Choosing Motherhood (or Not): Fertility, Privilege, and Redefining the Timeline
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Offer valid in U.S. and Canada. Exclusions apply. See details online. I think what would move the needle is if women believed we lived in a society that cared about our self-actualization.

If we believe that we could be mothers and follow our dreams, be mothers and have the careers we wanted, be mothers and have the support systems and policies that would help us care for our children. Hey, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today on Her Money. I'm Jean Chatzky. And today's topic is personal. It's also more than a little bit complicated. We're talking about motherhood and specifically family.

One woman's journey from deciding to be child-free and marrying someone who had made the same choice to changing her mind in her mid-30s to eventually choosing to go with a donor egg at age 41 in her second marriage. Today, for the first time in U.S. history, women over 40 are having more babies than teenagers are, which is certainly something to celebrate. But we also know that there can be a

a cost to waiting. If you want to freeze your eggs, it's around $5,000 just for retrieval. A single round of IVF in vitro fertilization can run $12,000 to $30,000. And IVF using your own eggs isn't the only option. There are other routes too. The entire process of having a baby using donor eggs

That can cost around $47,000 and I could go on, but I won't because my guest knows all of this intimately.

Ruthie Ackerman is the author of The Mother Code, my story of love, loss, and the myths that shape us. She's someone who's asked herself the hard questions about motherhood, and she's inviting the rest of us to do the same. Ruthie, welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Jean. Thank you so much for being here. You opened the book with a raw...

honest question. You ask, did I really want a child or did I just not know what to do with myself?

if I didn't have one? Let's start there. I think that is a big question for many of us. Why are more women talking openly about it right now? I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that we are having more conversations, social media is connecting us, we're feeling less alone. I think that when I was thinking about these decisions even 10 years ago, I felt like I

I was all alone. Something was wrong with me. Everyone else had figured something out or gotten a memo that I hadn't.

And now, because we have chat rooms, Reddit, Facebook groups, all of these various communities, we are talking about this. We are seeing that although our federal government, as we know, is pushing babies on people, offering baby bonuses, what we do have are communities of women and people saying, you know,

know what, that doesn't have to be your path. And child free by choice communities and showing us that there are so many ways to have a good life and it doesn't have to look one way. I think, boy, I think so many women are struggling with these choices because it feels like our runway has been expanded in part by technology, in part by longevity, in part by the fact that we have

career choices that we did not have many, many decades ago. What you ended up doing in freezing your eggs turned out to send you down, as I said, a pretty expensive road. So what do you think that women need to understand about this particular path? What questions should we ask ourselves? Should we ask our doctors before we sign on?

Yeah, I think that it has gotten a lot better. When I had frozen my eggs in 2013, it was the first year that egg freezing was no longer experimental. There wasn't informed consent in the way that I feel like there is now. There wasn't conversations with doctors. There just wasn't the research that showed consent.

how successful these procedures were because it was all very new. Also on social media, there were a lot of these startups and egg freezing companies that were talking about egg freezing and using words like insurance, saying that don't worry, your eggs will be there when you're ready for them.

When the truth that I learned and many women I know have learned is that egg freezing is not successful most of the time. But that's not the image that we're shown. I mentioned in the book I paid $15,000 for this process, not including the storage fees, which are additional costs and are very expensive too. I said that it's $1,200 a year. It's like as much as a Soho House membership or a gym membership, but none of the benefits. Right.

And so I had these eggs, and I was told that I had an 80% chance of having a child. Now, being somebody who, not a medical doctor, I'm not a scientist, 80% sounded pretty good to me. I never even assumed, it never occurred to me that I would be in the 20%, because 80% sounded great. And yet the reality is that doctors and the

Whole fertility industry needs to do a better job of discussing probability with patients, with women and families. And we have to do a better job as consumers to understand that egg freezing is a tool in our fertility tool belt, so to speak.

but that it is not guaranteed. It is not, we don't know if it's going to work. So we shouldn't depend on it. But if we need it and maybe it does work, that's great. But we have to have other options too.

And I think it's important to understand and consider the ongoing costs, right? I mean, as you said, the $1,200 a year, that's substantial for a lot of women. I would imagine it comes down to choosing between freezing their eggs and

and paying for storage or saving for retirement or trying to buy a home. Do we live in a world where reproductive choices are very, very closely tied to privilege? And is that changing in any way, in any meaningful way? We absolutely live in a world where reproductive choices are tied to privilege. And there is no question about that.

