Corporations need to butt out of family planning and become more family friendly

Ambitious women shouldn’t have to wait to become mothers until a company says they’ve earned it

This article in the Telegraph discusses the potential flaws in the recent plan for tech companies to offer egg freezing for female employees. I find it really disturbing that big corporations like Apple and Facebook are getting in on the fertility act. It really sucks that ambitious women often have to choose between becoming mothers and nurturing their career – in today’s competitive working world, it’s nigh on impossible to do both well.

But it is a real life dichotomy that needs to be solved by society, not by big corporations hungry to reap the best years of a women’s life, leaving her physically incapable of procreating without their generous helping hand. Tech companies offering to fund egg freezing for women smacks of upside down thinking, the sort of thinking that companies like the big four tech companies are famed. But the fact is, all the technology in the world isn’t going to solve the conundrum that nature thinks younger women make better mothers.

The problem is that freezing your eggs doesn’t solve the problems that nature’s more or less perfect system has had millennia to think through. Issues like still having your own parent in good enough health to be on hand to help, rather than nearing their own need for additional care and support or not around anymore at all; the fact that childcare is a marathon, not a sprint. Motherhood takes it out of you for decades, not just a couple of months, or years, and being in good health (youth is a fairly good indicator for reasonable health) is necessary not just when you conceive, but for a good many years afterwards. The fact that pregnancy hormones are tough enough to cope with at the “right” age, let alone adding an additional barrage through IVF, or the fact that older women may be more likely to have cancer cells lurking unseen that these hormones may then romp around the body at speed. This is a real risk – I’ve seen it first hand in a woman who wasn’t more than 38, but it is one that nature’s preference for younger mothers generally avoids.

How about supporting younger women to become mothers rather than penalising women twice by making them wait until their bodies aren’t so much up for it?

Tech companies offering to fund egg freezing are missing the point about raising their female headcount. We want a working culture that enables us to have children at the right time for our bodies as well as our careers, but the two don’t go hand in hand in today’s super competitive working culture.

How about funding additional childcare, and championing more family friendly hours for all staff? This would mean parents (of either gender) can take time off as and when they need to, rather than giving younger women who may want to have children the additional burden of guilt that they are not putting their own desire (and let’s face it, biological imperative) for children on ice until they have paid for the “right to breed”, by dedicating their best years to the firm that will have to fork out for their maternity leave?

When I was a pregnant graduate trainee, I knew all about being made to feel like I hadn’t earned the right to breed, despite being at peak fertility at 25, having giving the company many many weeks of unpaid “work experience” in return for a scholarship. I felt so uncomfortable arriving to my job pregnant five months pregnant, having finished a post grad qualification, and a year of work experience elsewhere – and I never returned when my maternity leave was over, (work experience doesn’t count towards your statutory maternity payment, I discovered) knowing the expectations on me as a junior would be too much to manage, and the pay wouldn’t cover the childcare, a move that harmed my career for the next five years. But it was a choice I felt I had to swallow to have my baby when my body was up for it, so to speak.

Or how about taking maternity policy out of the hands of fundamentally oppositional businesses altogether, and making it a ring-fenced state benefit of workable proportions that gives women the opportunity to breed when they damn well please without hampering their career, rather than this rather patronising belief peddled by politicians and right wing newspapers that generous state funded maternity and childcare encourages feckless breeding among work shy women. Who can afford to be “feckless” about children these days, or work shy for that matter?