Actor Dax Shepard offered to pay for pre-teen daughter to freeze her eggs at 18

On a recent episode of his "Armchair Expert" podcast, actor Dax Shepard said he recently offered to pay for his 11-year-old daughter to have her eggs frozen when she turns 18.

Key Takeaways:

• Actors Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell, married since 2013, have two daughters — Lincoln and Delta.

• In a recent episode of Shepard's podcast, "Armchair Expert," Shepard said 11-year-old Delta spoke recently about how she "can't wait to have a baby."

• Shepard then revealed that he offered to pay for Delta's eggs to be frozen when she turns 18 so she can have children later, "between [the ages of] 35 and 45," once she establishes her career.

The Details:

On a recent episode of the "Armchair Expert" podcast, Shepard and his co-host, Monica Padman, welcomed Shepard's wife — actress Kristen Bell — and legendary singer Cher as his guests for the first hour. After, Shepard and Padman had a one-on-one discussing aging before Shepard mentioned his 11-year-old daughter.

"I was just telling the girls on our vacation, Deltie was saying how she can't wait to have a baby," he began. "Which, yeah, she's going to really, really do it."

Shepard explained that Delta has a large, well-loved menagerie of stuffed animals, which he said makes him believe she'll be a great mother one day.

"Anyway, so she's saying she wants to have a baby," he continued. "And I said, when do you think you'll have your first child? When you turn 18? And I want to be supportive of whatever. I don't want to plant any seeds that I'd be judgmental or whatever. And she said, no! 18?! What do you think - really?"

From there, the conversation took a more disturbing turn.

"I said, 'My guess is between 35 and 45 is when I think you'll have kids,'" he added. "I said, 'and I think we'll, if you want to, we'll freeze your eggs when you're 18. Like I'll pay, I'll pay for you to get your eggs frozen, so you don't have to think about that.'"

He then concluded, "Every woman is like, you're going to want to do your career or whatever. All to say she was like, no, that's great! That's too old. Again, she's 11. So that probably seems like 80.  She's thinking mid-twenties." (Conversation begins around 1:10.)

Cher | Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Why It Matters:

Shepard's comments seem to echo the current cultural standard, in which children are raised to believe marriage and parenthood should be delayed until everything else in their lives is in place. As Shepard said, "every woman" is going to want to "do your career" before having children — reinforcing the narrative that career must come before children.

Having been fed a steady diet of this propaganda, it's no surprise that young adults are increasingly saying they never plan to have children at all.

This is not the first time Shepard has presented such a worldview; when he hosted pro-abortion actress Michelle Williams on his podcast she likewise perpetuated the message that children negatively affect one's career.

In addition, as Live Action News has previously explained, freezing one's eggs is not a guarantee of future fertility:

[A] 2022 study in the journal Fertility and Sterility from New York University Langone Fertility Center regarding egg freezing revealed data that Dr. Marcelle Cedars, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology at the University of California San Francisco, said “should give women pause.”

Cedars, also the president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, explained, “The pregnancy rate is not as good as I think a lot of women think it will be. I always tell my patients, ‘There’s not a baby in the freezer. There’s a chance to get pregnant.'”

The study found that the chance of a live birth from frozen eggs is only 39%. Dr. Alan Penzias, a fertility doctor at Boston IVF Fertility Clinic and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, told The New York Times that data from his center are consistent with the study. Women who freeze their eggs at his clinic have only a 33% chance of having a baby using those eggs.

“Counseling should be clear that there is no guarantee and that the value of delaying having a child must exceed the benefit of delay,” Dr. Penzias said.

National data on the success rates of having a baby after freezing your eggs remain unknown, Dr. Timothy Hickman, president of the society and medical director of CCRM Fertility in Houston, told The New York Times. Women are trying to buy time in hopes of having a baby in the future but there is no guarantee — and it could cost them tens of thousands of dollars. Once they have paid to retrieve, freeze, and store their eggs, there are still costs associated with the IVF process, which carries its own low success rate.

For women under 35, IVF has a success rate of just 44.5%, dropping to 2.8% for women ages 42 and over, according to data. Just seven percent of babies created through IVF survive to the newborn stage of life.

Even outlets like PEOPLE and Buzzfeed expressed shock that Shepard would have such discussion with an 11-year-old child. By Shepard's own admission, Delta is still playing with stuffed animals, and yet he's posing questions to her about motherhood and egg freezing.

The Bottom Line:

Delaying parenthood as late as possible has left many turning to anti-life measures like in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the hopes of having children when fertility is in decline. "Freeze your eggs" is not an easy answer for career pursuits, nor is it a guarantee that when a person finally feels "ready" for a child that they will be able to conceive one. Babies are not products to be ordered from a factory on demand.