Opinion: My Potentially Deadly Decision to Delay Motherhood

The question is no longer “can I have it all?” (The answer, for women at least, is decidedly “no.”) Instead, it’s which comes first—career or family?

Thanks to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and cryopreservation, women like me have been able to pursue our personal ambitions free of anxiety about the deterioration of our finite egg supply.

I am 38 now and ready to start a family, but I find myself confronted by disturbing questions I hadn’t considered when I first put my eggs on ice seven years ago: If a court were to determine embryos had rights, is my access to IVF guaranteed? Do I live in a country where I’m confident that I will survive pregnancy?

At 26, I was a local news anchor in Australia’s capital, Canberra. I was engaged to be married, and my fiancé and I had just moved into our first home. By all accounts, life was good. But I was suffocating. The final moment of recognition happened while I was scouring prospective wedding venues with the same gusto one might have for selecting new bed sheets. So, I seized on my dual citizenship, and I ran.

When I landed my dream job at CNN back in the United States, I was devoted to making that relationship successful. I was writing, reporting, and producing; for the better part of ten years, I contentedly did so for 6-7 days a week and over almost every holiday. Then, I won the ambitious woman’s lottery: the ability to freeze my eggs on the company’s dime.

Open TikTok, and you’ll find a bounty of ideological backlash to my path: suspiciously serene twenty-something women in pilgrim attire, baking rhubarb pies with small children hanging from their legs. While I would sooner trash any item of clothing that needs ironing, “trad wives” steam and press their husbands' shirts with a bewildering sense of exultation. They revel in their choice, as I did mine.

As I gave myself the last injection before harvesting, I was briefly overcome with a sense of peace. My thoughts dared not veer into ethical questions of corporate pressure and exploitation—are women being lured into forgoing their fertile years to lessen the impact of maternity and parental leave on companies’ bottom lines?—and I also shrugged off the warning signs that the profession I’d chosen was becoming an endangered one.

The reality today is that women are in a tug-of-war with a conservative groundswell insisting on early domesticity and progressive corporations touting careers at all costs. Two sides of the same grim patriarchal coin.

Over time, I grew weary of the attacks on my profession and succumbed to the reality that career opportunities in my field were dwindling. The writing was on the wall, so I ran—again.

At this point I was in my mid-30s, jobless, single, and heading westward without a plan. Then I met a mountain man during a brief stint in Denver, Colorado. Late-night conversations over whiskey soon turned to kids, as they tend to do (hastily) when dating after 35. But my frozen eggs had afforded us time. So we waited. We traveled. We created. We moved further west. We got a dog.

Now, we figure time is up. We’ve only the time and resources for one. But that’s okay, we said. After all, we were both ‘onlys’ ourselves. We’d be poster parents for a modern American archetype: older, IVF-bound, with our choice over the size of our family subject to an increasing cost of living.

I recently had surgery to remove scar tissue from my cervix and uterus to lessen the likelihood of miscarriage. But there is no greater threat to my dreams of motherhood than the seemingly generous gift of time offered to me all those years ago; the bitter truth is that postponing pregnancy raises the risk of miscarriage.

So, as I look around an empty room earmarked for a nursery, I’m left contemplating if my career was worth potentially forgoing motherhood. And I’m also faced with what’s really missing in the space: the hopes for my future and sense of trust in medicine I had felt when I plunged that needle into my belly all those years ago.

My mind darts to Avery Davis Bell in the throes of an agonizing miscarriage and begging for medical attention. Doctors in Georgia, where I had lived and worked at CNN, were required to leave her dying fetus inside her septic womb until the state-mandated 24-hour clock ran down. This waiting period, intended to allow time for pre-abortion counseling, almost killed her.

If I lived in Texas, my pregnancy could be my death sentence. It was for Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain. Both women would have survived their partial miscarriages, but their doctors were gripped by conflicting self-interests: abiding by the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm” or facing up to 99 years in prison under some of the country’s most restrictive abortion laws.

Yes, this is currently not the case across the United States writ large. But under a Trump presidency and amid a crusade against reproductive autonomy, are wise women in any state really feeling comfortable right now?

Horror stories of avoidable deaths during pregnancy and childbirth are rare now, but I fear we may be regressing to a bygone era when they weren’t. We are witnessing a precipitous decline in births simultaneous to a surge in women having children in the eleventh hour of their fertile years. If terrified women are forced to include cross-state escape plans and self-sourced abortion pills in their pregnancy preparations, just how much lower will our birth rate drop?