You’ve probably heard of single women in their mid/late 30s freezing their eggs for later use. In Tuesday’s Washington Post, Gillian E. St. Lawrence talked about taking this idea somewhat further.

St. Lawrence is 30. She’s been happily married for 8 years. She and her husband both want children. But they don’t want them now. And they don’t want to gamble with the decline in fertility rates looming around the corner. So instead, they’ve opted to create and freeze a handful of embryos, to be implanted at some future date when they feel more “ready”.

So, what does it take to be “ready” to have a baby?

For St. Lawrence and her husband, it means having time, which means having money. Enough money to be able to stop working, or at least stop working so much: “We both want very reduced work hours so we never have to look at day care or a nanny.” The two clearly want to be hands-on parents, which is obviously a good thing. But if St. Lawrence is saying it’s not okay to have kids if you can’t spend as much time with them as you want, what does that say about 99.98% of parents in the world? Should we all have engineered our conceptions, and lives, differently? St. Lawrence’s quest for optimal parenthood may be personal, but there’s a broader implication.

Here are two people who, relative to the rest of the country—not to mention the rest of the world—are pretty well set up to be parents.  So why do they feel they’ll need to wait at least another decade to get to that point?

The idea that parenthood should wait until the time is “right” is a common affliction of our generation, especially across a certain socio-economic swath.  I can relate to Gillian St. Lawrence’s anxiety. I remember feeling worried about running out of time, my mother reminding me of my biological clock as I sobbed after a breakup at the ripe old age of 25.  I was sure I’d be infertile by the time I got around to trying to get pregnant. I was lucky I was wrong. But even with my worries, I didn’t seriously consider trying to have kids earlier. I had no idea what it meant to be ready to have children, but I was convinced I was nowhere near it. Plus there was too much to do, and everybody knows that once you have kids, your life is over.  I now know that it isn’t. But I also know that the lack of cultural support can make things pretty brutal. So people feel like they need to prepare themselves for the onslaught, and line up a huge artillery—Million bucks in the bank? Check. Sufficient quantity of wild oats sown? Check. Sufficient time with partner before romance vaporizes? Check—before even embarking on the parenting project.     Gillian St. Lawrence is feeling the pressure. She’s afraid she won’t be able get all those ducks in a row before the clock runs out.  So she came up with a solution. It’s radical and control-freakish and maybe a little crazy. But I can understand how she got there.

I’m sure there are many people who will be dismayed by this story from a moral or religious perspective. I personally believe people should be able to plan their families based on their own priorities. I’m just not sure how I feel about St. Lawrence’s priorities. I’m worried that her equation is based on faulty calculations, numerical and otherwise. She seems to take it as a given that her plan will be successful, to the point of promoting “Preservation IVF” to other women as a way of pursuing “Freedom from our fertility clocks“. Banking embryos now is an insurance policy, she says, against “Desperation IVF”, which, apparently, is the kind of IVF that everyone’s being doing until now. But there’s no guarantee that the embryos she has frozen will be successfully implanted, or that they will even survive the cryogenic process. I had a hard time finding official data on Frozen Embryo Transfer success rates because there are so many factors involved.  I did get some numbers from a fertility support site: “Typical success rates are around 20% per cycle. It is important to know that not all embryos will survive the freezing and thawing process.” For reference, those numbers would mean the chance of pregnancy in a cycle of FET is slightly lower than it would be for a normally fertile couple having sex on an ovulation day. (St. Lawrence’s chances might be lower if she goes ahead with the single embryo transfer she intends. This method results in fewer multiple births, but it also has lower success rates overall.) So if these odds are accurate—which they may well not be at the facility she’s using—she has about a one in five chance‚ and five embryos.

Success rates aside, St. Lawrence may find herself up against another bit of bad math: what if ten years plus x dollars doesn’t equal the sense of security they expected? What if the optimal environment they had imagined doesn’t exist? Readiness is a state of mind, not a certain amount of dollars in the bank. This is not to say that financial stability isn’t a huge issue for all parents. It is. But it’s not everything.

I’ve been noticing a lot of single, childless people debating child-rearing in restaurants lately. They do this in the only way that single, childless people can—theoretically. Increasing volume with every glass of wine, they go on about how other people parent (horribly) and how they’re going to parent (perfectly). How many kids are too many, too few, just right. Thinking they can somehow control their fates if only they tweak the dials properly. I remember having those thoughts myself, and how calm and optimistic they’d make me feel.  Without those fantasies, I might never have had the courage to take the plunge. But for me, a big part of becoming a parent was the realization that no matter how hard you try, you really can’t control the universe. I wish Gillian St. Lawrence all the best with her career…and after that, her family. But one way or the other, she’s going to figure out that life is not something you can engineer.

photo: Eugene Ermolovich/wikimedia

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