Name: Apple and Facebook will help you freeze your eggs
Uploaded: 2014-10-14
Duration: 2 min
Description: Apple and Facebook will help you freeze your eggs

So the news that Facebook and Apple are offering egg freezing services for their employees is only recently broken and already there's speculation about what it means. There's no speculation however about what the services look like. Up to 20000 dollars in coverage for the pricey procedure which allows women. Freeze eggs and preserve them for future fertilization. NBC reported the story and said the latest in a long list of Silicon Valley perks could be a ploy to attract women to the notoriously male dominated field. It paraphrased a fertility specialist who suggested covering egg freezing can be viewed as a type of payback for women's commitment. Egg freezing, officially known as oocyte cryopreservation, has quickly evolved from an experimental, expensive, and often unsuccessful luxury, to a no longer experimental, still expensive, and slightly less unsuccessful option for women over the past few years. Writer Sarah Elizabeth Richards explained the appeal in a column for the Wall Street Journal last year. Once you land the job and man you want, you can have your frozen eggs shipped to a fertility clinic, hand him a semen collection cup and be on your way to parenthood. You mitigate the risk of birth defects by using younger eggs, and you can carry a baby well into middle age. In that context, it's easy to see why high powered companies like Facebook and Apple would want to offer that option to the equally high powered career oriented women they hope to attract. But there's another way to look at it. The Atlantic points out the egg freezing option could be a sign of a time. Times as more and more women have their eggs frozen, you could also read it as a sign that egg freezing has reached a kind of cultural normalcy. And the Atlantic also pointed to another possibility, that it's just the latest in a long running competition among tech companies to offer more extensive employee benefits than competitors. The lavish benefits of Silicon Valley are well documented with Google as one example. It offers perks such as nap pods wide ranging and free meal options and recreational spaces among others. Whatever the actual motivation NBC reports Facebook has already started offering egg freezing and Apple is set to start doing so in January