I’ve recently become acquainted with Dr. Jennifer Roback-Morse and her writings on marriage, sexuality, feminism etc. Yesterday I received this post on her site about the “Next Sexual Revolution: mothers over 50”. Most women becoming mothers over 50 are doing so with the heavy use of IVF technologies and almost always with an egg “donor”.

I appreciated her comments below which note the deal society has struck with women so they can balance career and family. Seems like a raw deal to me.

“We are currently taking the economic system as given and demanding that women adapt their bodies to the marketplace. Our bargain is this: we are allowed to join the workforce and have meaningful jobs, as long as we agree to chemically neuter ourselves during our fertile years. Then after we are economically established, we can torture our bodies further, over-stimulate our ovaries, possibly thaw out frozen eggs and hope we can reproduce artificially.
There is another solution. Instead of taking the economy as given and adapting our bodies around the workplace, I propose that we take women’s fertility as given, and organize the economy around women’s bodies.”

Author Profile

Jennifer Lahl, CBC Founder
Jennifer Lahl, CBC Founder
Jennifer Lahl, MA, BSN, RN, is founder and president of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. Lahl couples her 25 years of experience as a pediatric critical care nurse, a hospital administrator, and a senior-level nursing manager with a deep passion to speak for those who have no voice. Lahl’s writings have appeared in various publications including Cambridge University Press, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, and the American Journal of Bioethics. As a field expert, she is routinely interviewed on radio and television including ABC, CBS, PBS, and NPR. She is also called upon to speak alongside lawmakers and members of the scientific community, even being invited to speak to members of the European Parliament in Brussels to address issues of egg trafficking; she has three times addressed the United Nations during the Commission on the Status of Women on egg and womb trafficking.