Eggs on Ice

Ronald Dworkin—not the famous legal theorist, but a medical doctor and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute—writes in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about the development of technology that will allow women to freeze unfertilized eggs when they’re young so that they can use them to become pregnant later in life. Dworkin foresees a world in which women could have some of their eggs harvested and frozen in their twenties, spend a couple of decades building a career, and then use the eggs to become pregnant in their forties or fifties. Just as cheap, effective artificial contraceptives allowed women to be as cavalier about sex as men are, so now the technology to freeze eggs will allow women delay reproduction as long as men can. Assuming the cost of freezing eggs will be low enough, Dworkin is probably right that we’ll see quite a lot of this in the decades ahead. The full text of Dworkin’s article is here (subscription required).