Why corporate America should pay for women to freeze their eggs

Despite having founded three companies, one of the hardest things I’ve ever done was freeze my eggs. In my early thirties, while building my first startup in San Francisco, my nights were a blur of teaching myself to self-inject and tracking complex medication dosages, all while trying to keep my new company afloat. Four rounds later, paid entirely out of pocket, I had seen the reality of the system. At approximately 20,000 per cycle, the cost of preserving one’s eggs is a luxury few can afford. Women are gambling over 50,000 to keep their dreams of a biological family alive. Ironically, the time when egg freezing is the most effective is the same time as when career-driven individuals are focused on climbing the corporate ladder with the least amount of disposable income. A 50,000 out-of-pocket cost in your early thirties isn’t just 50,000. Invested over 30 years at typical market returns, that same money could grow to roughly 400,000 to 800,000 by retirement. America’s Population Decline The “silent tax” of egg freezing is not just a private burden on individual women. It’s a public-policy failure lacking corporate attention, and one with macroeconomic consequences. When fertility preservation and treatment are financed out of pocket, the people most likely to delay or forgo family-building are also the people the economy most depends on keeping in the labor force: educated, urban, high-skill workers facing the steepest career penalties for mistimed childbearing. Data shows fertility is now below replacement in nearly every OECD country, and the organization explicitly warns that sustained low fertility poses risks to future prosperity, labor supply, and public finances. Birth rates are at record lows, and for the first time in U.S. history, more women are having babies in their 40s than as teenagers. A low-birth-rate environment is a workforce issue: population aging raises the old-age dependency ratio, shrinking the future labor pool and putting pressure on tax bases and care systems. That makes egg freezing an integral part of family-formation infrastructure, along with childcare and paid leave. Fertility preservation allows for an investment in American families at a time when working women most need support. If governments and employers support only the back end of family formation and ignore the front end, they leave a major timing problem unsolved. Freezing Eggs and Debt These costs disproportionately impact certain groups. LGBTQIA+ families, for example, may start their career knowing they’ll need medical support to have biological children, but usually do not have workplace benefits to freeze eggs, sperm, or embryos. As individuals early in their careers struggle to pay the “egg freezing tax,” they take on debt. Options to pay for egg freezing include fertility-focused loans and payment plans, which tend to come with more educational support, or simply using a high-interest credit card. This means that the women and families who want the option to become parents later in life are forced to burden the investment in future American families on their own. Women already face lower wages, carry 64 of the country’s student loan debt, and now, a new tax on their careers. This impact further compounds for women of color: black women are twice as likely to experience infertility and less likely to seek treatment. The Gap in Family Building Infrastructure Having spent the past two decades working in New York and Silicon Valley, I’m familiar with seeing how quickly solutions emerge for expensive pain points. But the U.S. is unique among developed countries in terms of how fragmented fertility access is. Coverage for egg freezing is usually only included in health insurance if there is a specific health need, such as a cancer diagnosis. Only 16 of employers covered egg freezing in 2024. What’s needed is a major investment by policymakers, business leaders, and technology innovators to address this problem. The evidence suggests that when women can delay motherhood until they are more established, they earn more and stay more attached to the workforce. In a 2024 survey of more than 1,200 HR leaders and 3,000 employees in the U.S. and U.K., 75 of employers said reproductive health benefits matter for retention, 57 of employees said they have taken or might take a job because it offered family or reproductive health benefits, and 46 of Gen Z said these benefits influence whether they stay or leave. Investing in fertility preservation and family-building flexibility is important economic infrastructure, and young women should not be forced to bear this silent tax alone. We’ve built systems to support every other major life decision: 401(k)s to plan for retirement, mortgages and digital platforms to buy homes, robo-advisors to grow wealth. But we have failed to build comparable infrastructure for family formation. I’ve been supporting aspiring parents for years now, currently as CEO of Sunfish, a tech company that supports fertility solutions, and previously as a Director at one of the largest fertility companies. What I see consistently is not a lack of awareness, but a lack of access. Women understand the tradeoffs and know it’s not a guarantee. A system that requires individuals to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of dollars in long-term wealth to preserve the option of having children is not a system designed for a competitive, modern workforce. If we want to sustain talent, productivity, and population growth, fertility preservation has to become a structured part of our infrastructure.