Should I suggest my 35-year-old daughter freezes her eggs?

She’s still single but she just keeps saying the right person will come along

My daughter is 35 and has been in and out of relationships for years but nothing has stuck. She says she is fine and that the right person will come along – she is generally quite optimistic. I am getting really worried about her, though, and think that she should freeze her eggs. I would even pay for it. Should I suggest it to her? 
– Love, Uneasy
Unless your daughter has been living under a rock, she will not have escaped the narrative that the moment she hit her mid-30s her fertility and marriageability were put on notice. In 1986, Newsweek sent the female race spiralling by declaring that a 40-year-old, single, white, college-educated woman was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to marry. Twenty years later the publication retracted the statement, but the prevailing plotline remained: women in their 30s were condemned to live mired in Bridget Jones-style panic, waiting for The One to come and rescue them from a lonely, spinstery future. 
Fertility, we are all told, thanks to the screaming headlines, “falls off a cliff” in our mid-30s. Just in case you didn’t hear it at the back, that’s “OFF A CLIFF”. It is unlikely that your daughter will be unaware of this. Perhaps you should ask yourself if she says she is fine – is it possible that she is fine? Or, at least, is it possible that she is dealing with the situation. 
You are not telling us that though your daughter is saying she’s fine, you can tell she’s not. You are not telling us that she is unable to sleep, drinking too much, not going to work or isolating. It might be, dear Uneasy, that you are the one who is not fine. Perhaps you are not fine because you are sure you wouldn’t have been so breezy at 35. Perhaps it is you who has absorbed all the messaging about fertility cliffs and terrorists and is properly panicking. Perhaps your desire for grandchildren – perfectly understandable – is driving your uneasiness.
Sometimes when people tell us they are worried about us it is not completely an act of love. If you express your worry to your daughter about her choices, it could instead be an act of selfishness, because all you are doing is sharing your anxiety; you are unburdening yourself, and putting that weight onto her. She already carries the expectations of the world, the patriarchy and biology on her shoulders at this time. She probably doesn’t need your stress on them either. Perhaps your daughter is sufficiently engaged with the discourse to be realistic about the horrific biological shock we have to contend with, and has made the decision that she is not going to let it ruin her. For that, she deserves praise indeed.
We talked to a few friends about this situation, friends who have been on the fertility front line. One of them still clearly remembers the people who told her to “hurry up” when she was in her mid-30s; remembers them without fondness. Our fellow Telegraph columnist Sophia Money-Coutts made a podcast, Freezing Time, where she went through the egg-freezing process herself. Money-Coutts was quick to ask about your daughter: “Firstly, does she want children? You may assume she does, but it’s not an absolute given for women of my generation.” She also pointed out that “egg freezing is an expensive and invasive process, with no guarantees, so it’s not something to enter into without a lot of thought.” 
When the procedure hit the mainstream in 2012, it was hailed as a breakthrough for female reproductive health akin to the contraceptive Pill, but studies a decade later reflected success rates of live births from frozen eggs of 39 per cent. Another pal told us that instead of freeing her from the panic, freezing her eggs piled the pressure on even more. She likened it to making a will and instantly thinking she was going to die; the freezing didn’t calm her nerves, it triggered the insecurity that she had created a painful inevitability around her future.
Needless to say, your daughter’s situation is clearly troubling you, so before it spills out in all sorts of unhelpful ways and you find yourself weepingly hinting at your lack of grandchildren over a robust port at Christmas, you could suggest a walk one afternoon and say something like this: “I want you to know that if you ever want to talk about anything to do with this, or need any kind of support, I’m here. I’m not suggesting what you should or you shouldn’t do, I can see you are doing beautifully in your life and I couldn’t be prouder. But there is so much noise around this for women, and while it’s none of my business, anything you need from me, that’s my job.”
If you are going to discuss this with her – even though she says she is fine – then best to approach it without an agenda: not yours and certainly not society’s. She is not a vessel to be filled, and her choices are her choices to make. This may be hard for you, but we know, dear Uneasy, that you care very much indeed, and because of that, you can do this hard thing.
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