Apple and Facebook add "Egg freezing" to their employee perks
Posted by: Timothy Weaver on 10/15/2014 11:43 AM
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If you think free meals, on-site childcare and gym memberships were great perks for those hi-tech companies, Apple and Facebook are adding free egg freezing for their female employees.
Oocyte cryopreservation, or egg freezing, is the process of extracting, freezing, and storing a woman's eggs, to later be thawed, fertilized, and transferred to the uterus as embryos.
It is not a cheap procedure. According to NBC News, charges come to at least $10,000 per round, plus $500 or more annually for storage. Both Apple and Facebook will cover the costs up to $20,000.
A paper by health care law and bioethics expert Seema Mohapatra calls the process "putting a Band-Aid on the problem of how difficult it is for women to have a career and raise a family concurrently. Compared with setting up support networks or effective maternity and childcare policies to ease the burden on women who choose to have children according to their biological clock, egg freezing seems to be an easier solution for employers to advocate."
Egg freezing, though still very new, boasts "significant success" according to the NYU Fertility Center.
Oocyte cryopreservation, or egg freezing, is the process of extracting, freezing, and storing a woman's eggs, to later be thawed, fertilized, and transferred to the uterus as embryos.
It is not a cheap procedure. According to NBC News, charges come to at least $10,000 per round, plus $500 or more annually for storage. Both Apple and Facebook will cover the costs up to $20,000.
A paper by health care law and bioethics expert Seema Mohapatra calls the process "putting a Band-Aid on the problem of how difficult it is for women to have a career and raise a family concurrently. Compared with setting up support networks or effective maternity and childcare policies to ease the burden on women who choose to have children according to their biological clock, egg freezing seems to be an easier solution for employers to advocate."
Egg freezing, though still very new, boasts "significant success" according to the NYU Fertility Center.
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