Welcomed as liberation and dismissed as exploitation, the introduction of egg freezing has met with controversy and ambivalence, and is thus no exception to a longer tradition of politicized public responses to new reproductive technologies. The 20th century saw radical changes in the manipulation of reproduction through techno-scientific and biomedical means. Struggles for reproductive choice initially focused on avoiding pregnancy and birth, most prominently in relation to the introduction of the contraceptive pill and the legalization of abortion.1 The achievement of conception and birth, by contrast, became newly politicized from the late 1970s onwards, with the introduction of reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization, egg donation, and gestational surrogacy. In the early decades of the 21st century, these approaches to avoiding and achieving reproduction are combined in egg freezing. This reproductive technology simultaneously represents both an active choice not to have children in the present and a commitment to future, possibly assisted, reproduction, thus calling into question easy distinctions between reproductive and nonreproductive behavior. Media discourses surrounding the introduction of egg freezing give insights into the significance of this technology for the public reconceptualization of the female reproductive body as the site of a gendered politics of aging.
Although egg freezing has often been described as a procedure for a small group of elite women who can afford the expensive procedure, this chapter emphasizes that the significance of egg freezing stretches far beyond the growing, but still limited, numbers of women who use this technology. As a relatively fringe procedure—in the United Kingdom, for example, OC comprises only 1.5% of IVF cycles—it nevertheless becomes so widely significant because the possibility of egg freezing is increasingly publicly recognized.2 It is the widespread attention across print and screen media that makes OC relevant not only as a new clinical practice but as a cultural phenomenon that affects a much broader group of women and men.
The very possibility of freezing one’s eggs—whether or not one would choose or be able to do so—shifts the meaning of fertility and reproductive aging. Public discourses on OC display a tension between the understanding of female reproductive aging as either immutable or adjustable. On the one hand, women’s reproductive aging is framed as foundational to the formation of chrononormativities pertaining to idealized timings of when to have children, have a long-term partner, prioritize work or family formation—thereby renaturalizing them in the face of technological innovation. On the other hand, egg freezing may be presented as a technology that renders female fertility adjustable to meet broader social chrononormativities of wage time, education time, relationship time, and gendered ideologies of aging.
For example, in the Netherlands, the introduction of egg freezing for so-called social reasons was blocked by the Christian-Democrat-majority coalition government in order to maintain “natural” age limits to women’s fertility, which were affirmed through a regulatory framework that did not permit using frozen eggs beyond 45 years. By contrast, US egg freezing insurance coverage through Fortune 500 companies, such as Apple and Facebook, has promoted OC as a means of extending fertility to the time when women are “ready”—whether the time of readiness is determined by relationship formation patterns, the temporal organization of careers, or other factors. In different national contexts, the introduction of egg freezing can thus provoke both the reaffirmation of age norms in the face of their potential transgression and the reconfiguration of reproductive aging as operating by a different temporal logic when eggs can be “frozen in time.”
Both the British and the Dutch contexts are characterized by a high degree of national regulation of reproductive healthcare; yet egg freezing is regulated in strikingly different ways in the two countries. In 2009 the Amsterdam Academic Medical Centre (AMC) proposed to offer egg freezing not only to cancer patients but also to women who wished to anticipate age-related infertility.3 A majority in the Dutch Parliament objected to the AMC’s plan and a two-year highly mediatized public debate ensued, until “social” egg freezing was formally permitted in 2011.4 Although egg freezing had been allowed, the suggested maximum age for implanting the embryos was lowered from the 50 years the AMC had initially proposed to the customary 45-year age limit in conventional IVF.5 The controversy surrounding the AMC’s initiative, the public debate that ensued, and the subsequent implementation of OC reaffirmed reproductive aging limits in the face of the new possibilities associated with cryopreservation.
Twenty years prior, the United Kingdom had already drawn up egg freezing regulations in the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. At least 50 women froze their eggs during the nineties, but the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA)—the national body licensing and monitoring UK fertility clinics—did not permit the use of these eggs for fear of chromosomal defects.6 At the turn of the millennium, one of these women, Carolyn Neill, challenged the ban because she wanted to use the nine eggs she had frozen prior to having treatment for breast cancer. In response, the HFEA commissioned Dr. Sharon Paynter to write a report on the safety of egg freezing. Following her positive, albeit cautious, recommendations, the HFEA lifted the restrictions on using frozen eggs for fertilization and subsequent implantation.7 The first British frozen egg baby, Emily Perry, was born in June 2002. Unlike the Dutch equivalent, the UK HFEA regulations make no distinction between “social” and “medical” egg freezing, and there are no national age limits prohibiting treatment after 45 years, although they do limit the storage of gametes to 10 years.8
In the relatively unregulated US fertility sector, egg freezing was also available from the early 2000s onwards. For example, CHA Fertility Los Angeles opened one of the first egg freezing clinics for fertility preservation in 2002.9 Dedicated egg freezing companies—notably Extend Fertility—were founded as early as 2003.10 Meanwhile, cryopreservation was also taken up to create the first US donor egg banks, such as the World Egg Bank (see chapter 6). In spite of this early availability of egg freezing, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) was cautious about the OC practice and issued a warning in 2004 that egg freezing should neither be recommended to healthy women nor “be marketed or offered as a means to defer reproductive aging.”11 When the ASRM lifted the experimental label almost a decade later, the announcement was often framed as an endorsement of elective egg freezing, even though they repeated their earlier statement that there were “not yet sufficient data to recommend oocyte cryopreservation for the sole purpose of circumventing reproductive aging in healthy women.”12 In 2018, they once more adjusted and declared so-called planned egg freezing for this purpose “ethically permissible.”13
As OC was met with the public and political scrutiny characteristic of the introduction of new reproductive technologies, from donor-inseminated “virgin mothers” to IVF’s “test tube babies,” its news coverage is a key medium through which public understandings of fertility, egg freezing, and its users are shaped. For this reason, this chapter addresses OC coverage in newspapers to understand how public understandings of reproductive aging and female fertility are remade after the introduction of OC. The analysis focuses on three major national newspapers: the Guardian (UK), the New York Times (US), and the Volkskrant (NL), all of which have a relatively progressive orientation and include detailed articles on medical topics such as OC.14 The news coverage also brings together various other public discourses on egg freezing, including parliamentary debates, medical expert advice, and patient narratives. From the reading of this corpus emerged several recurring narratives about women’s motivations for egg freezing as well as specific dominant conceptualizations of female reproductive embodiment and aging. What is at stake in the OC newspaper coverage is, then, not so much the potential childbearing of a limited group of individuals who froze their eggs but the engagement of the wider public with popular narratives about fertility decline, reproductive choices, and the women who make them.15
Being effectively a prolonged IVF procedure, OC itself raised few objections when it was introduced. What stirred public discussions on egg freezing were women’s motivations and considerations in choosing this procedure. This chapter therefore focuses on the ways in which OC’s reproductive choice became politicized both through the categorization of women in binary oppositions of “social” vs. “medical” and “single” vs. “lifestyle” freezers and through the articulation of contemporary reconceptualizations of female reproductive aging. With these oppositions emerge new subject positions related to reproductive identity through which age-related aspects of social life come under public and medical scrutiny. Key elements in this discourse are the trope of the “biological clock” and related egg-focused, decline-oriented understandings of reproductive aging, which reframe female fertility as being under perpetual threat and in need of intervention—whether medical or political. Media hypes surrounding OC marketing and fertility insurance moreover point to female reproductive aging as a lens onto a broader cultural renegotiation of the relation between production and reproduction as central axes of a wider social order. The news coverage of OC thereby reveals a contemporary reconceptualization of female reproductive aging as a public concern, predicated on the presentation of reproductive ability as the organizing principle for the temporal structuring of life, which not only interpellates (potentially) infertile women who desire to reproduce but also impacts the wider public.16
Having It All? Egg Freezing as Lifestyle Choice
Fertility clinics are gearing up to open their doors to fertile couples seeking treatment as a lifestyle choice rather than a medical necessity, experts said yesterday…. The shift reflects a rise in what some fertility specialists have called the “have it all generation” who do not want to compromise between career and family. “The great problem we’ve got now is you can’t have your cake and eat it,” said Dr Simon Fishel, director of the CARE Fertility centre at the Park hospital in Nottingham.17
Although small numbers of women facing cancer treatment had frozen their eggs since the turn of the millennium, initial public interest in egg freezing was sparked mainly by its availability to healthy women who might, as this Guardian article suggests, seek treatment as a “lifestyle choice” because they want to “have it all.” At the heart of controversies surrounding OC’s introduction were women’s motivations for egg freezing—and the public negotiation of their validity. As divergent perspectives on egg freezing emerged, the subject of contention was not so much the OC technology itself but rather the situations in which women ought (not) to use it. And these discussions, in turn, revealed the instability of popular conceptualizations of fertility and reproductive aging in the face of cryopreservation.
