Reproductive medicine in Spain: motherhood and/or career

Professional football at the highest level and becoming a mother are mutually exclusive. At least so far. But now the Royal Spanish Football Association (RFEF) is offering its national team players a very special service: the world champion women will be able to have their eggs frozen in the future and thus fulfill their dream of having children after their active years with eggs from a young age after artificial insemination.

“A big step forward,” praises midfielder Alexia Putellas. “The association understands that you are serving your country in contradiction to your biological time, that you cannot stop, cannot become a mother because you need your body for work,” explains the 2022 World Player of the Year to the Spanish press. The time when many women give birth to their first child - between the ages of 25 and 35 - is also the time when top athletes perform at their best.

So does freezing your eggs finally help you balance your career and private life? Not everyone is as optimistic as Putellas. “And if a measure that they sell to us as feminist is actually deeply macho,” athlete Ana Peleteiro questions the RFEF’s offer, causing a heated discussion. “The problem is not freezing eggs.

The problem is rather why the institution for which these women work has an interest in financing the postponement of motherhood," says the Olympic bronze medalist in the triple jump in Tokyo 2020 and three-time European champion. Peleteiro, who became a mother twice during her active time and fought her way back to the world championship, warns that this offer could quickly become a means of pressure: "What do they want? To make motherhood possible or to ensure that they do not become a mother as long as they are active?"

As an alternative, Peleteiro suggests that the association and clubs finance a maternity break and maintain the place in the team. Maternity leave was negotiated in 2020 and included in the collective agreement for professional footballers in 2025. But there is no guarantee that you will return to your original position.

Marta Corredera knows this all too well. When the defender returned to Real Madrid in 2023 after pregnancy, another player took her position. She was told she no longer had a place in the club's plans. It was the end of her career. “The first thing that is needed is normalization,” she told a Spanish news agency in a detailed conversation. “An athlete is a woman like any other and has the right to become pregnant, to combine work and family and to start a family,” she warns.

In Spain, the freezing of eggs has not only sparked discussions in top-class sport. Many normal working women are faced with the dilemma of motherhood and career and finance the supposed time gain themselves. The specialist clinics are aware of this and use women's sports to advertise themselves. For example, on the jerseys of the Córdoba CF football club or the Lucentum Alicante basketball club. And in 2023, a fertility clinic supported Futpro, the largest association of female soccer players in Spain.

Business at these clinics is booming. Over the past decade, the number of women having their eggs frozen has increased thirtyfold. More and more women are projecting their desire to have children into the distant future and hoping that their careers will be so consolidated that motherhood will no longer endanger their professional advancement. The number of people who become mothers at the age of 40 or more exceeds those under 25.

Surveys show the contradiction that many Spanish women live with. According to the “Fertility Survey” by the Spanish Statistics Institute (INE), 72 percent of Spanish women between the ages of 25 and 29 want two or more children. But usually nothing comes of it. Because Spain – together with Malta – has the lowest birth rate in the European Union with just 1.1 children per woman. The number of births has fallen by 100,000 per year over the past decade.

Journalist Diana Oliver, author of the book “Maternidades precarias” (Precarious Motherhood), does not believe that the solution to the decline in birth rates lies in normalizing egg freezing. "Rather, we have to ask ourselves why we are delaying this crucial step in life at all. Is it due to a lack of stability? Because we are asked to do things in our professional lives that cannot be reconciled with raising children? Or is it precarious working conditions and the difficult housing situation?" she says.

A study by the Spanish central bank shows that women who become mothers must expect disadvantage in the labor market. In the first year after the birth of a child, women's income falls by 11 percent. That of the fathers remains the same. Ten years later the difference is as high as 28 percent.[Link to https://www.bde.es/wbe/es/publicaciones/analisis-economico-investigacion/documentos-ocasionales/child-penalty-spain.html]

“It is obvious - assuming you can decide for yourself what is best for you - that freezing eggs just to adapt to professional demands and be more productive cannot be seen as social progress for women,” comments Spain's largest daily newspaper, El País. Becoming a mother should not have a negative impact on an athlete's career or that of any other woman. This is from the basic feminism course.

The World Tennis Association WTA shows that there is another way. This passed a regulation for professional players in 2025. They receive paid maternity leave and then return to the world ranking position they were in before the pregnancy.