I think it's so unfortunate the image we have of a woman who needs or who uses fertility treatment is a white middle class woman or a white upper middle class woman when the truth is those that need fertility treatments or those who statistically are the most infertile are usually black and brown women. And so we have a case of the have and the have nots, as you pointed out. I talk in my book about what I call the fertility wealth gap.

This idea that we as women, we start off, as we know already, making less money than men. We don't ask for raises or promotions as often. We don't save as much for retirement for those reasons. And now it's falling on us in our 20s and early 30s and even beyond to –

pay for the privilege, if we even have that option, of fertility preservation. And yet we know that as a society, it benefits all of us when women start their families later, and it benefits men too. So what I was wondering is how do we make it so it doesn't fall only on women to preserve their fertility? Yeah, all of that is really huge. We're going to take a very quick break. And when we come back,

I want to go from freezing your eggs through the process to hear what steps you decided to take and how it worked out along the way. Back in a sec. You know, I have learned a lot of lessons from running about pacing and resilience. And yes, getting older, my hips are very honest with me these days. The main lesson I've learned, our bodies are capable of some pretty incredible

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New customers can enjoy this special offer of only $1.99 a meal. Go to everyplate.com slash podcast and use code HERMONEY199 to get started. It's applied as a discount on the first box, limited time only. We are back with Ruthie Ackerman, author of The Mother Code. We're talking about how...

Ruthie and many other women these days are redefining motherhood and the cost of motherhood on their own terms. Talk about the benefits to waiting to start our families later. What specifically? I can speak for myself.

I now have a four and a half year old daughter. Spoiler alert. By the time I had my child, I was 43 years old. So I had already in my career created the life that I wanted. I had started my own business. I was making much more money than I had been in my 20s. And I also know because my parents had me when they were 22 and 23. And so I

I had 20 years on them. So I knew just from my own life how much they had struggled both financially but also forming their own identities, figuring out who they wanted to be in the world while trying to raise me. And I had

Not that I'm not still evolving, but I had figured a lot of that stuff out before I had children or a child. So I had more time, more of a sense of how I wanted to mother, more intentionality in my parenting.

All of that is huge. You froze your eggs in your mid-30s. You had a baby at 43. What happened in between? A lot happened in between. One of the parts that I just want to mention, because I think this is important, is that even when I knew that I might want to have a baby, I stayed in my marriage anyway. Okay.

So I have a scene in the book that I like to point out because I was talking to my therapist and she said to me, how much on a scale of zero to 100, how badly do you want to have a baby? And I said 55%. And she said, there you go.

And I said, 55%, shouldn't I be all in if I'm going to be a mother? I'm going to annihilate my dreams, my identity for 55% certainty? And she said, why is 55% not enough? And for two more years, I struggled. I stayed in my marriage for two more years because I thought 55% wasn't enough to leave my marriage.

And it turned out that my husband actually left me. It wasn't me that walked away. And I do think that's an important moment in the book because for me, I wasn't brave enough in that moment to make the choice to follow my deepest desires. I was willing to continue to pretzel and contort myself. And now I know that so many of us, it's not necessarily a personal flaw, so many of us pretzel and contort because we're told to be people pleasers.

We're taught that from a very young age. And so once my husband left me, a lot of things happened, but I spent a long time dating. If any of you have been on the dating apps, you know about that experience. And I eventually met someone else who became my second husband, Robb.

And we went to thaw those eggs that I had frozen and learned that none of them were viable. So what I had thought was my insurance policy, it turned out was not an insurance policy at all. And we had waited. We had met when I was 39, Rob and I.

We were trying to figure out whether we should be together, whether we could be on the same timeline about becoming parents. We had both just gotten out of marriages. And we thought, you know what? We have these frozen eggs. We had an 80% chance it would work. So we went on that. And so only when I was 42, 41, almost 42, did I learn that those eggs weren't going to work. And so then we scrambled. I did two rounds of IVF.

and scrambled to try to use fresh eggs from my 42-year-old eggs, and those both didn't work either. And then eventually, a doctor had said to me, you know what, if you want to have a biological baby, you should probably consider donor eggs.

And donor eggs was something I'd never even heard of. I didn't, I had heard of donor sperm. I knew about that. But donor eggs was, there was so much shame and secrecy, I now believe. And that's why we don't talk about donor eggs.

What I think is so interesting about your quest is that you went through so many of the different fertility options that people have. The donor egg world, you're right, is not a world that many of us know about. So tell us, how do you know if this is a good option for you if you want to have a child? How much does it cost? How does it work?