In her discussion of reproductive technologies, Jana Sawicki argues that these “new technologies create new subjects—that is, fit mothers, unfit mothers, infertile women, and so forth.”18 What is likewise at stake in the case of OC is the construction of new subject positions for women who freeze their eggs, including the “lifestyle” freezer, the cancer patient, and the single woman who hopes to start a family with a future partner. These subject positions function as rhetorical tools in both critical and celebratory accounts of egg freezing and are indicative of a broader gender politics of reproductive aging and the social conservative and neoliberal discourses that underlie them.
Initial concerns about egg freezing were directed neither at those companies in the fertility sector who could stand to benefit from the influx of fertile women into the IVF clinic nor at the “changes to the conditions of life, work, childbearing, and child rearing” in late capitalism that rationalize later reproduction, and the concomitant demand for fertility preservation, among a growing group of women.19 Instead, sceptical accounts of egg freezing revolved around reproductive aging. They expressed concerns about the technology introducing new possibilities of deprioritizing reproduction, encouraging postponement, and transgressing the temporal limits of the “normal reproductive years.”
One central figure in the more sceptical presentations of OC was the “lifestyle” freezer who wants to “have it all.” This section’s opening quotation, which was taken from an article titled “Clinics Prepare for ‘Lifestyle’ Fertility Treatment,” exemplifies the use of this popular phrase. It positions egg freezing as a technology for those who want to “have [their] cake and eat it,” or for “the ‘have it all generation’ who do not want to compromise between career and family.”20 Even though gender is not specified in the “have it all generation,” the article’s focus on the novelty of female fertility preservation suggests that wanting to “have it all” in the face of fertility decline pertains more to women than to men.
Neither new nor unique to OC, the trope of “having it all” has been used as the defining feature of several postwar generations of women entering the labor force. Its perennial popularity signals a recurring public preoccupation with female fertility in the face of women’s participation in the workplace. Writing about the backlash against feminism in the 1980s, feminist author Susan Faludi frequently returns to “the popular myth about the ‘have it all’ baby-boom women.”21 She discusses the US news coverage of a supposed “trend of childlessness” described in headlines like “The Curse of the Career Woman” and “Having It All: Postponing Parenthood Exacts a Price.”22 The successful combination of family life and career was construed as “the myth of Supermom” that was debunked as mothers “recognized they can’t have it all” while “‘millions’ of career women will ‘pay a price for waiting.’”23 Kelly Oliver likewise argues that the public concern with women “having it all” reflects “deep-seated anxieties about women’s reproductive choices in an age of changing technologies.”24 It is therefore not surprising that the “having it all” trope framed the early public responses to egg freezing, as a new reproductive choice that was presumed particularly relevant—and affordable—to “career women.”
As the phrase reemerged in the egg freezing debate, it gained a different temporal dimension; here “having it all” pertained less to the work-family combination per se. In Sample’s quotation, the concern appears to be not necessarily with working mothers “having it all” but more with women of an age range associated with declining fertility who want to both focus on professional development and maintain the potential to have children. The combination in question is not so much career and family, but career and extended fertility. In the earlier concerns about working women “paying the price” of childlessness by deprioritizing reproduction for too long, fertility decline was used as a foundational biological fact to naturalize gendered differences in waged labor participation. The promise of egg freezing is that it will alter the very temporal limits to female fertility that underlie this logic. Sceptical responses to egg freezing suggested women may be using the technology to “suit their lifestyles and aspirations” and buy “time to enjoy an extended adolescence of vacations and cocktails or to single-mindedly climb the corporate ladder.”25 The implicit indulgence of “having it all” in the context of OC is, then, the stretching of a child-free but nonetheless fertile life course beyond established age ranges.
The potential of OC to threaten an understanding of reproductive aging as an immutable constant in the face of women’s historically changing gender roles instigated a public reaffirmation of the temporal limits to female fertility. For example, Dutch CDA MP Janneke Schermers considered egg freezing to be “completely unnatural.”26 She objected to the possibility that “women who have their eggs frozen can have children at an age at which pregnancy is normally no longer possible.”27 Schermer’s position demonstrates how egg freezing can trigger public assertions of the notion that there is a natural progression of the reproductive life span that may be threatened by the possibilities of this new technology. Indeed, in a poll among almost 20,000 Dutch people, the most prevalent argument against egg freezing did not pertain to health risks or to the medical treatment of healthy bodies but to the idea that women should reproduce during “normal reproductive years.”28 What is thus at stake in OC’s public discourses is the cultural negotiation of the female reproductive aging process, and whether temporal limits to fertility could be considered as potentially alterable through these technologies, or immutable in spite of them.
Single Freezers and Absent Partners
Partly in response to the narrative that women are freezing their eggs to “have it all,” an alternative prominent news story highlights instead that women undergo OC not because of their lifestyle or career but for lack of a partner. The foregrounding of the absent partner as motivating factor organizes an alternative subject position of the single woman freezing her eggs. For example, speaking against the notion that women put off childbearing for unspecified careers and “lifestyle reasons,” Dr. Lockwood of the Midlands Fertility Services clinic29 illustrates such a subject position:
Often they’ve been in a relationship that they assumed was going to lead to marriage and motherhood—possibly for 10 years. Then at 37, 38, the boyfriend says, “I don’t think fatherhood is for me.” Or he meets someone else.30
The narrative of single women freezing their eggs in order to be able to reproduce with a partner in the future puts OC in a more positive light.
31 Women in this scenario are considered as having an active wish for a child, but as unable to get pregnant at present for want of the relationship required for the desired family set-up. Rather than a willful nonreproductive choice of women wanting to “have it all,” egg freezing is here rationalized through the absence of the “right” male partner.
32 In discourses favorable to egg freezing, the rhetorical function of this subject position follows from the presentation of OC as a solution to a reproductive desire that is externally thwarted, rather than a technology for deprioritizing reproduction to meet one’s lifestyle preferences.
