In addition to many benefits and incentives people receive in their high paid jobs at established workplaces, there’s now a new trend of offering fertility preservation allowance to both women and men staff. Specially the Egg Freezing, which is currently the most attractive feature for female employees who don’t want age to become an obstacle in their fertility.
Started from Facebook, more than a dozen of big tech companies are now offering benefits that pay for their female employees to freeze their fertility eggs for later use. Women in their 30s, who want to focus on their career first, rather than becoming a mother, can easily avail this beneficial opportunity, and keep their fertility on freeze until they are ready to take the responsibility of motherhood.
Egg freezing, also called oocyte cryopreservation in medical terms, is a surgical process in which a woman’s eggs (oocytes) are extracted, frozen and stored as a method to preserve reproductive ability and potential of a woman.
As women in their late 30s and 40s face difficulties in conceiving babies naturally, fertility preservation can help. Egg freezing, as research suggests, is a safe and effective method for prolonging the reproductive age. After getting her eggs out and frozen, the woman can have them fertilized and transferred back to the uterus as embryos to facilitate a pregnancy, up till the age of 50.
Although chances can get lesser as the age of the woman grows but research showed that it works most of the time as it has been more than 30 years since the first human birth from a frozen oocyte was reported, back in 1986, the procedure is now more advanced and radical.
Egg freezing costs at least $10,000 a round but as now the tech-giants companies like Facebook, Apple, Google, Yahoo etc are offering it as a benefit, the female staff is highly considering to avail the option. “After a couple of years at Facebook, I learned the social network was expanding its family-planning benefits to offer everything from adoption assistance to paid surrogacy to egg freezing. That’s unusual. Most US companies don’t even offer paid maternity leave, much less egg freezing. Those types of benefits are expensive”, says Leslie Kennedy, a Facebook employee, in a report to CNET.
It was the Facebook first which announced the fertility preservation allowance for its staff members, in 2014, which encouraged other high tech companies to do the same; Apple started offering the benefit soon after that and then other companies hopped on board too.
The reason behind the popularity of fertility benefit is actually for the own good of the high-tech firms; they want to attract, retain and polish the talented and bright women in their companies. After providing such benefits, they can have a good hold on their best employees.
Motherhood, for all women, is an unavoidable responsibility and almost every woman wants to become a mother one day, but since the reproductive age passes away while women are busy building up their career, it puts them in indecisive position; whether to focus on career or get done with the pregnancy first. Egg Freezing can help them managing the time between their career and family life.