I didn't know it was a good option for me. That's the truth. And we don't know. What I knew was that I wanted to have a child. At that point, I was on that path. I wanted to, if I could, be able to give birth to a child.

Of course, adoption was still on the table in my mind. There were other options on the table. But I wanted to do what I could to be able to have a biological child. And so donor eggs was the option that was presented to me. And I could have done another round of IVF with my own eggs. But my doctor said that would be about a 10% chance that my own eggs would

eggs would work compared to a 65% chance with donor eggs. And to come back to the money point, we only had enough money at that point because by the time we thawed the eggs, the original eggs that I had frozen,

And then done the two rounds of IVF, that was already $50,000 in one year. Insurance did not cover any of that. Like my work didn't cover any of that. And so it just felt to me like we had one shot at this. We can try one more time with my own eggs with a 10% chance of it working, or we try donor eggs with a 65% chance. So really in that moment, it felt like a numbers game.

And I didn't understand, I didn't fully comprehend that I would be picking, almost like a dating site, picking the woman whose DNA would replace my own. It was a very emotional decision and I was feeling like I was looking for my replacement, although of course that is not true.

I felt like I should find someone who looks like me. I was like, is this person going to be funny? Because I think humor is so important. Are they going to have a good personality? Like, what are the things, if we're given the choice, what are the things we should try to control for? Not that there's any control, but when we're trying to feel some sense of certainty, we grasp onto whatever that might be. And of course, I knew nothing about genetics and DNA either.

So how much did the process end up costing? The process of donor eggs ended up costing about $47,000 all in. Wow. And fast forward nine months from then and you delivered a healthy baby girl. I did.

But I make a joke with Rob. Rob and I both joke that, you know, she already was in the red when she was born because with that $100,000. So she owes us. They all owe us, by the way. They all owe us. You mentioned the baby bonus. The

There's been talk in the news recently of a $5,000 baby bonus. The president said he kind of liked that idea. I don't believe it has made its way anywhere close to either law or even executive order. Not that it would be possible by executive order. But what do you think of it? I mean, we're at a point in our country right now where by 2038,

if nothing changes, the population of the United States will be shrinking. Do you think a bonus could move the needle? Or do you think we're just in a different era? Jean, I think what would move the needle is if women believed we lived in a society that cared about our self-actualization.

If we believed that we could be mothers and follow our dreams, be mothers and have the careers we wanted, be mothers and have the support systems and policies that would help us care for our children, I think women would have more children. I don't think we need baby bonuses. I don't think we need medals. I heard about we're going to get awards for having six children or more. I think it isn't about that.

I think it's about really investing in equality and in believing that women are entitled to a good life beyond marriage and motherhood. Now that you have, and by the way, you're right about the policies. I mean, I don't think anything would move the needle as much as child care, child care policies in the United States. We could talk about that for hours. But you are now at the point where you've come through this journey. You've written a book about it.

You've got a four and a half year old. How do you feel about motherhood today? I feel so differently than I did before I had a baby. I feel there's so much joy I didn't understand. There's the dread that I had worried about did not come to fruition for me. I feel that

we do women a disservice when we tell them, number one, that they're going to have an aha moment that says, now's the time to have a child or I'm 100% in. I also think we do women a disservice by saying that we should know and feel like mothers before we even become mothers. Because as I wrote in my book,

I became a mother through loving and commitment and caretaking of my child. And so that was only after she was born and only months and years in. So I became a mother as I mothered. It wasn't something that just happened or was automatic or could ever have happened before I actually had a child. Right.

And what do you say to women who go down the road and decide it is really not for me? That is a great decision. That any decision that is a decision that is aligned with your deepest desires is a good one. Everyone, as I said earlier, everyone has a different story. Every person has their own mother code or parent code or human code.

And there's no one who should be telling us who we should be in the world or whether or not we should mother. I even think that I could have made a decision not to mother back when I was making that decision in my mid-30s, and that would have been a good one too. It would have been a different path, a different life. I don't know what it would look like. I'll never know. But that would have been a good decision. What I know now is that there are no wrong paths.

Every path can be a good one. And we do deserve a good life. Ruthie Ackerman, the book is The Mother Code. Thank you so much for doing this with us today. Thank you for having me, Jean. If you loved this episode, please give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. We always value your feedback. And if you want to keep the financial conversations going, join me for a deeper dive.

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