In another Guardian article, Dr. Lockwood argues that more needs to be done to “help those forced to delay getting pregnant.”33 In her accounts, she presents her patients in a sympathetic way by emphasizing their age-appropriate reproductive intent and its contravention by external factors; women’s nonreproductivity happens to them, rather than because of them. Egg freezing is, in other words, not a sign of a woman unduly postponing reproduction. Instead, Lockwood presents it as the outcome of a boyfriend making nonreproductive decisions, and leaving the relationship—rather than the woman or the couple doing so together. The subject position of the single egg freezer is here characterized as a result of circumstance; age and singlehood become part of the plight for which egg freezing can provide the solution. The focus lies not on a potential subversion of the timing of motherhood but on OC’s role in maintaining the possibility of a normative genetically related family model in the face of female reproductive aging. Childlessness is presented as a consequence of women’s unfortunately incorrect assumptions concerning marriage and motherhood in their thirties. This framing absolves them from the judgment visited on women who use OC for “lifestyle reasons.” Instead, she highlights that, for some women, potential childlessness worsens already painful situations, and egg freezing provides a potential solution when the timelines of relationship formation do not match those of embodied reproductive aging.
Contrasted with the woman who is single by circumstance, the subject position of the “lifestyle freezer” bears a different relation to the absent partner; here women’s behavior is identified as the cause of their nonreproductive situation:
The IVF expert Dr Gedis Grudzinskas says it’s [conception] more difficult after the age of 27: “When women have got used to having a lot of freedom to run their lives as they wish, they do not want to hear that they may not be able to conceive. They perhaps need to compromise, find Mr Good Enough and have a family earlier.”34 Surveys of older mothers show half say they delayed because they had not met a suitable partner. Maybe instead of waiting for Mr Right they ought to settle for Mr Good-Enough, if they want children.35
In the frame of lifestyle freezing, egg freezing is not presented as the solution to, but as the symptom of women delaying reproduction as a result of wrong partner choices. In contrast to the woman who is single by circumstance, the “lifestyle freezer” is at fault for not having a partner. Her singlehood is not attributed to an unwantedly broken or absent relationship but to being too critical of potential fathers or too passive about the pursuit of finding one. Singlehood, in the narrative of the lifestyle freezer recounted here, represents a youthful freedom that ought to be relinquished when women reach an age associated with declining fertility in order to have a family with a suitably available partner.36
In public statements on female reproduction by medical authorities, the subject of egg freezing thus becomes the occasion for including advice about age-related life decisions beyond matters directly related to health and medical treatment, such as relationship and career choices. In this process, the temporal limits to female fertility are once more reaffirmed as reference points for naturalizing existing age normativities of reproduction and relationship formation. Significantly, when articulated by IVF professionals, these age- and gender-specific ideas run the risk of becoming naturalized as neutral health perspectives—which pertain not only to the women freezing their eggs but to the public at large.
Social vs. Medical Freezing
The categorization of single and lifestyle freezers notwithstanding, the key opposition in egg freezing discourses is the binary between medical and social freezing—if only because it is an important principle in organizing access to OC.37 Insurance coverage of egg freezing, for instance, is to a large extent contingent on whether egg freezing is considered to be medically motivated or not.38 This division was also at the heart of the Dutch parliamentary debate on whether women with “social” motivations should be allowed to freeze their eggs in the way that women with “medical” motivations are. Such oppositional framings of egg freezing motivations provide insight into the gendered politics of reproductive aging underlying these divisions and discussions. For example, reporting on the political debate about the legalization of egg freezing, the Volkskrant writes,
Today the Second Chamber debates egg freezing by “social indication.” … Egg freezing already happens by medical indication, for example in women who have to undergo a cancer treatment that may damage fertility.39
In the “medical” versus “social” division, the cancer-related cases are contrasted with those of women without a serious diagnosis who wish to maintain a chance of having genetically related children as they grow older. Unlike its “lifestyle” equivalent, freezing by “medical indication” is not the subject of much controversy, and its use is generally deemed “legitimate.”
40 Egg freezing simply becomes one optional step in a wider set of medical interventions that make up the treatment plan for diagnoses such as cancer. Fertility loss here gains a different meaning because it is not specifically caused by reproductive aging but by particular diagnoses or treatments.
Women’s so-called social reasons for egg freezing reference the anticipation of future, age-related infertility due to, for example, decreased responsiveness of the ovaries to follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinising hormone (LH) or reduced availability of viable eggs. Both “social” and “medical” motivations for OC anticipate physical difficulties in achieving future pregnancies at the time of the second phase of the procedure. The difference is whether these difficulties are caused by pathological or by age-related factors. The “medical” versus “social” binary opposition thus categorizes egg freezers by the reasons why they cannot have children at present, and, by extension, it positions the latter motivation as “nonmedical,” thereby demedicalizing the age-related infertility that the procedure seeks to preemptively remedy.
The relative acceptance of medical egg freezing also points to the significance of aging norms in organizing reproductive healthcare. After all, the health concerns raised in arguments against IVF-assisted older motherhood—including later childbearing enabled by social egg freezing—are similar, if not worse in these cases.41 Just as older age means a shorter remaining life expectancy, so serious disease and invasive treatment often entail a higher risk of the child losing a parent at an early age. The mother’s health risks associated with pregnancy, labor, and postnatal healing may be higher at an older age, but may be equally challenging—if not more so—for a woman who is recovering from immuno-compromising treatments such as radiation or chemotherapy. The fact that these risks are widely accepted and taken in these difficult cases is a testimony to the significance ascribed to maintaining fertility during “normal reproductive years,” even in circumstances that pose concerns not unlike those raised against older motherhood.
The seemingly commonsense opposition between “medical” and “social” egg freezing polarizes a situation that is far more complex than this binary suggests. Besides cancer, there are many other situations that may prompt women to consider the procedure, such as expected compromised fertility following polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), Turner Syndrome, or a family history of early menopause.42 Egg freezing is increasingly practiced for patients with diagnoses such as endometriosis, which can affect fertility, or multiple sclerosis (MS), which may be treated with fertility-compromising stem cell therapies.43 Egg freezing is also frequently used to tackle complications in IVF procedures, for example, when men cannot produce sperm or when women undergo several cycles of egg retrieval and “batch” the eggs together to do fertilization and incubation.44 It may also function as an ethical technology to avoid concerns about freezing or creating embryos for people or institutions who believe life begins at conception. OC moreover facilitates egg donation by removing the need to synchronize two women’s hormonal cycles or even their reproductive life spans. It also enables intergenerational egg donation, which may benefit women with daughters who suffer from diseases that will compromise their fertility when they grow up. Transgender men may want to freeze their eggs to leave options open for future reproduction as they transition. Women whose occupations may compromise their fertility, for example, those who take drugs such as anabolic steroids or work with harmful chemicals or radiation, may wish to use OC as a precaution. The variety of these possible scenarios illustrates the reductionism of a binary between social and medical reasons, as well as the potential pitfalls of regulating the procedure on the basis of this division.
