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Penelope Trunk Can Also Bite Me
Mar. 5th, 2008 09:40 amThis article appeared on Boston.com on March 2. I missed it until yesterday.
It's not that Penelope Trunk has no points: female fertility does not last forever, there is no perfect time to have a baby, life is unpredictable. It's just that then she goes off the deep end.
There's, for starts, the suggestion that young women dedicate the same energy to their search for romantic and child-rearing partners that they do to their careers. Trunk seems to have missed the fact that not only do people of all kinds invest huge amounts of energy into searching for mates, but also that this search requires a much lighter touch than career building. You can carpet bomb the job market with resumes, call aggressively, and sell yourself into the job of your dreams, but these tactics don't work so well when you're dating.
She goes on imply that if you wait one minute past your thirty-second birthday to breed, you'd better hire a gestational surrogate.
And then there's this:
"Freeze your eggs. If you don't want to exert control over your life by searching for a husband, how about saving some good eggs? The Wall Street Journal reported that even though it's actually not proven technology, women are signing up in droves for egg-freezing services. The procedure is expensive - up to $14,000 - but often that's easily affordable for women who will spend their most fertile years climbing corporate ladders."
She caps off by suggesting that, if you don't have ethical issues with the technology, you should consider it. (Undiscussed: the exact services purchased for that "easily affordable" fourteen smackers, which probably don't include storage fees and certainly don't include the costs of thawing or IVF in the event that you want to use those stored cells.)
I don't have ethical issues with the technology of egg freezing. I do have ethical issues with encouraging people to spend large sums of money on invasive, risky medical procedures THAT MIGHT BE USELESS.
Thank you very much, Penelope, for doing your part to support biotech in Massachusetts. Make them slap an advertorial label on your writing next time, 'kay?
It's not that Penelope Trunk has no points: female fertility does not last forever, there is no perfect time to have a baby, life is unpredictable. It's just that then she goes off the deep end.
There's, for starts, the suggestion that young women dedicate the same energy to their search for romantic and child-rearing partners that they do to their careers. Trunk seems to have missed the fact that not only do people of all kinds invest huge amounts of energy into searching for mates, but also that this search requires a much lighter touch than career building. You can carpet bomb the job market with resumes, call aggressively, and sell yourself into the job of your dreams, but these tactics don't work so well when you're dating.
She goes on imply that if you wait one minute past your thirty-second birthday to breed, you'd better hire a gestational surrogate.
And then there's this:
"Freeze your eggs. If you don't want to exert control over your life by searching for a husband, how about saving some good eggs? The Wall Street Journal reported that even though it's actually not proven technology, women are signing up in droves for egg-freezing services. The procedure is expensive - up to $14,000 - but often that's easily affordable for women who will spend their most fertile years climbing corporate ladders."
She caps off by suggesting that, if you don't have ethical issues with the technology, you should consider it. (Undiscussed: the exact services purchased for that "easily affordable" fourteen smackers, which probably don't include storage fees and certainly don't include the costs of thawing or IVF in the event that you want to use those stored cells.)
I don't have ethical issues with the technology of egg freezing. I do have ethical issues with encouraging people to spend large sums of money on invasive, risky medical procedures THAT MIGHT BE USELESS.
Thank you very much, Penelope, for doing your part to support biotech in Massachusetts. Make them slap an advertorial label on your writing next time, 'kay?
