our survey said finding the right partner would play a big role in

determining when it happens. A total of 40 women said finding a suitable partner was number one on their list of priorities when they decided to eventually thaw their eggs. Financial security and accomplishing their goals were also up there, while reaching an ideal age was bottom of the list of priorities for most of these women. So, while there are exceptions like Rajna who go in prepared for the potential solo motherhood, partnership still matters to most women. So what happens to the mating gap?

Right, so Masha in your book, you quote a scholar named John Berger, and here's a man who's written extensively about modern dating and just how complicated it is. In fact, he also goes ahead and acknowledges that this meeting gap does exist, right? He then goes ahead and suggests ways to deal with it. And he says you can do it in three ways, right? Let me read this out for you guys. Number one, either educate men. number two, encourage women to move to more women-friendly states, whatever that means.

Or number three, encourage women to go ahead and date men who aren't as educated or accomplished as they are. Basically, that would be an unequal partnership. Now, I want to focus on that third option, because in a country like India, that option is really complicated, right? Yeah, so this is really getting into the heart of the matter here. Yeah, so John Berger, an economic journalist, wrote this really important book for me. It was called Datanomics, how the lopsided numbers game affects dating or something, the subtitle. But it was about this lopsided numbers game. And what does he mean?

He basically just used U.S. census data to look at educational achievement and the differences between men and women. And he showed stunningly that American women have been doing much better in terms of higher education, going to university and four-year colleges, you know, getting university educated. They've been increasing for decades to the point where we have many more American women going to university now than we do American men. There's been increasing media attention and a couple of prominent scholars who are saying we need to care about the fact that men are not doing well. The minority American male is excelling at the highest levels of achievement, but the most, majority, the modal American male is slipping out of education and labor markets. And John Berger called it the man deficit. He said there is a university educated man deficit in America and an

oversupply of university educated women. And so, you know, you're right. He proposed these three solutions. He said, you know, either, you know, women are going to have to move to parts of the country where there are more educated men, although sometimes that's very problematic. And And, you know, he said women are going to have to really reconsider who they're going to partner with. And he promoted this thing called mixed-collar mating, you know, women with educations, with university educations, you know, marrying men, working class men, men who were plumbers and electricians, you know, men who are not as educated as they were. And actually in my study, I did find women who had made that decision.

I have some really powerful stories of women who were found, happily found, partners who were less educated than they were. And so, you know, what are you going to do if there are huge gaps in educational levels between men and women? And we know that this is a global phenomenon. In every continent around the world, with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa, women are out-matured, and outgraduating men from universities all over the world. And so going back to the point in a place like India where, you know, it's really important to try to find somebody, as you said, either equal to you or maybe more accomplished than you are.

That's what in anthropology we call hypergamy or mating up, marrying up. If that's sort of the tradition, you know, what are you going to do as a woman doing the opposite, which is called hypogamy or mating down or marrying down, it doesn't make people comfortable. And, you know, John Berger said, honestly, these kinds of differences, it's just not common. People from different social class backgrounds and profoundly different educational backgrounds, you don't see a lot of mating across those kinds of boundaries. And so this really brings up a huge issue about, you know, educational achievement of women around the world. women are doing really well. They're soaring around the world educationally.

But it is creating certain problems in different societies if women who are highly educated are therefore unable to find committed partners. Actually, you know, Marsha, what you're saying about hypogamy is very interesting. Now, just to make it clear to our listeners, hypogamy is basically when you cannot find an equal partner. So you have to kind of settle down with somebody who is lesser accompanies. So, you know, you're right about that, Marsha. Even in India, you know, as more and more women, of course, it's nowhere near the level as it is in Western society. We are still seeing a rise in hypogamy and hypergamy, which is what we are so used to as a society, as a culture, right, where women are always marrying men who are more educated or better accomplished than them. That is kind of changing. And now this, but the thing is the, this right, this right. in hypogamy here in India is it's mainly educational. So, you know, it does not mean that gender barriers have really drastically changed or,

you know, because it is really complicated here, right? And actually, I wanted to ask you, because you spent so much time researching Arab society and gender relations there. And because we have more in parallel with Arab society than with Western society, right? Are there, you know, are there any kind of, you know, common consequences that you could see or predict with women taking more control of their reproductive rights and their fertility in, you know, countries like India? Yeah, it's interesting. I just want to say, having checked the statistics from the World Bank for India, there are 11% more Indian women in higher education than there are men. That is the latest statistics. So, you know, this issue of sort of educational disparities and the, you know, and the growing differences between men and women, it's pertinent to India as well and other parts of South Asia.