The opposition of the “medical-social” indication is not unique to OC but also organizes other controversial medical interventions in female reproductive healthcare, including elective caesarean sections, hospitalization for childbirth, and the institutionalization of donor insemination.45 Stoop and colleagues note that the term “social” is rarely used as an indication for medical treatments generally; it rather references a “nonmedical” and “deliberate choice” in cases like “social abortion, social sex selection or a social Caesarean section.”46 It is striking that these instances pertain to women’s reproductive choices; the explicit “social” nature of the indication for treatment often appears to be associated with the role of female agency in accessing reproductive healthcare. Another instance is the distinction of “social” and “medical” indications for contraceptives, which was in widespread use during their 1950s introduction and reflects the morally controversial nature of their prescription. Once the use of contraceptives became popularized, this distinction fell out of use.47 “Social” versus “medical” oppositions likewise organize public discourses on abortion, e.g., in the distinction between “social indication models” that permit “abortion when the woman can claim social or economic distress” and “medical indication models” that allow “abortion only in cases in which the physical or mental health of the woman is in danger.”48 These cases illustrate how the explicit characterization of a “social indication” for a treatment is itself indicative of the controversial nature of its accessibility at the patient’s request—particularly so when that patient is a woman seeking to access reproductive healthcare.
The historical continuity of the “medical” versus “social” opposition in motivating the use of egg freezing and other (once) contentious reproductive technologies is also reflected in the representations of the women who use them. The single and lifestyle subject positions structuring OC’s news coverage are reminiscent of the rhetoric used in historical abortion discourses, in which motherly and self-indulgent women were presented as opposites. Sociologist Annulla Linders analyzes the “opposite solutions” to regulating abortion in the US and Swedish contexts. She points to a distinction between stock narratives of the 1920s Swedish “exhausted mother” and the 19th-century US “frivolous wife” petitioning for an abortion. The popular trope of the “exhausted mother” of “eight to ten” children, whose pregnancy would threaten the welfare of the family, shifted the Swedish abortion debate in favor of legalization. As was the case for the single woman in OC, this trope counteracted accusations of “selfishness” by emphasizing that the problem was “not that she did not want to become a mother, but instead that she was effectively prevented from becoming one” by her circumstances.49 In the stock narratives of the single freezer and the exhausted mother, OC and abortion are constructed as interventions that evidence prioritizing motherhood.
By contrast, the “frivolous wife” seeking abortions held strong cultural currency in the criminalization of abortion in the United States. Here women were criticized for wanting to “rid themselves of the care and responsibility of maternity,” while being motivated by “self-indulgence,” “extravagance,” and a “fashionable life.”50 Reminiscent of the socially motivated “lifestyle freezers” whose use of OC suggests a deprioritization of motherhood and a “having your cake and eating it” attitude, the stereotype of the frivolous, carefree woman appears to be a persistent feature in negative portrayals of women using (non)reproductive technologies. For example, the continued newsworthiness of such reproductive frivolity as social provocation is evidenced in the media hype surrounding the promotion of OC at fashionable “cocktail parties” that target career women and “bring together fertility doctors, … financing information and cocktails.”51 In short, the binary stock narratives of frivolous and blameless women have functioned as key rhetorical tools in a number of reproductive struggles; their continuation in OC discourses points to a contemporary reproductive politics that is hinged on a public renegotiation of female fertility and its extendability.
In the context of OC’s medical-social divide, the invocation of stark oppositions between women facing cancer treatment and others with “social” reasons for choosing OC—whether unspecified or described as “suit[ing] their lifestyles and aspirations”—can function as a rhetorical move to trivialize the motivations of women in the latter category by positioning them as fortunate and healthy by comparison.52 In this move, reproductive aging and future infertility are demedicalized as “social” indications. Yet public discourses of female reproductive health—which are the subject of the following section—nevertheless frequently present healthy women’s bodies in more perilous terms of continual decline. Contradicting the frivolous connotations of “lifestyle” motivations, articles on egg freezing emphasize that fertility cannot be taken for granted, especially not as women age. It is thus not uncommon to read statements in articles on egg freezing that posit female reproductive aging as a serious medical concern. For example, in a Guardian feature titled “Mother Nature,” clinical director Charles Kingsland comments that “the passage of time can quickly take away a woman’s fertility and she should always bear in mind her fitness for fertility.”53 Assertions such as this one once again bring age-related infertility to public awareness and posit it as a serious health concern. In other words, although the “social” classification demedicalizes women’s reasons for egg freezing, public discussions of egg freezing themselves play a crucial role in remedicalizing female fertility.
No Exit: Representing the Biological Clock and Reproductive Aging
Egg freezing emerges in the wake of widespread news coverage on older motherhood, whether of glowing celebrities having children in their fifties, demographic trends towards later childbearing, or sensationalist cases of women setting new records with technologically enabled pregnancies later in life. As has been the case before when IVF, and particularly donor eggs, enabled older and postmenopausal motherhood, egg freezing once more brings the timing of reproduction into the public eye. Now shifting not only the ages of childbearing but also those of conception, the understanding of OC as a practice that could extend women’s reproductive age range once more raises questions about the appropriate ages for having children or freezing eggs.54 In the face of these developments, the newspaper coverage of OC reveals a public renegotiation of the meaning of female fertility and the demarcation of “normal reproductive years.” The media framings of age-related fertility loss, which this section explores, draw heavily on the “biological clock” trope and fertility statistics in ways that highlight the politicization of reproductive aging in the context of OC.
The Biological Clock
The biological clock is, of course, one of the key concepts in popular constructions of female fertility and in OC’s media coverage. Although the term is used with reference to any bodily temporal regulatory system—circadian, hormonal, etc.—in contemporary news discourses, the biological clock has become virtually synonymous with women’s reproductive aging. As a clock, it positions fertility decline as clockwork: as grounded in measurable facts and as a shared conceptual reference point for understanding gendered time. And as a clock that is biological, it frames fertility decline as a biological fact that particularly lends itself to naturalizing contemporary reproductive chrononormativities.
This rhetorical function of the biological clock can be traced back to at least the 1970s, when the term first started to be used as a marker of fertility decline. Medical historian Jenna Healey describes the biological clock’s origin story and locates its starting point in Richard Cohen’s 1978
Washington Post article “The Clock Is Ticking for the Career Woman.”55 In this article, Cohen describes the “Composite Woman”: a representative woman he construed out of a group of women he had recently spoken to. Notwithstanding his dubious disavowal of sexism (he later wrote, “These were not male chauvinist pigs. These were men like me”), he depicts her as follows:
There she is entering the restaurant. She’s the pretty one. Dark hair. Medium height. Nicely dressed. Now she is taking off her coat. Nice figure…. The job is just wonderful. She is feeling just wonderful. It is wonderful being her age, which is something between 27 and 35.56
Yet in spite of her wonderful life, there is “something wrong.” The Composite Woman eventually confesses to him, “I want a baby.” Whether or not she is in a relationship, “there is always,” Cohen suggests, “a feeling that the clock is ticking. A decision will have to be made. A decision that will stick forever.”
57This notion of a biological clock struck a chord and became shorthand for a cautionary tale about women “postponing” having children amid the emergence of contraceptives, the rise of feminist movements, and women’s increasing participation in the labor market. Media scholar Moira Wiegel traces the growing popularity of this term in public discourses and shows how the biological clock was used to naturalize a supposed universality of age-related reproductive desires amid a time of widespread, gendered social change.58 Counterbalancing this social change, Cohen implied, was the immutable bodily truth of the Composite Woman’s biological clock:
There was something about their situation that showed, more or less, that this is where liberation ends. This is where a woman is a woman—biologically, physiologically, uncontrovertably [sic] different.59
What the biological clock pointed to was a bodily reification of traditional gender roles, a biological limit to “liberation.” Importantly, this recourse to gendered difference as a limit to social change is not a given from birth, or characteristic of adulthood, but is contingent on reproductive aging.
