Freezing Eggs: Part Deux

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.