But, yeah, you know, I realize, you know, partnerships are complicated everywhere, I will say, but there are different kinds of complications in different societies, right? And, you know, in the Middle East, for example, you rarely see marriages across sectarian or religious lines, for example. I mean, they do happen in countries like Lebanon, which is a very multisectarian society. But, you know, people don't, you know, generally speaking, do not marry across religious lines. And, you know, other sort of social status is it really matter depending on. It's almost the same future. It's quite similar. Right, right.

And also, you know, just, I mean, in some parts, it's tribal, you know, tribal structures. People have to marry within certain tribal lineages. You know, so every society has sort of rules around who's an appropriate mate for you, right? And I'm going to say that in the United States, we don't really, a lot of those sorts of barriers have broken down to some degree, but not completely, right? and it just was really interesting to me that in this study, I mean, I'm going to speak about the egg freezing study. The majority of women were already in their late 30s. They didn't have a partner. And so it brought up questions of like, who is an appropriate partner for me?

Am I going to try to be with somebody who isn't what I thought I was supposed to be with, you know, with? the kind of man who I never imagined that I would be with, am I going to do that? Am I going to think about that? And so some women really thought about it and said, it's okay, it doesn't matter. I'm looking for a kind person who is wonderful to me, loves me, and shares my goals.

And so I think women are taking, you know, some bold steps and sort of reassessing mating, if you will. So basically the whole game of dating and relationships is in a bit of a flux. In the US, several accomplished, well-educated women have recognised that they won't get what they need from quote-unquote equal men, so they are dating down. But here in India, it is a whole other ballgame.

It takes one conversation with a single woman to understand just how difficult it is to find a partner, especially if you are older and looking to settle down. So it makes sense that some of these women are thinking about freezing their eggs or just going ahead and doing it. But again, it's not like anybody can go ahead and do it. It is an expensive procedure and it is in many ways a first world solution to this partner problem.

You're not just paying lakhs of rupees to actually freeze your eggs, you're also paying to store them in an egg bank for when you decide to eventually thaw them. The procedure alone can cost up to 3 lakh rupees here in India with an additional cost of up to 25,000 annually to store your eggs. In the U.S. and many other Western countries, it is even more expensive, way more expensive. Yet, for most of the women, Marcia, interviewed, it was worth it. More than 90% of women in my study said that they were glad they had done it.

They had many sorts of comments. I have a huge table in one of the chapters of my book with a sort of positive comments, the way women thought helping them in various ways. And, you know, for them, it really, first of all, it was a way to sort of preserve the potential to have children. If you preserve the eggs when you're, say, 32 years old, and you go back if you're 42 years old to use those eggs, you are using your biologically much younger eggs,

you know, higher quality eggs. And they said, you know, it was the one thing I could do, you know, given the resources I had to do something for myself, it gave me profound psychological relief. I didn't feel this pressure of the, you know, clock ticking away on my shoulders. I felt like I invested in myself. I felt like I bought myself a little bit of a safety net.

I took the pressure off of dating. I'm not looking at every man as the potential father of my children. It was just like a huge pressure relief on women. And a lot of women just thought, you know, being interested in the fact that this is like a new scientific development. It's amazing that it can be done, that eggs can now be frozen. it gave them a sense of optimism. So there were many, you know, over 200 sort of things that women said about why they appreciated egg freezing and that it gave them a sense of taking some kind of control of their reproductive destinies.

Right. Marsha, can we come back to India again for a moment? You know, the fertility market here is booming. We know that, I mean, there is an IVF clinic at every corner, every nook of every city, town. it's basically all over the place and of course it is IVF that is huge here because again we are a fairly conventional society that believes in marriage

and we know that egg freezing is one of the steps of the IVF process itself and you know I kind of want to point out here that compared to the rest of the world egg freezing is super cheap in India like you were telling us in the US you said I think it comes up to around $30,000 in India it's about $5,000 in total

