‘My choice, my responsibility’: views of Danish and Israeli female students on financing egg-freezing

Abstract

Over the past decade, egg freezing has evolved from being an experimental medical technology to become a commercial enterprise, accompanied by heated feminist debate. This study examined the views of Danish and Israeli female students regarding the financing of social egg freezing (SEF) (self, state, employer or family), and their correlation with country and feminist identity. A total of 569 female students (283 from Denmark and 286 from Israel) completed a questionnaire composed of closed and opened-ended questions on SEF financing under different circumstances (e.g. career advancement, lack of a partner, lack of money). The majority of female students in both countries supported SEF self-financing. They wanted to keep fertility choices in the private domain, in part by separating the bodies of women from the state and the employer. We conclude that SEF exemplifies a neoliberal and gendered responsibilisation of women’s reproductive futurity, yet self-identification as a feminist was found to be correlated with stronger support for state financing. In contrast, we found no correlation between feminist identity and support for company-sponsored egg freezing. Our findings suggest a relationship between holding a feminist worldview and public policy preferences.

Keywords:

• Social egg freezing
• assisted reproductive technologies
• financing
• feminism
• Israel
• Denmark

Acknowledgements

We thank Irit Adler and Anat Oren of the William Bill I. and Lucille Cohen Institute at Tel Aviv University for methodological assistance, and Tal Sabag and Caroline A. W. Rasmussen for their help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1 We used logistic regression to analyse perceptions of responsibility for financing (a dichotomous variable), and multinominal logistic regression to analyse opinions regarding employer funding of SEF (three non-ordered categories).

Additional information

Funding

The study was supported by a research grant from the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo and by a network grant from the Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond (Grant # 7059-00018).