Today my newsfeed had a story about how liquid nitrogen malfunction at a fertility clinic in San Francisco may have damaged thousands
of frozen eggs and embryos. This happened within a few days of destruction of nearly 2,000 eggs at a similar but unrelated facility at Cleveland. These two incidents got me thinking about a new argument that didn’t quite
occur to me before when I wrote an article in law school on egg freezing. I wrote about the cons of freezing eggs in general, with a special emphasis on how
taking advantage of employee-sponsored egg-freezing--while seemingly an attractive
choice to beat the biological clock--can ultimately harm women.
I understand that with technological improvement in
cryopreservation, it’s just a matter of time before egg-freezing becomes more
commonplace as an employee benefit. Non only the private sector, but even the
US Army offers egg-freezing benefits to female soldiers these days.
An employee probably cannot sue an employer when a malfunction at a third-party facility, such as the San Francisco and Cleveland
clinics, destroys her frozen eggs. I would assume the employee would have the
right to directly sue the facility for damages (an Ohio couple already sued the Cleveland facility for loss of their embryo). But a lawsuit is not always a comprehensive solution.
The
emotional cost of losing one’s frozen eggs/embryos could be many times more
than the monetary damages that you can get from a lawsuit, especially if the
woman’s chance of producing healthy eggs had declined significantly since
freezing her eggs previously. Even if the woman is still biologically able to produce more
eggs for freezing, it does not change the fact that each attempt at egg freezing
takes a physical toll because of hormone therapy and other medical procedure
that are involved. For example, a woman may suffer from ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome during the hormone therapy, that can pose serious health risk.
At the end of the day, the choice remains with women to
freeze their eggs. But incidents like the cryo-failure in the fertility clinics in San Francisco and Cleveland should be a wake-up call for women to realize that they cannot fully hedge the risk associated with "timing motherhood" just by
freezing their eggs.