In the context of egg freezing, this trope of the biological clock, and its relation to social change, reemerges as a widespread, age-related concern. The biological clock here references a particular time frame in the female life span, typically starting in the early or mid-thirties, that is characterized by a sense of urgency. Rather than an ordinary clock that tells time, the biological clock here figures as an alarm clock going off at a certain age or as a timer counting down the years. For example, a Guardian article discusses egg freezing with reference to “this woman—who has always assumed that eventually a baby or two would come along—[who] finds herself single with her biological clock running down quite fast.”60 As this quotation suggests, the biological clock trope organizes popular narratives about women who live contentedly and subsequently become urgently aware of their reproductive ability—whether in the form of positive desires for children or negative fears of infertility—at the age at which their clock ostensibly starts ticking.
Specific ages may be identified as signaling a life course transition associated with the biological clock. For example, Guardian journalist Tahmima Anam both observes and reiterates the public problematization of female fertility when she describes her experience of reproductive aging: “Lately my eyes have been alighting on newspaper articles decrying the end of my fertile days, and the number 35 flashes before me like a blinking no exit sign.”61 Significantly, Anam explains how the truth claims about fertility decline in media discourses affected her anxious attachments to both specific ages and her own reproductive embodiment. The biological clock is here associated with a particular age range that signals a departure from a time of idealized youth and the onset of a concern with the prospect of impending reproductive failure. The header of this article reads, “Anam felt ‘footloose and fancy-free.’ Then she hit 33—and baby-panic kicked in. Is freezing her eggs the answer?” As the article suggests, a sudden awareness of the impending end of her fertility jolted Anam out of the supposed carelessness of young adulthood to a life course determined by the pressure of the biological clock.
Strikingly, the references to the biological clock are accompanied by accounts of fear, stress, and worry. Newspaper reports on egg freezing cite stories of women who “were very worried by the ticking of the biological clock around the age of 34, 35 or 36.”62 One article notes that “doctors at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York interviewed 20 women with an average age of nearly 39 who had chosen to have their eggs frozen. Half said they felt pressured by their biological clocks.”63 Another describes a fertility doctor’s observation about such pressure: “Many women worry about meeting the right guy because ‘they hear that biological clock ticking loudly,’ he says. That ticking is a stress factor in their lives.”64 Beyond a bodily phenomenon of decreased pregnancy chances, the term of the biological clock thus denotes—and produces—an age-specific affective experience of female fertility as, almost by definition, potentially imperiled and precarious in nature.
The possibility—and newsworthiness—of egg freezing provides the occasion to both reaffirm and reinvent the biological clock trope. As was the case in Cohen’s 1970s article, popular concern with the biological clock reiterates a highly gendered narrative about tensions between “the workplace” and reproductive aging concerns. For example, the article “Born in the Nick of Time” argues that
despite all the advances in technology and the workplace, that ticking clock is still there and if you don’t have its existence at the back of your mind, you may miss the chance to have a family.65
Using the second-person mode of address, the text’s warning about reproductive aging is directed at the readers. The option of not having children is construed as a loss, as a “chance” that one may “miss”—rather than a valid alternative—resulting from not paying attention to the biological clock. Having children earlier is proposed as the resolution to the supposed conflict between advances in the workplace—i.e., women working—and the “ticking clock.” Beyond a straightforward pronatalist message aimed at working women, the article posits a particular affective experience of reproductive aging. In order not to miss out, it is suggested, the time pressure associated with the biological clock must be lived through an ongoing awareness “at the back of your mind” of a body that is ruled by “that ticking clock.” Such recommendations betray a gendered temporal organization of the life span, which requires not only correct reproductive timing but also a continued awareness of the precariousness and finitude of fertility.
Infertile Numbers
Fertility statistics play a central role in this public articulation of female fertility and its temporal limits. Constituting a quantitative counterpart to the biological clock, they are ubiquitous in egg freezing coverage. In order to explain the relevance of egg freezing, articles frequently include a passage such as the following:
A 30-year-old woman stands a 22% chance of getting pregnant in any given month. By 35, that drops to 18%. By 40, it’s 5%. By 45 you’re down to 1%. By 25, women have lost 80% of the eggs they were born with. By 35 that has dropped to a 95% loss.66
The predominance of quantitative data positions statements like this one as factual information, inviting little critical reflection from readers. However, precisely because it appears as objective data, it is important to consider the rhetorical effects of this quantified framing of reproductive aging, and its role in rendering fertility precarious.
These numbers convey the message to the readership that an objective, scientific understanding of the female reproductive system is characterized by an urgency about decreasing functionality. In this quotation, the diminishing chances of pregnancy per month appear slim to begin with, given that there is just over a one in five likelihood of pregnancy at a life stage normally associated with fertility. However, these are fairly optimistic numbers if translated into accumulative chances of pregnancy per year: the 30-year-old would have a 95% chance, compared to 91% for the 35-year-old and 54% for the woman trying to conceive at 40.67 By instead presenting monthly chances with dwindling numbers in shortening sentences, the cited text conveys an understanding of female fertility as characterized by low likelihood of pregnancy and progressive decline from a relatively early age onwards.
The sense of loss is intensified where the eggs are concerned. Already at the age of 25, the text suggests, an overwhelming majority of a woman’s eggs are lost, and this decline will accelerate over time. While diminishing ovarian reserves are indeed a key cause of age-related infertility, such representations of available egg percentages suggest that their loss is inherently problematic. However, egg loss is a normal process in fertile women. Given that a woman who has no or a small number of children will experience on average 450–480 menstrual cycles in her lifetime, even if she matured a healthy viable egg every month and was optimally fertile, she would lose a majority of the millions of eggs she was born with. The 25-year-old’s loss of 80% of her immature eggs does not necessarily signify a loss of fertility, just as a girl’s loss of 60% of her eggs by the time she hits puberty does not signal anything but normal physiological development.68
The focus on the loss of immature eggs suggests a conceptualization of the female reproductive body as characterized by decline throughout the life span. Understood in these terms, a woman is born in decline, with her body continuously failing to retain the eggs. The female reproductive system—whether fertile or infertile—is framed in terms of a negative economy of egg loss, in which the loss of eggs corresponds to the loss of time before “missing the chance” of having a family. It is this loss that is key to the reframing of female fertility as fundamentally a precarious condition.
In her analysis of medical metaphors of female reproductive embodiment in The Woman in the Body, Emily Martin contends that the nonpregnant fertile state, and its expression in menstruation, is understood “in terms of a purpose [conception] that has failed.”69 In newspaper reporting on egg freezing—and particularly in the narrative framing of declining fertility rates—it is not menstruation but egg loss and reproductive aging that are conceptualized as failure. In keeping with the understanding of menstruation as failed reproduction, the cited figures on age-related infertility conceptualize the female body, and its eggs in particular, as oriented towards the moment of reproduction. Yet here it is not so much the nonpregnant state that Martin highlights, but the body’s being in time—or aging—that is understood in terms of a failure to retain the continued possibility of conception. The newspapers’ presentation of information on declining fertility rates and diminishing ovarian reserves suggests a collective diagnosis of failure—not the loss of blood, but the loss of eggs, and the reproductive potential they embody, is conceptualized as women’s bodies’ foundational failure.
