The Great Maternal Meddling

Egg freezing as a “workplace perk”, the Grandmother Hypothesis, slowing menopause and ovarian tissue transplants…and why young women need to care about it all

I listened to a couple podcast episodes¹ about the tech that is being developed to stave off menopause recently, such as cryopreservation of ovarian tissue. As I listened, I realized that the efforts being undertaken to avert this normal female bodily experience are just an extension of the birth control experiment. By extending the reproductive years beyond what they are meant to be, we further legitimize the temporary sterilization of younger women in favor of careerism over familialism.

I’m not puritanical about the “shoulds” of female life paths. This I mean in the sense that I don’t necessarily believe every single woman should be prioritizing family over career or other ambitions. I understand and respect that there are outliers, females who are more inclined towards flourishing that comes from their craft, their art, their vocation outside of the home and do well without children. The key word here is outliers, however.

I do believe that many women, most even, desire to have children or will desire to have children. Of course, birth control itself can physiologically harm this process even after it has been eliminated from the equation. Even more concerning though, is the putting off of the act of childbearing into the years where one just isn’t as naturally capable of conceiving. Companies using egg freezing as an incentive of employment is a perfect example of false reproductive expectations being sold as empowerment.

The idea of fertility shouldn’t be framed as a “workplace perk”. It should be understood as the standard baseline of a healthy individual in the reproductive years. The fact that the word itself has came to mean access to a myriad of tools and tech rather than a state of being within the body is very telling. In the same way “postpartum” has been culturally shifted and demeaned to now imply “depression”, “fertility” is now often code for “care for infertility”, especially in the cases of it being used as a career incentive. When companies say they have fertility benefits, they really mean they will pay for ways to deal with the infertility that you likely will face due to your commitment to their company. If companies had actual fertility benefits, they would be paying for longer maternity leave.

This article put the practice as “putting motherhood on ice”, which gave me such a bleak picture in my mind. I much prefer to put motherhood beside the hearth myself. The practice of enticing young female workers via these benefits started out mainly in big tech companies like Meta and Google, the STEM girlies being ripe for the picking I suppose. Now, more pedestrian workplaces like Walmart and Starbucks have partnered with fertility clinics to offer these services to the women they employ as well.

In listening to those podcasts, I noticed a pattern which indicates a lifetime of female biologic medical intervention being promoted. For those who choose to freeze their eggs, often after years of taking birth control, something like freezing egg tissue using cryopreservation to be transplanted in later years in order to utilize young ovarian egg reserve to bypass menopause won’t feel as strange or suspect. It’s the natural cascade, a landslide of medical meddling in the maternal. Other methods being studied include the use of an immunosuppressant drug typically used in transplant medicine called Rapamycin, thought to potentially lengthen fertility, and a fake version of a natural hormone called anti-Mullerian hormone or AMH, which can (maybe) slow egg loss. The goal of all of these things is slowing egg loss. Of course there is the standard of care used now as well, hormone replacement therapy, which is a different method with a different technical goal, but which is searching for the same outcomes all the same.

When many women are never even taught how their female fertility actually works, of course these measures can be tempting. The more I think about these matters, the more I realize that ample and adequate fertility education earlier in life is the answer to a life well lived as woman. Which is why we need to care about menopause in our 20s and 30s.

Extending the fertile window of women’s lifespans will be sold as just another health choice, as a freedom, and again, as empowerment (the favorite trope of all women’s health marketing), when it really is just another way of subverting human nature. Women should be able to enjoy the years they should be grandmothers, not new mothers themselves. Children should be able to have mothers who live into the years when they have their own children. “The Grandmother Hypothesis” can help elucidate in a beautiful way why this is so important for our species at large.

Peter Paul Reubens, Old Woman and Boy with Candles

In listening to Jennifer Garrison, PhD, an assistant professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, speak (podcast linked in footnotes), she states we are in “the dark ages” when it comes to understanding why reproductive decline happens at midlife in human females (as opposed to many other mammals, most of which who reproduce much closer to the limits of their lifespans, with the exception of a select few like toothed whales). She states these things are not unknowable, it’s just that scientists simply haven’t researched them.