So, you know, my question is, what happens when a country like India, like ours, becomes the fertility capital of the world? Yes, I mean, India is going to be a place where people from Western countries and other, you know, Asian countries will come to freeze their eggs because it's simply much less expensive. I mean, we know that that happens certainly when surrogacy was allowed, you know, when it was international, commercial, gestational surrogacy. India was the hub of that. And we know, I think India claims the highest number of IVF clinics in the world for any country. As you pointed out, I think there are more than 1,500 IVF clinics in India, which outstrips any other country, you know, by many fold, actually. So, yeah, it is, you know, India, I think, prides itself on being this sort of global fertility hub. And, yes, I firmly predict that there will be travel and traffic, repro travel to India.

for egg freezing. And then the question is, how are you going to move those gametes around, right? You know, how are you going to get your stored eggs? You're going to have to have them cured someplace else. So that's going to be a problem getting the eggs out of India if you want to use them. Right. But, Marsha, since you brought it up, let's actually talk about thawing and actually using these eggs, right?

Have you also spoken to women who, you know, at some point went ahead and thawed their frozen eggs? And what kind of prompted them to take that step, right? Was it when they finally found that perfect partner? or, you know, was it something else entirely? Interesting follow-through, though, to say something about, do women go back to use their eggs? Well, so far, the studies that have been done globally

really show that a lot of those frozen eggs are still in storage. Women haven't come back to use their frozen eggs. And, you know, the technology is only about 12 years old. So we've only had about 12 years of experience with egg freezing around the world. But, you know, why are women not coming back? for the frozen eggs, it could be one of two things that women find their partner, their magical unicorn partner. They find somebody and they end up, you know, getting pregnant naturally and they don't

need to return for the frozen eggs. But what some research is suggesting is really the other thing, which is that women aren't coming back because they didn't find their partner. They were waiting for that mate who never appeared. And they don't want to use their frozen eggs because they never really. intended to, you know, have a child on their own. And one thing that egg freezing does present for women is the possibility of so-called single mother by choice or being a solo mother and just, you know, using the eggs, frozen eggs, you know, having them inseminated with donor sperm and just

going ahead and becoming a single mom. And that is a growing phenomenon in the United States and in parts of Europe, for example, where women are just doing solo motherhood, you know, through IVF or through assisted reproduction. And there were some women in my study who decided to do that. It's like, you know, I didn't find the partner. I still want to be pregnant and be a parent, so I'm going to do it on my own. So it's a new reproductive order out there. There's a new world order of reproduction that's going on around the world.

And I think egg freezing is also, in some senses, paving the way. way to that decision among women. Forget the mate, forget the partner. I didn't find the right person, but I'm going to do this motherhood project on my own. A new reproductive order is actually a really good way to put it. And Rachna is a great example of just that. She opened up about the whole egg freezing experience, the pain, the trepidition, the mood swings. But for her too, in the end, it was worth it. In fact, Rachna, you know, I was a good. I was a lot of, you know, I was a lot of was actually going through your Instagram and you have some really helpful stories about the whole process that you went to. And I saw that you actually ended up doing two rounds of egg freezing,

right? Like, why, why did you do it the second time? What, what prompted you? It's multiple things. Um, but one was, if I decided to have my own kids, I was very open to having a sibling for the kid to have a sibling. I've grown up with a brother and it's been the best part of growing up honestly. And I knew that just given the rates of 20, 25% success, actually, it's much less than that, but clinics claim about 20, 25%, I would say it's more one in six, that did my number suffice, and I didn't think so. I also knew that if I were to do it, if I were to do another round of X freezing, it's probably going to be in the next year, again, just given that at the age of 31,

I'm at 14, how many would I potentially get if I were to do it two, three, four years later, much likely, much less, much fewer. So I decided the following year to do a second round. And I would encourage everyone who is thinking about second rounds or two rounds to do it as soon as you can. So as I mentioned that, you know, when I did my AMH test the first time, I had a number like 29, which is very high. And I was like, oh my God, I'm so fertile. I'm amazing. I can have kids at like 55 or whatever.

But the second year when I did my ANH test, so this is barely a year after, my fertility, my AMH number went down to something like 11 or 12. And again, this was a reality check and this was like, how on earth did my fertility just drop in a year? And I was like, okay, I'm glad that I've taken the decision to do it now and ever. Thank you for listening to this episode. We want to know what you thought about it. Please feel free to write to us with your feedback, suggestions, absolutely anything at all. Our WhatsApp number is 897-1-0837. We will also add the number to our show notes.

Today's episode was hosted and produced by Rahal Philippos and I, Sinkta Sharma, and it was edited by Rajiv Sien.