WHO are the women who will allow their employer to freeze their eggs so they can have babies at a time that’s convenient for their bosses?

Why, they are women who work for companies such as Apple and Facebook. Facebook has already got the policy in place for its employees in the US and Apple will do the same from January.

Apple said: "We continue to expand our benefits for women, with a new extended maternity leave policy, along with cryopreservation and egg storage as part of our extensive support for infertility treatment.”

The companies will pay up to $20,000 per female employee for the medical procedure.

They think it’s worth it because the tech industry is male-dominated and in a western world that abhors sexual inequality at work, that is simply unacceptable in one of the world’s most forward-thinking industries in one of the world’s most forward-thinking countries.

But would you be willing to hand over your fertility rights to your employer? There are many ethically dodgy implications inextricably linked to this, not least of which is: who ultimately owns those eggs? And who owns the right to decide when the employee can have them back to turn them into babies? What happens to the eggs if the employee leaves the company?

It smacks of Aldous Huxley’s chilling Brave New World, where the World State controls population numbers by denying people the chance to reproduce by natural means, instead creating babies by harvesting eggs and artificially fertilising them. The babies, all genetically modified to be one of five different types to fulfil different functions, are moved into “hatcheries” and grow up in “conditioning” centres, all bereft of family.

Huxley, who wrote Brave New World in 1931, foresaw a future where the entire world’s population came under the rule of one anonymous all-powerful “state”, a logical extension of the totalitarian Communist regime in the Soviet Union at the time, but even he failed to predict how the forces of capitalism would eventually prevail.

And so, 80-odd years later, and thanks to scientific advances, young women are being enticed to hand over control of their fertility to private companies. Do they really understand the long-term implications of having babies when they’re older? The greater health risks for both mother and baby? Including the fact that the process, which involves IVF, may not work at all and the woman may end up with no babies at all and all her chances gone?

Indeed, will younger female employees have the maturity to weigh up the pros and cons of delaying motherhood versus delaying career ambitions?

Apple says, “We want to empower women at Apple to do the best work of their lives as they care for loved ones and raise their families”.

It is asking the impossible: for women to give their best at work and at home.

This cannot happen. Apple and Facebook, and a great swathe of western society, regard motherhood and babies as nuisances that get in the way of women’s progression at work, and this is the key factor in the issue of sexual equality at work.

But sexual equality at work pre-supposes that men and women are the same, and they are not.

Only women can get pregnant and have babies. Western societies seem to be pushing all sorts of scientific and cultural barriers in an attempt to make men and women the same, and the way things are going I’m sure it won’t be long before science enables men to have babies.

But until that happens, we need to accept that men and women are different in this respect.

Men have always been troubled by women’s ability to have babies, and have always tried to control it for their own ends.

I sincerely hope the young women who work at Apple and Facebook see through this “generous” offer and tell them they will have their babies when they want.