Is it not common sense though, that with our lifespans being much longer than most other mammals, that menopause serves as a marker for when it is actually appropriate for us to stop reproducing? As a timeline for the body to follow so that we as women may shift into another phase in life, where our purpose isn’t the making of life, but a more focused ability to tend to it? Wouldn’t a sort of post-productive phase of life make sense?

The general idea of the grandmother hypothesis is that human women live long past reproductive capacity in order to help their daughters and their grandchildren, especially in the realm of food gathering and foraging. This would have helped their daughters to reserve more energy and resources in order to birth more babies, thereby influencing human survival and evolution. It is summed up below, taken from the paper “The Grandmother Hypothesis and Human Evolution”, the theory having been formulated by Kristen Hawkes, an American anthropologist.

Killer whales are a fascinating example of the grandmother effect. A team of scientists (details in this article, photo also from the same article) found that “whale calves whose grandmothers died within the last two years had a mortality rate 4.5 times higher than those with a living grandmother, in the two years following her death. The effect was significantly amplified in years of fish scarcity, which the researchers judged through data on annual catches of Chinook salmon, and diminished in years of plenty.”

“Humans differ from other primates in feeding their offspring long after weaning, and in their extended postmenopausal lifespans. Recent research among contemporary hunter-gatherers suggests that these characteristics are evolutionarily related and tied to the use of low-variance, high-yield resources, such as deeply buried tubers (Hawkes, O'Connell, and Blurton Jones 1989, 1997). Where such foods are available, senior women can provision their daughters' weaned off-spring, thereby enhancing the children's survivorship and allowing their daughters to produce more children sooner. The resulting fitness increase for grandmothers favors extended postmenopausal lifespans.”

The industrious, intelligent older woman is a benefit to society, especially to women in their current childbearing years..

“The help the older women provided by feeding their grandchildren was especially important when child-bearing women cut down their foraging with the arrival of a newborn, indicating a ‘division of labor’ between mothers and grandmothers in the production of surviving youngsters .”

Is this not the “village” we all mourn? Perhaps a more interesting question is, with women living as long as they do today, what societal factors are preventing them supporting their daughters and grandchildren? The combination of the trend of migrating far from one’s place of origin for work, retirement age and the financial demands of things like mortgages, the need for health insurance, and also somewhat venomous attitudes on the parts of both some grandmothers and some of their daughters (“I raised my kids, it’s my time now” mentalities on the part of older women, and a toxic idealism in younger women who expect their mothers to align with their every preference lest they be shut out—the whole “going no contact” thing) are what come to mind quickly, although I am sure there are many more factors. And further, what is lost when the grandmothering years are not used in the tending of the mothers and the grandchildren but is instead reserved for more work outside the family due to finanancial obligation or selfishness/misplaced priorities? One such (highly significant) thing maybe cognitive maintenance, as illustrated by Hawkes below:

“Increased somatic effort that slowed aging would allow less allocation to reproduction at younger ages, but the contributions of senior females would increase the reproductive success of child-bearers more than enough to offset the reduced expenditure on current reproduction by the childbearers themselves. Continued childbearing, on the other hand, which would conflict with grandmothering, would interfere with this compensation and so be no more favored than in other ape species. According to this model, senescence in all aspects of physiology except fertility would be slowed as a result of grandmothering.”

Another thought this brings up is whether some amount of food production is actually an imperative of health in our later years? Really, for all stages of life. Of course, to build up to the level of knowledge and specialization that those elder women in hunter-gatherer societies possessed, this would be a lifelong endeavor, but even so, it makes one think. If this act, of tedious, repetitive, tending and observing of the soil and land was a large part of our reason for living past reproductive capacity in our ancient past, perhaps it is an element of the matrix of things which makes us function more optimally in our elder years in the present. The tending of life isn’t just for grand babies, it is for plants.

