Freezing the biological clock : the experience of undergoing social egg freezing for delayed childbearing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent years have seen growing trends toward delayed childbearing and the increasing use of assisted reproductive technologies. In 2012, egg freezing was made available as an elective procedure for healthy reproductive age women to attempt to preserve their fertility. As more women delay childbearing and pursue social egg freezing, it is important to improve our understanding of this phenomenon. To date, limited research has examined the experiences of women who have undergone this procedure, and this study sought to address this gap in the literature. The research question guiding this study was: What is the meaning and experience of undergoing social egg freezing for the purpose of delaying childbearing? Through the use of a qualitative phenomenological approach, in-depth unstructured interviews were conducted with six women of reproductive age who electively underwent egg freezing in order to delay childbearing, for the purpose of learning about the meaning and experience of this phenomenon. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using van Manen’s (1990) hermeneutic phenomenological framework. Six common themes emerged from the women’s stories, including: Sense of Reducing the Pressure to Have a Child, Sense of Taking Control and Agency, Sense of Personal Empowerment and Acceptance, Sense of Feeling Fortunate, Sense of Keeping Options Open, and Openness with Others. The research findings are presented and discussed within the context of the limited existing literature on social egg freezing, with an emphasis on highlighting new areas of understanding. The implications of these findings on counselling practice are discussed and suggestions are made for future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".