“I just couldn’t find a man I liked enough to have a child with.” Why annalouiesuss froze her eggs
ine years ago I moved from New York City to start a new job in Washington, DC. As excited as I was about my career, I was also curious about jumping into a new dating pool. I was in my early 30s and had just broken up with an older, divorced man – I wanted a child and he didn’t want any more. A friend told me that men in Washington tended to be more interested in settling down than men in New York .
Back then, the only book I could find on the topic, “Motherhood, Rescheduled” by Sarah Elizabeth Richards, had minimal information on the science or success rates . After doing as much research as I could, including chatting to a friend who had frozen her eggs, I scheduled a consultation. But that last minute comes at a different point for men and women. Though male fertility falls with age – a fact which is still relatively little discussed – a woman’s fertility does so earlier and, after her mid-30s, more precipitously. Although the optimal age to conceive remains unchanged – your early 20s – the age at which most people get married is advancing all the time. From the 1940s to the 1970s the average American woman got married at 20; now the average is nearly 29.
Tall and voluptuous, with Betty Boop eyelashes, Michaela reckons she’s dated at least 150 men in the past seven years. She’s tried OKCupid , Jdate , Hinge , Tinder , Bumble , Happ’n and The League, which initially recruited from Ivy League universities . It shouldn’t matter if your date has a degree certificate, but it does if you want kids. According to theBureau of Labour Statistics, workers with a bachelor’s degree earned $1,305 a week in 2020, compared with $781 for those with a high-school diploma. If you want to start a family somewhere like New York, it helps to be rich. The Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank, estimates that child care for an infant in New York costs just over $15,000 a year, on average .
Before the pandemic, American millennials were encouraged to attend “egg-freezing parties” at fertility clinics: events with drinks and snacks where women watch a presentation then get to ask questions. I went to a few of these as a reporter in 2018. The presentations, usually delivered by a clinic’s lead doctor, ranged from slick, monotonously narrated PowerPoints to high-octane spiels that wouldn’t have sounded out of place at a used-car salesroom.
When the eggs had matured to the point where my ovaries were about to release them, I went for a retrieval operation, which happened under general anaesthetic. I woke up about half an hour later slightly woozy, changed but unchanged. Then I settled the bill.
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