You can listen to Hawkes lecture on her theory further below:

How ironic that grandmothering very well may help women age slower cognitively when the proponents of ovarian anti-aging are promoting a practice which will effectively put off the act of grandmothering. If you are slowing down ovarian aging and therefore having babies at a much older than is natural age, then the time you have with your eventual grandchildren will be cut short. Unless these people are going to extend total lifespan with their technology, this doesn’t quite add up. In this article, Garrison, states:

“‘Aging is the number one risk factor for chronic disease in the modern world, and the ovaries are the fastest-aging organ—aging at least two times the rate of other tissues in the body,’ Garrison says. ‘If we are interested in extending healthy longevity, we have to understand how and why ovaries are aging so much faster.’

I hold a lot of skepticism about statements like this. Not say that risk for chronic disease doesn’t rise with menopause, but the question should not be how to manipulate the process and instead how to support the process. It’s no secret that people across place and time who treat their bodies in a certain manner— giving it ample minerals and nutrient dense foods, nutritive movement, time in nature, fresh air and sunshine, who have time for hobbies and trades, who sleep and honor the circadian rhythm and who have access to community and faith, and their grandchildren—do better longevity wise. Longevity is not a mystery, and I think the answers to the body’s difficulties are often quite basic. It’s a matter of priorities, of self discipline, of geography, of resources, of personality, of support and of faith—the ability to trust the resourced and supported body. It isn’t a matter of what doctor we need to pay next for more experimental treatments.

Garrison herself agrees, stating in the same article:

“If you were to do a clinical study with diet and exercise up against any of the new anti-aging ovarian treatments being studied right now—Rapamycin, AMH, any of them—diet and exercise are still going to win by a mile.”

I do think by extending the reproductive years, the female body and by extension, the female capacity to create life, is degraded into a shell of false hope. The maternal body is reduced down to the location of mechanistic procedures and check-ups, the reproductive system on life support. By not using the natural timeline of the body to ensure procreative success but instead using drugs and manipulation, the maternal body becomes a cash cow to those seeking to line their pockets with the maternal yearnings of women whose wombs were not listened to when they were in working order. Where a woman should be able to take ease in knowing the work of gestation is complete, where a sigh of relief that one has made it through years of pregnancy and postpartum and birth and breastfeeding should be expelled….instead there will be hustle and bustle and lab draws and poking and prodding. The industrial surveillance of the menopausal maternal machine is only gaining momentum with ovarian anti-aging tech. Sounds cozy, huh?

I look into my future and hope for many grandchildren. I hope for days in the garden with them. I hope for feeding them soup and cookies and giving their mothers a break. I hope for my time to be filled with their presence but at night, I will want to sleep. On some days, I will want to rest a little more than usual. I will crave quiet in equal measure to the sounds of sweet children. The changes that come with aging will likely be an adjustment but I think in some ways a relief. This is what that time is for.

There is a lot of work that comes with being in our childbearing years—from the biological work of pregnancy and birth and lactation to the emotional and mental work of the discipline and feeding and education of children to the need to maintain some measure of the sort of personal attractiveness that inspires life-making. I like to think that in embracing some wrinkles and a womb that no longer wants to be the location of life unfurling when the time naturally comes, we all will find a sense of settling and contentment.

After listening to the aforementioned podcast, I sought out another perspective and landed on this one—Kimberly Ann Johnson, who many may be familiar with due to her popular book The Fourth Trimester discussed aging and menopause without pharmaceuticals on Isabella Malbin’s Whose Body Is It podcast, linked below (it is well worth a listen). At one point she states “maybe I’ve got a responsibility to my aging face, and maybe it isn’t just to me but to others…”. This, I appreciated. This made me think about aging as a commitment, and doing so without meddling as an example. It isn’t supposed to be easeful or comfortable. It will likely be wildly confronting. But just like the pain of birth, we are capable of confronting it, and we actually should. Aging “gracefully” as so many people like to phrase it, doesn’t mean aging beautifully with the help of drugs and Botox. It means being able to sit in discomfort knowing that it has a purpose.

