WHY does a woman have to know today whether she will want to become a mother tomorrow? Some women want children, some are unsure, and some may never want them at all. In Pakistan, where the biological clock is often accompanied by reminders of shaadi ki umar and warnings of future regret, egg freezing remains an uncomfortable idea.
Recently, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez documented her egg-freezing procedure on social media. While many praised her openness, others criticised her for delaying motherhood. The discomfort is likely to be even greater in Pakistan, where marriage and motherhood remain deeply intertwined. A recent Dawn feature, ‘How to freeze your eggs in Pakistan’, shows that the procedure is available in Pakistan, alongside stigma and practical barriers. Rather than treating fertility-preserving technology as something to fear, we should ask what problem it is trying to solve. Several economic ideas help explain why freezing one’s eggs can be a rational response to uncertainty, without implying that every woman should do it, or even that every woman ultimately wants children.
‘Real options theory’, developed prominently by Avinash Dixit and Robert Pindyck in Investment Under Uncertainty (1994), shows that when decisions are difficult to reverse and the future is uncertain, keeping an option open can have value. Egg freezing offers a similar option: a woman may later use her frozen eggs, never need them, or decide she does not want children at all. Its value lies in preserving the possibility of motherhood without requiring her to decide today what her future self must want.
But the value of keeping an option open depends on what time allows. This is where ‘search theory’ becomes useful. Marriage is a search problem: no one knows when a suitable partner will appear, while waiting can bring both benefits and costs. In Pakistan, those costs are also shaped by the marriage market. Recent research by Bashir and Nazir (2025) highlights the importance of family networks, finding that nearly half of marriages are consanguineous, most commonly between first cousins. Waiting is therefore not simply a private calculation between a woman and her biological clock; it occurs within family networks and social expectations. For a woman who wants children, declining fertility can make continued search costly. Egg freezing cannot remove the uncertainty of finding the right partner, but it may reduce one cost of waiting and give some women greater freedom to reject a match that does not feel right.
The value of keeping an option open depends on what time allows.
But uncertainty does not end with finding a partner. A woman may also be uncertain whether motherhood will remain part of the life she wants. Economics allows for heterogeneous preferences: one woman may be certain she wants children, another may want to preserve the possibility, and another may decide motherhood is not for her. These are different preferences under uncertainty, not different degrees of rationality.
This matters because women are often asked to make reproductive decisions through the language of future regret: ‘what if you change your mind?’ Graham Loomes and Robert Sugden’s ‘regret theory’ shows how anticipated regret can shape choices under uncertainty. Applied to reproductive decisions, regret can run in multiple directions. A woman may regret not freezing her eggs, but she may also regret paying for a procedure she never uses; she may regret not having children, but she may also regret becoming a parent under pressure. The question is not how to eliminate regret, but which risks a person is willing to bear.
Yet regret is not formed in a social vacuum. ‘Identity economics’, associated with George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton, argues that choices are shaped by social identities and the norms attached to them. In Pakistan, marriage and motherhood are treated as expected stages of a woman’s life. Slamat, Bracke and Ceuterick (2026), studying childless women in rural Punjab, describe motherhood as socially obligatory and find that women are expected to demonstrate mothering qualities and seek treatment to validate their desire for motherhood. In such a setting, even anticipated regret may be shaped by social expectations.
Egg freezing is valuable precisely because it can give women more room to make personal decisions on their own timeline, though that freedom will remain unequal as long as access is limited by cost. Finding the right partner is difficult, and not every woman who wants children will meet that person in time. Some will freeze their eggs and later use them; others may decide motherhood is not the life they want. Reproductive freedom should mean having space to pursue motherhood, postpone it, remain uncertain about it, or reject it altogether.
The writer is an assistant professor of economics at St Olaf College.
Published in Dawn, September 7th, 2026