What is at stake in this information is the establishment of new norms for the timing of fertility preservation. Whereas information on age-related fertility in newspapers previously primarily pertained to questions of timing childbearing, now it also provides the rationalization for deciding whether and when to freeze one’s eggs. For example, the article “Have Your Eggs Frozen While You’re Still Young, Scientists Advise Women” reports that women who freeze their eggs are typically aged 37–39, but “flaws that accumulate in eggs over time lead to a rapid decrease in fertility over the age of 35.”70 Through the newspapers’ inclusion of medical discourses, whether articulated through expert interviews or statistical information, the body becomes recognizable on its terms. In the absence of easily observable signs of the onset of age-related infertility, this type of reporting rationalizes the timing of egg freezing at particular ages. In keeping with Jana Sawicki’s argument that “[ARTs’] control is not secured primarily through violence or coercion, but rather by producing new norms of motherhood … and by offering women specific kinds of solutions to problems they face,”71 the emergence of OC instills new norms about when one may assume oneself to be fertile and what solutions are prudent in the face of the potential loss of fertility. When fertility loss points not so much to a decreased ability to conceive and get pregnant but to a decline in the IVF success rates associated with eggs frozen at a particular age, OC may become a rational choice—and fertility decline an actionable concern—much earlier in the life course.
More detailed statistical accounts of the temporal limits to female fertility are frequently included to explain the logic of the procedure:
With age, women’s eggs accumulate genetic damage which causes fertility to fall rapidly after 35. Older eggs result in poorer quality embryos which are more likely to be miscarried. By 40, the average miscarriage rate reaches 40%.72
Although it is important that people are informed about their bodies’ capacities and the likelihood of conceiving at different points in their lives, it is equally significant to address the implications of the rhetoric of failure in which this information is couched. This article equates aging with accumulating genetic damage, rapidly falling fertility, poor-quality embryos, and miscarriage. In the absence of specific data, these descriptors communicate a sense of urgency and rapid decline. Where a number is mentioned, the 40% suggests a problem, even though the reader has not been informed of the percentage of miscarriages that occur at other ages, variations in the population, or a specification of what counts as miscarriage. The citation nevertheless reads as a progression, in which the passing of years from 35 to 40 signals increasingly intensifying reproductive failure: from “genetic damage” in the gametes to the evocative notion of miscarriage. The article refers to the eggs’, rather than the woman’s, age. Taking up a central role, the older eggs appear to “result” in poorer-quality embryos through a process in which sperm, and its quality or age, or the bodies from which these gametes are derived, play no mentionable role.
Although these statistics are disseminated in the context of egg freezing, their framing of fertility pertains to all women—irrespective of their interest in OC. The description of 30-year-olds as having a 22% chance of getting pregnant every month, for example, has particular rhetorical effects. The exact percentage both suggests a precise, calculable conceptualization of fertility and requires a statistical literacy to assess the limitations of such precision in population averages. The inclusion of these numbers conveys that it is important to know the details about fertility decline in order to make informed reproductive decisions. Yet when one becomes knowledgeable about these figures, their limitations for predicting one’s own specific fertility become apparent. In this way, fertility statistics produce a dynamic of knowing and not knowing. It is this dynamic that is itself productive of a precariousness of fertility—as not only in decline but as by definition unknowable save through further interventions. This precarious fertility provides a driver for the rising popularity of fertility testing—even if it is not a very reliable predictor—and egg freezing—even though its success rates are limited. And these biotechnological resolutions may themselves, as we shall see, be institutionalized in ways that produce new forms of fertility precarity.
Cocktail Parties and Health Perks: Institutionalizing Infertility
So far we have seen how sceptical responses to the introduction of egg freezing were linked to a public concern about reproductive aging. Stories about women who freeze their eggs were important rhetorical instruments in public rejections of the potential shift of reproductive aging limits enabled by OC. The subject position of the lifestyle freezer was invoked to emphasize women’s agency in changing the previously fixed limits to reproductive aging to suit their lifestyles or career ambitions. This figure played a key role in the social conservative project that appealed to the supposed naturalness of age-related limits to conception to oppose, or limit access to, egg freezing. Often in response to this negative framing of women, an alternative narrative highlights the singlehood of the majority of women freezing their eggs, whether with reference to a broken relationship or to unwanted singlehood. This framing of egg freezers highlights women’s social circumstances in order to raise understanding for their decision to cryopreserve their eggs. And indeed, most academic studies of egg freezing confirm that the majority of women freeze their eggs because they are not with a (suitable) partner.73
More recent media coverage on OC has also broadened the focus on the market forces and structural conditions driving the growing popularity of egg freezing. As various UK and US fertility companies are heavily marketing egg freezing, news media may adopt or critically reflect on these marketing narratives, thereby bringing them into a wider public conversation about female fertility. This section highlights the gender politics of reproductive aging that emerges in the institutionalization of (in)fertility through the widespread promotion of egg freezing—often to a younger target audience—and its coverage in news media.
In the summer of 2018, a “fertility van” appeared on the streets of New York City. With pleasing pastel aesthetics, the yellow-and-white van sought to create a pop-up wellness boutique experience for passersby to discuss fertility and egg freezing. A chalkboard next to the van said, “The fertility facts you need!” and inside, quotations in picture frames encouraged women to “understand your fertility today, so you can set the stage for tomorrow” and “own your future.” The fertility company running the pop-up, Kindbody, also offered the option of undertaking a free fertility test in the van. The test measured women’s antimullerian hormone (AMH), which Kindbody presented as determining the “number of eggs in your ovaries.”74 Although the predictive value of such tests for pregnancy rates has been seriously questioned by the medical community,75 the results—irrespective of their accuracy—provide an individualized indicator for an otherwise rather opaque and precaritized fertility. And, in doing so, the tests can function as an ideal promotional tool. Good results mean that now is the perfect time to freeze your eggs while they are still healthy and plenty; below-average results mean that now is equally a great time to freeze your eggs before you lose them all.
Interest in the van was overwhelming; the 100 appointments available in the pop-up van were booked up in 20 minutes. The company behind the project is run by Gina Bartasi, who, in her previous role at Eggbanxx, also organized egg freezing cocktail parties at “swanky hotels,” which similarly moved egg freezing information events away from the clinical and baby-focused setting of the fertility clinic.76 These parties—not unlike the van—sought to lower the barrier for younger women to learn about egg freezing and fertility decline.
