Kent Law School\u2019s Dr Ruth Cain, an expert in the personal politics of parenting, has commented on the recent announcement that Facebook and Apple have offered to freeze the eggs of their female employees by saying:<\/p>\n
\u2018The recently-reported offer by Facebook and Apple to freeze its female employees\u2019 eggs, supposedly in order to provide them with more flexibility as to when to have a family, is an at best inadequate and at worst gimmicky response to the very real problems of balancing work and childcare responsibilities.<\/p>\n
\u2018This burden still primarily falls on working women rather than men. Despite recent legal changes to allow the sharing of parental leave among other measures, women tend to do the bulk of childcare and household work whether they work full time or not. Leaving aside the rarely-reported facts that egg-harvesting and freezing is an invasive and sometimes dangerous medical procedure, and that reproductive techniques involving frozen eggs have a very low success rate in terms of babies born (around 12.5% to date<\/a>), futuristic-sounding egg-freezing procedures provide only an illusion of choice and flexibility.<\/p>\n \u2018Delaying childbearing while pinning hopes on new and unreliable technology is a very poor alternative to real and effective work-life balance policies for both mothers and fathers. If this is all that top-ranking companies have to offer their female employees, then what hope for women working for employers with fewer resources?<\/p>\n ‘Egg-freezing is simply not a realistic solution for working women, their partners and families.\u2019<\/p>\n