2024.07.04 냉동난자

안녕하세요,

저는 매일 아침 출근시간보다 50분이나 1시간 일찍 출근해서 

파리바게트에서 빵과 커피를 먹으면서 신문을 읽습니다.

오늘 읽은 기사 중에서 배울만한 문장이 있는지 알아보도록 하겠습니다. 

오늘은 냉동난자에 관한 기사입니다. 

예전에는 여성에게 연애, 결혼, 출산이 당연한 순서로 여겨졌지만, 요즘에는 변하고 있는 추세입니다. 많은 여성에게서 결혼과 출산은 더 이상 필수라기 보다는 선택이 되었고,  출산을 당장 할 계획이 아니라면 미래에 건강한 아이를 낳기 위해서 egg freezing이 하나의 선택안이 되고 있습니다. 아직 결혼할 상대는 없지만 가임기가 지나가는 여성은 나이가 조금이라도 어릴 때 난자 냉동을 선택하게 됩니다. 또한 기사에 따르면 여러 기업에서 냉동난자를 지원하고 있는 추세이기 때문에 앞으로 난자를 냉동하는 여성이 더 많아질 것으로 보입니다. 

 

 

국문	영문
그녀는 환자가 마취되어 의사가 바늘로 난소에 구멍을 뚫고 난자를 빨아 들여 냉동시킬 수 있는 정맥 절개실과 수술실을 보여주었습니다.	She showed me the phlebotomy stations and operating room, where patients are anesthetized so that a doctor can puncture their ovaries with a needle and suck out eggs for freezing.
생식 시계를 늦추려는 노력도 다르지 않습니다.	Efforts to slow down the reproductive clock are no different.
전형적인 환자는 또한 점점 더 젊어지는 것 같다고 의사들은 말합니다. 이는 출산 보존을 보장하는 기업 혜택 패키지의 꾸준한 증가와 일치하는 변화입니다.	The prototypical patient also seems to be getting younger, doctors say, a change coinciding with a steady uptick in corporate benefit packages that cover fertility preservation.
일부 의료 기술은 천천히 확산되었지만, 생식력 보존에 대한 관심은 놀라운 속도로 성장했습니다.	Some medical technologies spread slowly, but the embrace of fertility preservation has grown at a remarkable rate
난자 동결 주기는 여성이 난자 생산을 자극하는 호르몬(“밤 주사” 참조)을 하루에 한두 번 주사할 때 시작되고 약 2주 후에 의사가 바늘로 난자를 추출할 때 끝납니다.	An egg freezing cycle starts when a woman injects herself once or twice a day with hormones (see: “shots nights”) that stimulate the production of eggs and ends about two weeks later when a physician extracts those eggs with a needle.
일부 환자들은 더 많은 난자를 얻기 위해 여러 주기를 거친 후 액체 질소 탱크에 보관합니다. 이는 산모 연기를 가능하게 하는 미친 과학 실험입니다.	Some patients go through multiple cycles in the hopes of getting more eggs, which are then preserved in liquid nitrogen tanks, a mad science experiment enabling deferred motherhood.
난자 냉동은 1980년대부터 있었지만 수십 년 동안 암 환자들이 생식 능력을 손상시킬 수 있는 치료를 받기 전에 주로 사용했습니다.	Egg freezing has been around since the 1980s, but for decades it was primarily used by cancer patients before undergoing treatment that might damage their fertility.
그러나 최근 몇 년 동안 난자를 냉동시키는 동기는 더욱 다양해졌습니다.	But in recent years the motivations offered for freezing eggs have gotten more varied.
그리고 일부 사람들은 선택적 불임 치료를 단순히 통제할 수 없는 신체, 즉 노화된 신체에 대한 통제력을 행사하는 방법으로 봅니다.	And some view elective fertility treatments simply as a way to exert control over the uncontrollable: their aging bodies
많은 직장에서 이러한 새로운 혜택은 자신의 난자를 냉동하기 위해 돈을 지불한 여성의 수년간의 노력 끝에 나왔습니다	In many workplaces, these new benefits came after years of effort by women who paid out of pocket to freeze their own eggs.
그녀는 계란을 해동하기로 결정했습니다	She decided to thaw the eggs
그녀는 단 하나만 실행 가능하다는 것을 발견했습니다. 연구에 따르면 특히 난자를 얼렸을 때 나이가 많은 여성의 경우 일반적인 경험이며, 이를 이식한 후 4일 이내에 임신이 사라졌습니다.	She found that only one was viable — a common experience, research shows, particularly for women who are older when they freeze their eggs — and when she implanted it, she lost the pregnancy within four days.

 

 

Your boss will freeze your eggs now

Spring Fertility, a clinic in midtown Manhattan, looks like the place where the main characters on “Broad City” would have wound up if that millennial sitcom had done an episode about egg freezing. The waiting room has books by America’s youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman and its Instagram poet laureate Rupi Kaur. The kitchen is stocked with Spindrift. A conference room also serves as a venue for “shots nights,” less raucous than they sound, where patients inject themselves with fertility drugs communally, with encouragement from the staff.

Spring’s medical director in New York, Catha Fischer, dressed in a loose blouse and a low ponytail, beamed as she showed me the phlebotomy stations and operating room, where patients are anesthetized so that a doctor can puncture their ovaries with a needle and suck out eggs for freezing. The room, Fischer noted, “looks like a ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ OR.”