Of course, in the van and at the parties, the lines between education and marketing are blurred. Reminiscent of cosmetics campaigns suggesting that “you’re worth it,” Kindbody’s marketing strategy of stating that “you deserve the facts” imparts a set of supposedly neutral truth claims as a means of encouraging a neoliberalized quasi-feminist mode of self-empowerment. Marketers often appeal to notions of deservingness in their slogans, especially when promoting “indulgent products,” such as higher-calorie or higher-end products. Examples include “You deserve a break today” (McDonald’s), “You deserve a car this good” (General Motors), and “Because you’re worth it” (L’Oréal).77 This notion of “deservingness” is also often used at the introduction stage of a productive cycle for “consumers who are new to the product” and “capitalize[s] on a person’s motive to get what they deserve,” which, in this case, means to become informed.78
The information on offer in this instance leaves little doubt that female fertility requires technologized management and that egg freezing is a rational, proactive, and empowering reproductive choice to make. On its website, Kindbody exemplifies this logic with the following list of “facts:”
We are born with all the eggs we will ever have
The quality and quantity of our eggs declines [sic] with age
There are ways to measure your ovarian reserve
Freezing eggs is the way of the future
Freezing eggs is like freezing time
You’ll never be more fertile than you are today
Freezing eggs doesn’t affect your ability to get pregnant naturally
Using frozen eggs is safe
It is striking that, in this list, fertility is reframed as deficient and in decline from birth onwards. This framing of fertility as subject to continued slippage (“you’ll never be more fertile than today”) invokes a specter of loss and scarcity that drives the popularization of new forms of biotechnological dependency, which is presented as “safe” and “work[ing]” in spite of OC’s limited success rates and potential side effects. Barbey’s analysis of US egg freezing websites confirms that this message of time running out is widespread and, he argues, both “appear[s] crafted to cause alarm” and suggests that it is normal for women to “feel out of control” prior to using this technology.
80Promotional initiatives such as vans and parties received ample news coverage, including in the Guardian and the New York Times. “Egg-freezing cocktail parties … held in New York by profit-driven clinics” were presented as examples of the “commodification of fertility” and were positioned in the wider context of a “rolling back of reproductive rights” in the United States.81 Several articles criticized “cocktail part[ies]” where women “learn how to freeze your eggs” and “companies like EggBanxx [that] host egg freezing–themed cocktail parties” for promoting a solution to reproductive aging that “isn’t going to work for all women” and is “anything but foolproof.”82 As opposed to the accusatory frame of the “have it all” freezer, here it is not women but fertility companies that become the subject of contention for promoting a frivolity and an “enthusiasm” that are “epitomized by information sessions rebranded as ‘egg freezing parties.’”83
Yet what is at stake in these developments is not only the potential failure of the frozen eggs to produce babies but also the popularization of new narratives about fertility that target ever younger women for IVF treatment. Rather than focusing on the lifestyle freezers, these news reports draw attention to the lifestyle marketing of egg freezing that touts “the procedure as a breezy, accessible and eminently sensible lifestyle choice for the youngest members of the millennial generation.”84 As egg freezing companies are unabashedly announcing that they “are now targeting women in their 20s and early 30s,” while younger women and their fertility clinics declare that fertility “begins to wane as early as one’s 20s,” fertility becomes precarious at increasingly early ages. Clinics that previously served women at the “older end of the childbearing years” are now planning “national advertising campaign[s] encompassing radio, television, print and social media” to convey the message that fertility is finite to ever-younger women.85 The emergence of the narrative of an ever-reducing female fertility illustrates how the popular redefinition of reproductive aging is at the heart of the growth agenda of this part of the fertility sector.
Insuring Precarious Fertility
This institutionalization of the precariousness of fertility is nowhere as publicly contested as in the discussions surrounding corporate egg freezing insurance. When Facebook and Apple announced in 2014 that they would cover egg freezing for their employees, a media hype quickly ensued. Lisa Campo-Engelstein and colleagues’ media analysis of OC confirmed that the introduction of workplace fertility benefits prompted a remarkably significant increase in the US news coverage of egg freezing. Their study suggests that this media coverage painted “a simplistic and rosy picture that more options, especially reproductive options or financially neutral options, automatically enhance women’s autonomy.” In line with this, they note that their media outlets framed corporate fertility insurance as a resolution to the prohibitive costs of OC and the companies offering these benefits as “heroes that offer a ‘life-altering benefit: paying for employees to freeze their eggs.’”86
However, both the newspapers selected here and Campo-Engelstein’s sample also found widespread concern about how this so-called perk would intensify employers’ influence on female employees’ reproductive autonomy and decision making. The Guardian health editor Sarah Boseley, for example, wondered whether Apple and Facebook “acting as caring employers in offering egg-freezing” will make women “feel under some sort of psychological pressure to carry on working, rather than trying for a family when they might have, because they have eggs in store?”87
Guardian editor Harriet Minter put it more strongly, suggesting that the message is, “Work through your most fertile years and when you can’t have kids anymore, use the eggs we froze for you as a perk.”88 The New York Times similarly proposed that while the benefit may be a “highly welcome surprise” to women planning to freeze their eggs, “workplaces could be seen as paying women to put off childbearing. Women who choose to have babies earlier could be stigmatized as uncommitted to their careers.”89
Here egg freezing was not presented as serving carefree or career women, but instead became a threat to reproductive autonomy in the face of corporate control. As a health “perk,” commentators argued, egg freezing could function as an implicit mechanism to discourage reproduction. The tension between career and reproductive aging here resurfaced not in an accusatory tone that chastised women for “having it all” but as a criticism of the corporate management of female employees’ reproductive aging processes through fertility-preservation programs. What is, then, at stake in these fertility-preservation programs is not simply women’s use of these schemes or not, but the institutionalization and corporate endorsement of a precarious model of female fertility as at once fundamentally deficient and technologically salvageable through biotechnological cryopreservation.90
I read the media attention to corporate fertility insurance as another iteration of the tension between the professional and the private that also emerged in the mediatized oppositions between career-minded and single freezers. It is this tension that gets renegotiated when egg freezing (potentially) changes the temporal limits to female fertility. This tension is important, and is so frequently invoked in public discourses on egg freezing, because it points to a more fundamental renegotiation of the relation between production and reproduction—and specifically the temporality of this relation—as a central axis in the wider social order.
Reproduction vs. Production: Redirecting Accumulation
The opposition between reproduction and production has long been regarded as the “constitutive institutional separation” of capitalism. Political philosopher Nancy Fraser discusses the importance of this separation in the regime of “financialised capitalism” that characterizes the contemporary moment. One of its key elements is a move from the Fordist family wage to the ideal of the two-earner family. This shift is accompanied by the “steep rise in the number of hours of paid work now required to support a household,” which effectively entails an obligation to “shift time and energies once devoted to reproduction to ‘productive’” (i.e. paid) work.” As a result of the combination of increased working hours and cuts to public services, Fraser argues, “The financialized capitalist regime is squeezing social reproduction to the breaking point.”91 Indeed, in a survey into the reasons why young American adults are having fewer children, the scarcity of money and time and the concomitant need to outsource care make up the top five motivations:
Child care is too expensive (64%)
Want more time for the children I have (54%)
Worried about the economy (49%)
Can’t afford more children (44%)
Waited because of financial instability (43%).
92
Here the socioprecarity characteristic of financialized capitalism drives both trends of later childbearing and associated concerns with age-related female reproductive bioprecarity.
In light of these developments, Fraser contends that egg freezing is simply another coping mechanism used by time-poor women in contexts characterized by high female labor participation, limited parental leave, and a society’s “love affair with technology.” In such contexts, egg freezing can function as a techno-fix aimed at resolving the tension between reproduction and production in capitalism. In other words, OC becomes symptomatic of a social organization in which women are required to “shoehorn social reproduction responsibilities into the interstices and crevices of lives that capital insists must be dedicated first and foremost to accumulation.”93 In a similar vein, Mwenza Blell characterizes this social organization as one in which “many people are afraid to risk having children (or as many children as we would like) because of precarity and because (as people said to me) you might never be productive enough again, which means not able to work from early morning until 10 or 11pm every day with a child.”94
In this process, egg freezing not only offers a resolution to the scarcity dynamic between production and reproduction but also collapses them by bringing fertility itself into the realm of capital accumulation. First, egg freezing produces new means of accumulation in the fertility industry through the creation of novel business models and the widespread promotion to fertile women as a key target group for IVF. In a largely privatized fertility sector, egg freezing presents expansion possibilities by commercializing not only the creation of babies but also fertility itself through the accumulation of frozen eggs as a proxy for reproductive youth and extendable fertility.
