Facebook and Apple are offering women employees the chance to put their dreams of motherhood on ice — by paying for them to freeze their eggs.

    The extraordinary perk is aimed at boosting the number of women staff by allowing them to focus on their careers without sacrificing the opportunity to have children later in life.

    The Silicon Valley giants — the first major employers to offer the procedure for non-medical reasons — are willing to pay US$20,100 a time to cover the cost of putting the eggs on ice plus an additional US$480-a-year for deep freeze storage. The eggs can then be planted into the patient’s uterus at time of her choosing when she may no longer be producing them naturally. According to NBC News, Facebook has begun paying for egg freezing and Apple will start in January.

    Preserving eggs has been described as a key to “leveling the playing field” in the male-dominated tech industry and a possible game-changer for women who have traditionally had to choose between their careers and starting a family at a time when their male counterparts are climbing the ladder. “Having a high-powered career and children is still a very hard thing to do,” Brigitte Adams, an egg-freezing advocate and founder of the patient forum Eggsurance.com, told NBC.

    In the past year, fertility doctors in New York and San Francisco report that egg freezing cases have nearly doubled. In a 2013 survey published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, a majority of patients who had their eggs frozen reported feeling “empowered.”

    However Harvard Law School academic Glenn Cohen asked: “Would potential female associates [staff] welcome this option knowing that they can work hard early on and still reproduce, if they so desire, later on?

    “Or would they take this as a signal that the firm thinks that working there as an associate and pregnancy are incompatible?”

苹果和Facebook新福利 为女员工出资冷冻卵子

苹果公司和Facebook出台了新政策，为公司女员工出资冷冻卵子以了却她们迟些做母亲的梦想。

花费这笔不菲的费用旨在吸引更多的女性人才，冷冻卵子可以让女员工们专注于事业而又不耽误她们生宝宝。

这两大硅谷科技巨头公司提出愿意报销卵子冷冻操作过程的一次性费用20100美元以及每年的冷冻存储费用480美元。这两家公司可能是美国大企业中首批为出于非医疗原因冷冻卵子的女员工支付这一费用的。

冷冻卵子后，女员工可以自行选择时间提出卵子植入子宫，这样即使她已不能自然排卵时也能怀孕。据美国全国广播公司报道，Facebook最近已开始落实这一福利，苹果将于明年1月开始。

冷冻卵子被称作是“平衡男性主导的科技行业男女比例”的关键，也可能因此改写以往的游戏规则：男性可以专注于事业，而同样处于事业上升期的女性却必须在事业和家庭之间选一个。“事业成功和当一个好妈妈目前仍不能两全，”布里吉特•亚当斯告诉NBC记者，她是冷冻卵子的支持者，也是“卵保”论坛的创始人。

纽约和旧金山的生育医生称冷冻卵子的人数去年几乎翻了一倍。2013年美国期刊《生育与不孕》的一项调查显示，接受了卵子冷冻的大多数女性表示她们感觉“掌握了自己的人生”。

然而哈佛法学院的学者格伦•

科恩却对此表示质疑：“不知道有意加入公司的女员工会否欢迎这个政策：现在拼命工作然后晚点生宝宝，还是据此认定公司觉得工作和怀孕不能兼顾？”

Words to Learn 相关词汇

【平衡】

pínghéng

level

place on the same level, equalize

【支持者】

zhīchízhě

advocate

one that argues for a cause, a supporter