 

There is always a market for products, from skin care to weight loss, promising to ease the angst of womanhood. Efforts to slow down the reproductive clock are no different. The business of egg extraction is thriving, among the privileged group of people who can gain access to it.

 

Across Spring’s clinics nationwide, the number of egg freezing cycles undertaken last year jumped 37% from the year before. That surge is visible at fertility clinics around the country, according to data from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. The prototypical patient also seems to be getting younger, doctors say, a change coinciding with a steady uptick in corporate benefit packages that cover fertility preservation. In 2015 just 5% of large employers covered egg freezing; in 2023, nearly 1 in 5 did.

Some medical technologies spread slowly, but the embrace of fertility preservation has grown at a remarkable rate. In 2015 there were about 7,600 egg freezing cycles recorded nationwide, and by 2022, that number hit 29,803, a nearly 300% increase.

An egg freezing cycle starts when a woman injects herself once or twice a day with hormones (see: “shots nights”) that stimulate the production of eggs and ends about two weeks later when a physician extracts those eggs with a needle. Some patients go through multiple cycles in the hopes of getting more eggs, which are then preserved in liquid nitrogen tanks, a mad science experiment enabling deferred motherhood.

Egg freezing has been around since the 1980s, but for decades it was primarily used by cancer patients before undergoing treatment that might damage their fertility. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine lifted the treatment’s experimental label in 2012. In the decade that followed, the vast majority of people who froze their eggs fell into one defined demographic, painted vividly in anthropologist Marcia Inhorn’s book “Motherhood on Ice”: women in their late 30s who hadn’t settled down with romantic partners and wanted to preserve the option of becoming a mother. Inhorn called egg freezing a solution to the “mating gap,” the lack of eligible male partners for educated women.

But in recent years the motivations offered for freezing eggs have gotten more varied. There are those who see it as a way to spend their early 30s focused on career, untethering professional timelines from reproductive ones. There are those who have seen friends freeze their eggs and figure they may as well do the same.

 

Others see egg freezing as something ineffably empowering, all the more so after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which has led to states around the country curbing access to reproductive health care; in vitro fertilization has recently become a legal and religious target too. And some view elective fertility treatments simply as a way to exert control over the uncontrollable: their aging bodies. All of these rationales are made more possible with corporate benefits.

 

When my employer, The New York Times, expanded its coverage to a lifetime cap of $50,000 for fertility treatments on company-sponsored plans earlier this year, I decided, at age 29, to freeze my eggs. My roommate had frozen her eggs because she was on a short-term professional fellowship that covered it. Another close friend described the process of giving herself hormone injections as an arduous but exhilarating experience in which every day she marveled at her body’s capacity to nurture future life.

 

After years of absorbing the reasons my generation dreads motherhood — the costs, the bodily toll, the disappearance of friendships, the looming climate and social disasters — freezing my eggs felt like a gift of ridiculously unmitigated optimism. It was a way to invest in the possibility, however far off, of becoming a mom, not as a negation of all the cultural doom and gloom surrounding it, but as an antidote. After I froze my eggs, two other good friends decided to do the same; I made one a playlist for injections, “Eggselent Beats.”

Mine is the first generation with access to a technology that promises to slow, a little bit, the biological clock, and, for those lucky enough, bosses who will foot the bill. That brings with it a magical thinking that we’re already accustomed to: for every difficulty we saw our parents grapple with, there’s an app for that.

But as I spoke with more friends and experts, I wondered whether the hype over egg freezing, in a backhand way, affirmed the seeming impossibility of balancing parenthood and work.

 

In many workplaces, these new benefits came after years of effort by women who paid out of pocket to freeze their own eggs. These “egg freezing activists,” as Inhorn calls them, felt that colleagues coming up behind them shouldn’t have to shoulder the costs alone.

Fertility benefits can be relatively affordable for companies, compared with other corporate perks, because there is a limited number of employees who are of reproductive age and will use them, according to Segal, a benefits consultancy.

When companies don’t cover it, egg freezing is so expensive that the breadth and demographics of people it reaches is extremely limited. And even when companies pay, it entails taking time for frequent doctor’s appointments. One study, which analyzed nearly 30,000 egg extractions between 2012 and 2016, found that just 7% of the women who had undergone the process were Black and 4.5% were Hispanic.

In certain white-collar industries — law, tech — fertility benefits are increasingly viewed as a new standard for corporate health care.

More than a decade since the technology was first put into use, though, some of its early beneficiaries are vocal about the limitations of its effects on their careers.

In 2011, when she was 39, Brigitte Adams froze 11 eggs. She was single and working late nights as a marketing executive. Five years later, she was feeling fed up with dating and being ghosted, and was past ready to have her own children. She decided to thaw the eggs. She found that only one was viable — a common experience, research shows, particularly for women who are older when they freeze their eggs — and when she implanted it, she lost the pregnancy within four days.

Adams, who is now 51 and a marketing consultant in Carmel, California, had a daughter in 2018 with a donor egg and donor sperm. She has become an outspoken voice on the ways in which egg freezing can be a psychological balm but not always a practical one. “It’s too bad that a technological revolution in assisted reproductive technology is putting off the discussion of how it’s still impossible for women to have it all,” she said.

 

Joan Williams, a professor at the University of California Law San Francisco who studies women in the workplace, sighed when I asked her to describe the limitations of egg freezing as a feminist technology, as though pulling out the script for a production she’s done far too many times.

“It doesn’t solve the problem, which is that you still define the ideal worker as someone who is always available for work,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

 

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