Motherhood: Why women choose to freeze their eggs? Females preserve their fertility because they do not consider the men in their lives to be “father material”.
Females preserve their fertility because they do not consider the men in their lives to be ‘father material’
Women do not freeze their eggs because they are too busy focusing on their careers but because the men they meet are not father material, a study has found.
More than 800 women a year in Britain now choose to preserve their fertility by freezing their eggs, which are far healthier when women are young.
It has led to speculation that women are delaying motherhood so they can climb the career ladder.
But the first survey of dozens of women who opted to have their eggs frozen found none had done it for work reasons.
Instead they blamed the reluctance of modern men to settle down and be hands-on fathers, as the reason for their decision.
Many women had boyfriends when they opted for the treatment, but were aware that their current partner would not make a good parent.
PhD student Kylie Baldwin of DeMontford University in Leicester said her research dispelled the myth of the job-focussed woman, putting off motherhood to climb the career ladder.
Speaking at the British Science Festival in Swansea she said: “One of the women said to me that there is this perception that women are freezing their eggs for career reasons, and she said ‘yes I’ve got a great career, but that’s not because I deliberately avoided a relationship, it’s because there was no one at home to go to so I stayed at the office late’.
“A lot of the women were based in large metropolitan cities and they routinely invoked the notion of the difficulty of finding a man who would commit to parenthood.
“Several of these women had been in relationships for years and years and had assumed that those relationships would lead to motherhood but these had ended sometimes over disagreements about whether to have children or not or they felt their partner at the time was not the right person with who to have a child.
“None of the women underwent the procedure for career reasons.”
All the 31 women surveyed were well-educated, middle class, with good jobs who lived in urban areas. The majority also had post-graduate qualifications.
In 2001, 29 women opted to freeze their eggs but since then there has been a sustained increase. The latest statistics show that in 2014, 816 opted to store their eggs for later use — a 25 per cent increase on the previous year.
A recent study by the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA) found that other reasons for freezing eggs include impending medical treatment that may affect fertility — such as chemotherapy for cancer or the risk of injury or death, for instance for a member of the armed forces who is about to be deployed to a war zone.
Ms Baldwin said the decision to freeze eggs was often made by the most maternal of women.
“They want to do parenting properly, they want to do motherhood properly and they think the best way to be the best mother they can be is with a male partner who is equally committed to children,” she said.
“But they also wanted to be at a time in their lives where they could offer their children a good life.
“They wanted to own their home, be stable in their jobs, provide their children with opportunities which perhaps weren’t afforded to them by their own parents.”
They want to do motherhood properly and they think the best way ... is with a male partner who is equally committed to children.” Kylie Baldwin, PhD student conducting research at De Montford University in Leicester