I have been planning to post about Apple and Facebook’s decisions to offer their women employees free egg freezing services to allow them to delay having children. As a friend of mine put it, the policy is just about keeping younger women pounding away at their computers–youth being highly valued by Big Technology.

But then I read my wife’s colleague (and our friend) Caille Millner’s righteous rant against the policies of these proudly politically progressive companies in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. And I decided, heck, Caille did a better job criticizing than I would, so I’ll let her do most of the work. From, “Egg Freezing Perk from Apple and Facebook is Creepy:”

Why offer this at all?
Most of the employees at these companies are paid well enough to afford egg-freezing on their own, should they wish to go that route. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other family-friendly benefits that these companies could have offered women. (It’s worth noting that the option to delay childbearing was offered only to women; there were no free sperm bank visits for men. That’s a statement in itself about who these executives believe must remain responsible for the weight of family life.)
They could have offered on-site day care. (Currently, Facebook offers full-time on-site day care only for dogs; Apple offers none for dogs or humans.)

Boom!

They could have offered to ease negotiations about flexible work schedules for new parents.
Above all, they could have offered transparent salary scales and guaranteed pay equity. Women feel far better about starting a family when they know they won’t be penalized, either economically or in terms of career opportunity, for doing so.

Pow! Take that Koch Brothers Apple and Facebook

More seriously and potentially consequentially for women, Millner correctly notes that egg harvesting can be an onerous and dangerous procedure:

[E]gg-freezing [is] an intrusive procedure with a limited success rate. It’s a complicated, physically grueling process that provides no guarantees about future parenthood.
Because egg-freezing is such a major procedure, a few of the media reports called the announcements “creepy.” Indeed they are.

Allow me to be more specific: Egg harvesting requires massive hormonal whiplashing of the ovaries so that they release twenty eggs rather than the usual one.

Extraction involves anesthesia and the insertion of a collection needle through the vaginal wall. No fun.

Side effects can include ovary swelling, infection, infertility, increased chance of cancer, and in rare cases, even death.

To which, I will add: When it comes time for the eggs to be thawed and children gestated–it will also be exploit-a-destitute-surrogate time!

Sure, eggs can be thawed, IVF embryos implanted, and babies born when women are above normal child-bearing years. But it’s more difficult.

Consequently, if free egg freezing policies spread–and with “healthcare’s” definition ever-expanding, don’t think that intrusive Obamacare bureaucrats won’t insist eventually that insurance pay for it–women from the developing world will do much of the actual child-bearing.

These “gestational carriers”–in the IVF industry’s dehumanizing parlance–often are kept in quasi-slave conditions including forced to undergo Caesarians.Oh, and if a baby doesn’t pass eugenic muster, then the surrogate may be pushed to have an abortion or the baby abandoned by the womb renters–something that is already happening.

Millner is absolutely correct. The egg freezing perk is a misogynist wolf in feminist sheep’s clothing with–to mix my metaphors–many long tentacles.

Read Caille’s whole piece: It’s well worth your time. And it saves me from idiotic comments about how a man has no right to express an opinion about the reproductive lives of women.