The following is an excerpt from Rene Almeling, Joanna Radin, and Sarah S. Richardson’s CNN Op-ed, Oct. 20, 2014. Click more to read the entirety.

Apple and Facebook made the headlines last week on the news that they are offering coverage for their female employees to freeze their eggs. Financial support for egg-freezing represents a bold step by these tech leaders, intended to support women as they manage the modern-day conflict between work and family.

It is also the latest incarnation of technological optimism, a belief in quick fixes for complex social, political and cultural issues. But women and men everywhere should be suspicious of egg-freezing as a “solution.”

Egg-freezing has its history in a century of experiments applying cold to reproductive cells to maximize productivity. Cattle breeders in the mid-1900s began freezing bull semen so they could impregnate many cows all at once by the same bull. In this way they could standardize and control conception to generate the highest profits. The techniques developed in agriculture traveled to fertility clinics, and today a similar logic prevails in human sperm banks… MORE