The Price of Eggs

Dobbs and Trump are forcing a generation of women to delay and forgo families

Nov 22, 2024

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The sun likes to shine on Caroline’s face, and why wouldn’t it? She stands up straight with her shoulders back. She faces the world with a smile. And when she listens to you, she repositions herself to directly face you, giving you all of her attention. Caroline is the best listener I’ve ever encountered. At first I credited her focused listening to her public-facing profession and her sunniness to an earlier stint as a flight attendant, but as I’ve gotten to know her I’ve learned that this is the way she chooses to face the world: clear eyed, smiling, and on her terms.

She knew she wanted to have kids, but with friends spending $20,000 a year on day care she knew she wasn’t making enough money to support a child. After the Dobbs decision and with the looming election imperiling her peak child-bearing years, Caroline realized that she couldn’t afford to risk waiting it out and hoping for the best.

“Egg freezing buys me a little more time”

After the election, she decided to undergo oocyte cryopreservation, commonly known as egg freezing.

“I would like have a family, so egg freezing buys me a little more time to make that possible,” she said last week after a visit to the fertility clinic where they’d measured the size of her follicles. “It feels like a degree of control that I can make in a world where there’s a lot of uncertainty. It feels like a choice.”

Caroline is not alone. Like Britons putting their children on trains out of London to avoid Hitler’s bombing raids, women in America are facing hard choices about their future children. Demand for egg freezing is way up since the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Others, like many of Caroline’s friends, are burning that bridge by getting their tubes tied. (Also up, but much much less common, are vasectomies.) Some are trapped behind enemy lines. An Alabama court deemed frozen embryos were unborn children and prevented would-be parents from moving them to a safer state.

“It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while and had been putting it off and putting it off,” she said. But the Alabama case got her attention, and Donald Trump’s nonsensical proclamation that he was the “father of IVF” did not reassure her. She didn’t like where this could be headed. “That was the kick in the pants I needed.”

She started by researching her insurance policy. Without insurance, egg freezing would have cost her around $15,000 plus more for storage. With insurance, she pays only a couple thousand. “I don’t know what a new administration might do on insurance coverage, but I don’t wanna mess around and find out,” she said.

Waiting out a second Trump administration wasn’t an option for her because of what she called, with glint of steel in her voice, the “ticking time bomb of fertility.” Four more years would put her out on the wrong side of her body’s ability to get pregnant without extraordinary measures. “If you want to have children, it’s entirely on you to harness that timeline,” she said. “It’s a cruel trick of biology.”

“I’m lucky. I get to make a choice, and there are so many women who don’t get to.”

She knows she’s not alone. She doesn’t think she’s special, or unique, or deserving of your pity. In fact, she knows she’s fortunate to be able to exert this measure of control over her biology. “I’m lucky. I get to make a choice, and there are so many women who don’t get to make a choice,” she said.

But for a generation of fertile women, 76.7 million voters have forced them “to contend with what happens when your peak reproductive years coincide with an administration that isn’t friendly to reproductive rights,” said Caroline. “It’s a double blow to women. I can’t tell you how many women I’ve spoken to in the last week who are terrified that their peak reproductive years are coinciding with a Trump presidency.”

Caroline is not her real name. She asked me to keep details of her identify secret, which is not unusual for women these days. Trump has announced that he will nominate more than a few people connected to Project 2025 to high positions. Project 2025, among other nightmarish deliriums, “includes numerous attacks on sexual and reproductive health and rights,” according to the Guttmacher Institute.1

“I can’t tell you how many women I’ve spoken to in the last week who are terrified that their peak reproductive years are coinciding with a Trump presidency.”

After voters rejected Kamala Harris’ positioning of abortion rights as making pregnancy safe again, the election compounded a generation’s post-Dobbs anxiety with the threat that worse could be coming. Whether by hiding pregnancy scares from medical records, punting fertility to a hoped-for safer future, or closing off the possibility of pregnancy altogether, the fertility of millions of American women is going underground.

“When I go into the clinic, it’s crowded,” said Caroline. “It’s packed. There are a lot of women in there. I look around and know we’re sharing a similar anxiety, and we’re trying the best we can to make it work.”

She’s clear on the science and the risks. She knows this doesn’t guarantee she’ll be able to have a baby or even to get pregnant. She understands all of this. “The whole game of conceiving a child is based on statistics and chances,” she said.

“Bonkers”

What she doesn’t understand is why women, who don’t need to be told about the biological realities that are visited upon them over the course of their lives, would vote to make being a woman more dangerous.

Often said after the election is that these women voted for Trump because of the price of eggs. If they only knew. “Bonkers,” she said. “That you would make that harder on them and introduce that level of risk on an already excruciating process is bonkers.”

And because this is Caroline, hopeful despite it all, she’s not angry. She doesn’t scream with rage in the shower about the consequential choices that Trump voters made, most of them good people who coo over baby pictures and have raised children of their own. The truth is that she’s sad.

And because this is Caroline, who believes in the power of a real conversation, she would handle this as only she might. “I wish I could sit down and talk to each of them about how difficult it is to be a woman today,” she said.

I chose Caroline as her fake name because that’s the name I—who love my two gorgeous, brilliant, and funny sons, no cap2—would have wanted to give a daughter, and I feel a fatherly affection toward her. So when she texted me yesterday evening that she’d undergone the procedure to extract her eggs, I went into Dad Mode.

“Made it!” she texted with a picture of her in a hospital gown, smiling—of course she was smiling—and flashing a thumbs up.

“You OK?”

“All good”

I let her know with some restraint that I would be open to more information, perhaps a mark of punctuation to indicate the degree of her goodness despite all’s connotation of comprehensiveness.

“I am doing great!”

Better.

“I took about an hour to recover post op and headed home!”

Excellent. Logistics. Events in sequence. I relaxed. Caroline is going to be OK. Hers was the last of 14 procedures that day, a record according to one nurse. They were able to successfully freeze 18 eggs.3 She would be back at work the next day, recovering nicely other than mild cramping.

Now for the other millions of American women in their years of peak fertility. In this new Reproductive Underground, we’ve got a lot of work to do.

Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.