Category: egg freezing

The Number of Employers Who Offer Fertility Benefits is on the Rise

PFLAGLI

fertility benefits

Fertility benefits rank high on the list of valuable benefits that make recruiting top talent, retaining valuable employees, and reducing turnover easier. Providing coverage for family building options has been shown to increase employee retention and loyalty.

According to a recent FertilityIQ survey, 68 percent of millennials consider fertility benefits when choosing an employer, and 9 out of 10 employees with fertility issues will switch jobs for benefits.fertility benefits

This scenario was very true for millennial, Katie Goad and her husband Adam. They had an 8-year-old daughter and wanted to expand their family. After giving birth to her first child, Katie had surgery that meant she would have to undergo in vitro fertilization (IVF) in order to have another child.

Lacking insurance for IVF, Katie was determined to expand her family without going into debt in the process, so she explored her employment options and discovered that Starbucks offered benefits to cover IVF, even to hourly, frontline workers. Starbucks is revered for being among the first to provide fertility benefits to hourly and part-time employees.

“I was honest with them in my interview about what my goal was, and what my intentions were,” Goad said in a recent interview with Benefit News.

She landed the job and started working as a part-time barista.

In a recent survey, FertilityIQ, author of the extensive Family Builder Workplace Index, found that 73 percent of fertility patient respondents felt more gratitude toward their employer because of fertility benefits, 61 percent said it made them feel more loyal, and 53 percent said it influenced them to stay with a particular employer longer.

“In this tight labor market, millennials are entering the family building years and flooding the workforce. Companies eager to recruit top talent know that offering fertility benefits, paid parental leave, and flexible schedules fosters a great sense of loyalty,” said Patty Stull, Chief Marketing Officer of SGF.

Once Katie qualified for health benefits through Starbucks, she began fertility testing and treatment under the care of Dr. Mark Perloe at Shady Grove Fertility Atlanta.

The post The Number of Employers Who Offer Fertility Benefits is on the Rise appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

Opinion – What Happened to All Those Frozen Eggs?

PFLAGLI

Frozen Eggs was supposed to be as revolutionary as birth control. It hasn’t lived up to the hype — but it has still changed women’s lives.

Frozen eggs – The potential for egg freezing to allow women to pause their biological clocks is one of the most astonishing developments of recent fertility science. The promise was thrilling: Women could enjoy more time to find the right partners, break up with the wrong ones and become emotionally and financially ready to become mothers.Egg Donations

Enthusiasts even fantasized the technology would promote gender equality by giving women control over their fertility so that they wouldn’t have to scale back their career ambitions during their 20s and 30s. “Freeze Your Eggs. Free Your Career” blared a 2014 cover of Bloomberg Businessweek.

When Facebook and Apple announced that same year that they would pay for egg freezing for employees in a “game-changing perk,” Apple said in a statement, “We want to empower women at Apple to do the best work of their lives as they care for loved ones and raise their families.”

Egg freezing was an act of self-care — and professional advancement — for the modern woman.

“All the talk in the beginning was about how egg freezing would be as big as the birth control pill and liberate women,” said Janet Takefman, a reproductive health psychologist at McGill University in Montreal, who has counseled more than 200 women considering egg freezing.

And women responded to this promise. In 2009, the first year the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology started collecting egg freezing data, 475 women went through the procedure, in which an average of 10 eggs are surgically removed and preserved in liquid nitrogen after 10 days of hormonal stimulation. In 2017, more than 9,000 women froze their eggs.

Now we have a chance to look back and ask: Did egg freezing live up to its hype?

The most obvious question is whether egg freezing worked by allowing women to have children later. Although SART collects data on pregnancy rates using frozen eggs, it doesn’t break out whether women had frozen them as part of in vitro fertilization treatment or fertility preservation during illness, or to delay childbearing. So I contacted four fertility clinics that have been in the field the longest to find out. (I froze my eggs at two of them and haven’t yet thawed.)

nytimes.com, by Sarah Elizabeth Roberts, December 21, 2019
Click here to read the entire article.
 

The post Opinion – What Happened to All Those Frozen Eggs? appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families