To wonder why more parents don't encourage daughters to freeze eggs?

Not everyone agrees with the morality of it. I don't.

YABVU. Because it’s basically a con - the chances of it actually working with defrosted eggs aren’t that high. Plus the IVF you put a young woman through to yield the eggs can cause ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (proven fatal to some women), also bowel perforations, abscesses and long term damage. The long term impact of injecting yourself with strong fertility drugs to overstimulate the ovaries to mature the eggs hasn’t been widely studied.

Then there’s paying thousands in storage costs to clinics for 20 years, then what do you do with leftover eggs? Then there’s clinics who offer you a discount if you give up half your eggs - meaning a pipeline of eggs they sell on at profit, and someone else raises your genetic child.

You would be mad to do this. Please, do not encourage your daughters to do it and don’t do it yourself.

Darling daughter not only will you be paying off a student loan but you will be paying storage on your frozen eggs , shopping for Danish sperm and being ghosted on dating apps oh and we are going to alter your hormone levels to make you recreationally available for sex. Next you’ll be expecting us to pay for an abortion when the guy who is a sperm donor on the side isn’t ready to settle down because his dating age range gives him more of a biological window oh domestic load has no status so that will be outsourced to someone lower down the economic ladder and surrogacy if your body isn’t on ice enough .

Because thankfully my parents didn't view me as a baby making machine,

Cos i dont see a need to push invasive and expensive medical procedures
She has expressed never wanting kids - why would i undermine her wants on a 'maybe'
Its her body and her choice - saying 'here, freeze your eggs just in case' is as good as saying 'you dont know what you want, i know better, you will want babies'

I find it odd anyone WOULD offer their kids this without an expressed desire for help in the area

What???

Ok, so I'm a 41 year old man, with a 17 year old daughter, and my answer to your question @alesndra would be "Huh, is egg freezing a thing that exists? Why would an 18 - 25 year old need to freeze eggs?"

Having read the thread I presume it's in case she doesn't meet someone, or isn't in a financial position to have a kid until her late 30s, but that's a hell of a leap surely. Admittedly I live in a fairly cheap area of the country, but I don't know anyone who wanted kids who didn't have a partner and hadn't bought a house by 30ish.

And surely the money put towards egg freezing would be better off used as a deposit etc., rather than some remote hypothetical that might never be needed.

Seems a most odd position to take!

I can’t comment as have made my own way in life with minimal intervention from parents from 16.

I did look into this procedure personally with a view to funding it myself when younger, but it didn’t seem a good option at the time so didn’t do it. No regrets.

Will of course support if there’s genuine need but think good parenting is more about fostering independence so wouldn’t be doing this (or any of the other things your DPs chucked money at) for DC.

WTF
are you seriously saying that !!!!

Because it is nothing to do with them and would be a wildly inappropriate attempt to coerce another adult into a likely unnecessary invasive medical procedure.

Thanks! That change totally passed me by, I'm so pleased it's changed, it seemed quite a cruel requirement, having listened to a programme on the radio about people affected by it.

You can store them for 55 years now

Because it would involve assuming your daughter wanted a child, wasn’t going to conceive one via the ordinary route, and then spending a lot of money in a complex, invasive medical procedure with a not-great chance of success, in pursuit of a goal it’s far from certain the giftee even wanted?

Do you know that you can only freeze eggs for 10 years? So if a girl got this as an 18th birthday present the eggs would be destroyed when she's 28, maybe long before she's ready to use them. But can you imagine the stress that this would cause? It's not because of quality, it's just an arbitrary date.

My thought exactly.

Do you actually need IVF? As your post makes it sound like you choose it? And if you are still dependent on your parents in your 40s why didn’t you have a child earlier or why are you not self sufficient yet?

@twopercent it has quite good success rates now and personally I didn’t find the process traumatic at all.

but as the only person on this thread who seems to have frozen their eggs no one seems to be listening to my own experience 😂

as I said, there are of course very real health risks that should not be ignored. But a lot of the emotional trauma of IVF comes from the heartache of experiencing infertility - which is a different context to egg freezing

but whilst it was positive for me - I think there are bigger questions about its wide spread use

When you look at the number of women who actually want IVF compared to the number of women who conceive normally plus those who don't want children, the chances your expensive, painful 'gift' is probably going to be a waste of money. Also I wouldn't have volunteered for it as a teenager /20 year old even if it had been offered!

If my parents had “gifted” me a round of egg freezing, I’d have told them to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.

Creepy and telling their daughter what she should do with her body. So weird.

Because it shouldn’t be the norm perhaps??? !!! 🤦🏽‍♀️🤦🏽‍♀️🤦🏽‍♀️

@alesndra I wish my parents had encouraged/offered me this. In my 20s it didn’t even cross my mind. Now, with poor egg quality and failed ivf attempts, I so desperately wish I had frozen my eggs when I was younger.

At the point when your parents were buying your flat you weren't thinking, I'd rather they pay for my eggs to be frozen, nor when they paid for your wedding, it's likely your circumstances now are making you think about the younger eggs that could have been frozen.
I think if that had been offered to me instead of a flat, I'd think they were bonkers.
You're being subjective rather than objective

Egg freezing is a last resort to give a small amount of hope, in cases of cancer and similar. It isn't a life style choice. It is very unpleasant and rarely works. It would be an irresponsible thing to encourage. HTH

I have had 3 egg retrievals. Luckily now have my little boy and another on the way.
My memory of all the injecting etc day in day out and the procedure itself is nothing short of traumatic. This procedure for many is done as a last resort/no alternative. I cannot imagine doing it all as a starting point or a 'just in case' to then find out it was totally unecessary.

Lots of reasons spring to mind. It’s a lot of money for something that is more likely to be unneeded than needed. It’s a bit weird and handmaid’s tale-y to focus so intensely on fertility when women are young and probably still deciding about whether they even want children. It’s applying pressure on daughters to undergo an invasive medical procedure because their parents want to preserve their fertility options. It’s more about what the parents want than what their daughter wants.