Johnson also talks about the grief of not having more time to cycle harmoniously as she only found that harmony later in her years of having a cycle. What a perfect reminder to see it all as a gift in the times we have it, rather than a curse. That gift isn’t one that is all Instagram-style divine feminine woo-woo mysticism either, it is one that allows us a window into the picture of our systemic health and functionality. I think many of us were not taught a truly holistic, compassionate and accurate understanding of our cycles as young girls. It is something we have had to actively seek out as adult women, often after years of taking hormonal birth control. Learning the truth about an experience you have been living through for years already may be necessary, but it isn’t ideal. This is why I think it worth learning about menopause while still in our childbearing years.

Putting fertility on hold and promising technological ways to bypass the biological clock later also means that in the years when these women are dulling their reproductive systems with pharmaceuticals they may likely be unknowingly suppressing symptoms of health issues that need tending to. When this is a years-long game of ignorance by way of birth control, these issues have time to take hold in a way that they may not have if they had not been hidden away behind the curtain of convenience. By the time they are revealed, along with their implications on the potential failure of the promised technology, the time it takes to figure out the root cause and treat and mend them in time to conceive an IVF/frozen egg baby often just isn’t there. Which then leads people into the insidious territory of the sort of desperation that leads to dealing in the buying of other’s genetic material. One ethical issue leads to another, leads to another.

With this, it is easy to see how the circle that starts with years of pharmaceutical birth control can end with years of HRT and future anti-aging tech for our ovaries, and likely some IVF and other various reproductive technologies sprinkled in there in between. Not to mention the highly medicalized births they will inevitably have as the result of high risk pregnancies.

Many teenage girls are put on birth control from the age of menarche. If these same girls grow into women who follow this path of constant outside influence and input into their bodies indefinitely, they will never experience a fully human, fully embodied physiological life. They will never experience the path the women before them walked. In losing this physiological womanhood, they lose a sense of belonging, a sense of what we are capable of enduring, a sense of wonder for what we have been called to.

Of course, there are some who will state that women of the future never having to experience what bodily processes women have historically experienced is a good thing. I have a hard time with the “biology is oppressive” mentality and don’t have much patience for it, to be perfectly honest, but I can have compassion for it due to the fact that I have common sense and know that there have been many horrible things we have had to endure. I reject the idea that these horrible things are a reason to do away with normal physiological processes and functions and timelines though. I also think that we should not simply trade the horrible of the past for the progressive, highly technological horrible of the future either.

I think this because I think the meddling with these processes can only lead to further suffering and/or further collapse of the beauty that coexists with some level of risk that is innate to living in a human body. I think of the female experiences I already know. To experience the utter joy and transcendence of birth, and the subsequent love and precious bonding we share with our babies, we have to risk some bodily danger and often intense pain. To experience orgasm and romantic love, we risk making ourselves vulnerable to men who are physically stronger than we are and potentially dangerous. To experience a cycle which can tell us critical information about our health, we risk some pain and some mess.

Does this mean every birth is dangerous and extremely painful? That every man is a danger to our personal safety? That every period is excruciatingly painful and debilitating? No. What this means is that there are inherent dangerous and unpleasant potentialities within every human experience. This is especially the case in experiences which offer us such gifts. This is why biology isn’t oppressive, because for every danger, there is a reward. Oppressive forces do not dole out rewards.

Photo from here

I aspire to be a Grandmother Hypothesis Grandma, not a Cryotherapy Grandma. I aspire to years of tending life, both life that my body gestated and life that my body did not, and life beyond human life—whether that be dairy sheep, tomato vines, or heirloom roses. I aspire to hold fast to the trust I have in my body now and not abandon it when it feels hard or scary. I aspire to a cognitive state that is informed by my sweet, silly future grandchildren and by the soil I stick my wrinkled hands into. I aspire to a life lived in commitment to my real, earned face and to others seeing it and understanding that this is what an elder woman is supposed to look like. I aspire to serving not just the survival, but the thriving of the family line I birthed into existence.

1. This:

and this:

This podcast is pretty intriguing in general but almost all of the topics covered are ones I take issue with so I only listen to try and challenge my skepticism. My conclusions are generally that skepticism is healthy, but it is interesting nonetheless!