Freezing Eggs in a Warming World

Most discussions of population control focus on how many children people should have, but ignore issues to do with the timing, so there is little discussion of the value of delaying childbearing. Once we recognize that delaying childbearing can have a significant impact on the size of the population, and, therefore, on CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) emissions, our perspective on egg freezing changes significantly. In this article, I argue that, if we focus on future generations in general, rather than focusing only on the children who would be conceived using frozen eggs, policies permitting or encouraging the freezing of eggs may reduce potential harms to future generations. This, I argue, may block the objections to egg freezing for non-medical reasons which focus on the potential risks to the child (without requiring an appeal to the non-identity problem).