As Iranian-born New Zealander Shamin Yazdani hurtled towards her mid-30s, she asked herself a big question: should she should freeze her eggs?! What was first a simple conversation, that so many women today can relate to, grew into an even wider conversation about how migration and motherhood are so intertwined.
Should I freeze my eggs?
Filmmaker Shamin Yazdani faced that question as she approached her mid-30s as a single woman.
“In my 20s, I was very aware of the fact I didn’t want to have kids then, but that I might change my mind,” says Shamin.
“That was quite a challenging thing to navigate and confront … How do I move through life with that uncertainty of potentially changing my mind, and is that something that should lead [my] decisions?”
The Nuances
There’s a growing global conversation around egg-freezing, as more women are either choosing to be childfree or delaying parenthood.
Fertility rates in Aotearoa hit a record low of 1.55 births per woman in 2024, and only slightly increased to 1.57 this year, according to Stats NZ.
In Shamin’s new documentary, Frozen – My Eggs & Me – which premiered at a sold out screening at the Show Me Shorts Festival last weekend – she explored whether freezing her eggs was the right move for her.
She confided in several loved ones – a mix of women who are mothers, who have frozen their eggs, who haven’t and have regretted it at a point in their lives, and who have happily chosen to be childfree.
These discussions showed the nuances of why people are putting off pregnancy, or opting out entirely.
In Shamin’s case, she says she was living overseas for 12 years and put her career first.
“I was in a long-term relationship, but I was living in London at the time, and it felt like it would be a challenging place to have a family, especially as someone who didn’t have family there.”
She says her parents were also living overseas for most of the time she was in London, and her extended family were in other countries as well.
When her parents eventually moved back to Ōtautahi Christchurch, it took her a year or two to come back to Aotearoa.
She says she felt a pull to return to a slower and family-focused life, wondering whether it was time to be more domesticated.
An Only Immigrant Child
In the short film, the egg-freezing conversation took an emotional and insightful turn when she hopped on a video call with three of her closest Iranian friends – who were all childfree by choice.
Their chat makes one reflect on how their lived experiences as migrants could impact their choices to become a parent.
In their conversation, Shamin admits she was worried she wouldn’t be able to provide her children that sense of security of being rooted in a place her family has lived for generations.
They also touched on themes of carrying guilt as immigrant children, who want to honour the sacrifices their parents made to provide a safer and better life for them.
Shamin says her parents lived through a revolution in Iran and an eight-year war, and they came to Aotearoa via Europe when she was about four years old.
She says her parents have prioritised her, and understand that life isn’t always going to play out the way you want.
“They’ve immigrated more than once and life’s thrown a lot of curveballs, and they’ve always prevailed.”
So, the pressure she’s feeling around having children isn’t something her parents have put on her. Instead, she says it’s self-inflicted.
“[The pressures are] more my own, of I guess wanting to honour the sacrifices that my parents have made, which is a classic immigrant story. And just feeling a little spooked by the idea of being the last [person in our family] line,” says Shamin.
Plus, she’s an only child, which she has found that regardless of being an immigrant or not, contributes to the pressure of bearing children.
The Cost of Women’s Freedom
Another point her close friend Tanya raised in the documentary: “Women like us have never existed before … They’ve never been this free.”
Now reflecting on that quote, Shamin says while it is a powerful statement, it also begs the question – at what cost do we have this “freedom”, “liberation” and “feminism”?
“We’re now entering a time where some women are turning around and saying, ‘I don’t want it all.’
“Yeah, we’ve never been this free, but we’ve also never been this isolated. We’ve never been this atomised. We’ve also never been this stressed.”
(Preach! Whoever says being a “stay-at-home” mom isn’t a fulltime job is kidding themselves. And in this economy, you’d need to have a two income household to raise a child – unless you come from wealth!)
In an ideal world, and she’s not sure we live in that ideal world, she says she would want to have her own children.
Unique Challenges of an Immigrant
There are unique factors that shape an immigrant’s decision to have children compared to those who were born into a country.
Shamin says immigrants spend a lot of time building and nurturing fundamental conditions that locals would’ve been born into – whether that’s building community, learning the language and understanding cultural and social cues.
“Obviously it varies and there’s this spectrum depending on how big the gap is between the culture you left and the culture you enter. But for many of us, that gap can be quite big.
“So the difference is we have to work twice as hard, if not thrice as hard, just to get to the starting point that other people are born into.”
She grew up in Ōtautahi Christchurch at a time when it was predominantly Pākehā, and coming back as an adult has been confronting for her.
She says she was seeing things with fresh eyes, especially coming back from a very multicultural London, and realising she didn’t have the same start as everybody else did.
“It was very homogeneous and sometimes when you’re the exception … What happens is that you sort of integrate, borderline assimilate, and see yourself as one of them.
“Maybe they even see you as one of them. But the danger in that is we end up overlooking from both sides what the differences actually are.
“I feel like there’s a lot of rhetoric these days about how we’re all the same … but that’s not true. We’re all very different and it’s okay to acknowledge, celebrate and respect that.”
In making this film, she says her hope is that other immigrants who can relate to the journey will feel seen.
“We can cultivate our own community, where we uplift and empower one another.”
You can watch Frozen – My Eggs & Me now on RNZ, Māori+ and Day One Hāpai te Haeata on YouTube.
Banner Photo: Danielle Hao-Aickin
