By Esther Kim In the face of a dying planet and economic challenges, we millennials are weighing our fertility options and making big choices. Over catch-up lunches back in New York, my Korean American friends, who work in tech and medicine, talked openly and candidly about the process and cost of freezing their eggs and embryos IVF as futureproofing, a form of insurance. Major tech companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft and Apple offer egg freezing to their employees and cover the cost of the procedure, up to $20,000 per employee, as part of their fertility benefit program.
Seoul has even begun to provide egg-freezing subsidies for millennials and Gen Zers this year to reverse the threat of national "extinction." But is freezing eggs on a heating planet akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? Before jumping to this technocratic, capitalist solution, what are the underlying problems? The millennials dilemma The Washington Post summarized my generation's 99 problems. "Hammered by the Great Recession, soaring student debt, precarious gig employment, skyrocketing home prices and the Covid-19 crisis, millennials probably faced more economic headwinds in their childbearing years than any other generation," it said.
Nonetheless, the biological clock waits for no one. Thirty-five is the age in which one apparently becomes a "geriatric mother," so we contemplate the questions, do we want kids at all? Single or with a partner? Who? Can we afford it? And, in my case, as a f.