Second, the biomedical management of reproductive aging enters the realm of production through the popularization of fertility insurance. The critique of corporate fertility insurance, as we have seen, has primarily focused on the possibility of employers influencing employees’ reproductive decision making with egg freezing coverage.95 This possibility, of course, is at least in part newsworthy for further collapsing reproduction into the realm of production, i.e., the workplace itself. Yet what also happens in this process is that egg freezing and fertility-preservation insurance offers a new means of wealth accumulation for employers, insurers, lenders, and dedicated egg freezing companies. In other words, the expansion of infertility treatment to the fertile population also enables the expansion of IVF provision to a broader set of organizations, which recognize and reinforce the idea that assisted reproduction has become relevant for a much larger group of their employees or customers. In this way, financialized capitalism, and its associated socioprecarious arrangements that render employees reliant on their employers to attain health insurance, thus also provide the context for intensifying reproductive bioprecarity by normalizing and rationalizing egg freezing through the offer of corporate fertility benefits.
This institutionalization of the egg freezing “perk” by employers, the marketing thereof by specialized fertility benefits companies, and the media hypes that surround it all contribute to a wider public discourse that positions female fertility as precarious and in need of preservation, protection, and investment. Symptomatic of a broader neoliberalization of reproduction, fertility—and its extension across time—thus becomes a site of proactive investment for women themselves, employers, and fertility companies. Underlying this neoliberal model of egg freezing is an approach to reproductive aging as malleable, investable, and subject to market logic.96
This particular framing of egg freezing, which brings fertility into the realm of capital accumulation, contrasts with the abovementioned, more social-conservative problematization of OC as a type of “luxury medicine” and “lifestyle choice” for carefree and career-minded women. The rejection of women “having it all” precisely insists on the opposite movement in the relation between reproduction and production: not the collapse of one into the other but an insistence on their continued, gendered separation is key to maintaining the existing social order. The upholding of women’s reproductive aging as a given, biological fact naturalizes a host of gendered chrononormativities pertaining to the prioritization of reproduction over production at different points in the life course. This conservative, sceptical approach to egg freezing relies on a model of reproductive aging that is, or ought to remain, fixed and unalterable as a gendered site of naturalness.
So we see, on the one hand, a social-conservative discourse that positions childbearing as a goal in women’s lives that must be attained within natural aging limits and, on the other hand, a more neoliberal trend that frames egg freezing as a potentially empowering choice to invest in one’s future self and change the existing age limits to conception. What they have in common is the mobilization of a precarious framing of fertility to rationalize the promotion or rejection of egg freezing.
Here fertility’s precariousness reflects not simply a bodily reality or the result of a new form of biotechnological control over the timing of reproductive aging. It is, perhaps more importantly, the usefulness of a conceptualization of female fertility as defined by its ongoing precarious decline that lends itself to a gender politics of reproductive aging that suits both neoconservative and neoliberal agendas. Reproductive aging may be mobilized either to accumulate capital and promote proactive self-investment or to naturalize gendered differences in chrononormative arrangements of the life course. Whether it functions as a motivation to promote technological interventions or earlier childbearing, the precarious framing of female fertility is a foundational and influential element of egg freezing news coverage that affects not only the women who freeze their eggs but the wider readership.
Conclusion
Whether through statistics of fertility decline, stock narratives about the biological clock, or subject positions for women freezing their eggs, the news coverage of OC expresses the public negotiation of when and how fertility becomes precarious. Whereas female fertility has long been subject to public scrutiny, particularly since the introduction of the contraceptive pill and assisted reproductive technologies, egg freezing repoliticizes age-related (in)fertility by suggesting new ways of exerting agency over reproductive aging. It is now not only the timing of childbearing that is of concern but also an intermediate stage of timing egg freezing. Given that most women learn about egg freezing through media outlets,97 the newspapers do not simply describe a situation or opinion but constitute a public mode of address through which fertility becomes legible. They play a key role in interpellating a particular contingent of women by marking various ages in the twenties and thirties—particularly 35—as the onset of female reproductive decline and as a time when singlehood becomes problematic and childlessness becomes a risk of “missing out.” The time when fertility becomes precarious is characterized by heightened uncertainty and implicit—or explicit—calls to mitigate the sense of concern by freezing eggs, having children, or becoming informed.
In these public discourses, egg freezing becomes meaningful through oppositions between “social” and “medical” motivations and between stock narratives of the single woman who prioritizes motherhood but is looking for Mr. Right and the “lifestyle” freezer who deprioritizes motherhood and wants to “have it all.” As a set of subject positions is developed in relation to these oppositions, women’s life choices come under medical and public scrutiny, whether these are related to romantic or professional commitments or to other priorities that are not direct expressions of reproductive health. These subject positions moreover function as important rhetorical tools in framing OC in negative or positive terms as a technology that could, respectively, exacerbate an existing trend of delayed motherhood or provide a chance to avoid unwanted childlessness.
Whereas the popularity of the biological clock trope signaled women’s changing social roles in the 1970s, the contemporary biological clock becomes relevant once more as the notion of reproductive aging itself is being reconceptualized and repoliticized after the introduction of egg freezing. Reproductive technologies such as IVF have prompted widespread reflection on the status of “the biological” as no longer fixed and foundational, but itself denaturalized in the face of technological manipulation.98 Likewise, the introduction of egg freezing has raised questions about the (not so) foundational status of reproductive aging. Should reproductive aging continue to be conceptualized as a given, biological reality that is immutable in the face of techno-social change or has reproductive aging become a manipulable phenomenon now that eggs can be frozen?
The former position was upheld in the public response to egg freezing in the Netherlands, where OC posed a potential transgression to accepted reproductive age limits. The Dutch reinforcement of the 45-year age cap for using frozen eggs shows how legal limits may reaffirm a biological limit—whether to liberation or otherwise—in spite of it no longer being biologically inevitable.99 Conversely, the OC coverage also presents claims to “turning back” or “reversing” the biological clock. Corporate fertility-preservation insurance highlighted how, in a neoliberal logic of self-investment, egg freezing can be framed as a means of overcoming bodily limits—whether in one’s private or professional life. Here a celebration of the abolishment of women’s “limit to liberation” through corporate benefits also renders fertility precarious by affirming its ongoing decline and universalizing financial and clinical dependencies to counteract it. These dependencies at once exclude women along established lines of social inequality and enlist other women to subject themselves to a new cultural logic of self-investment, which, as I discuss below, is fraught with potential conflicts of interest from which various third parties stand to benefit.
The introduction of egg freezing has thus triggered both the reaffirmation of existing reproductive aging norms against the threat of their transgression with OC and the reconfiguration of reproductive aging as operating by a different rationale when eggs may be “frozen in time.” Both the confirmation of “normal reproductive years” and the redefinition of fertility as extending later into life position female fertility as unreliable and subject to loss at an unknown and inopportune moment. Whether as false promise, unnatural transgression, or pragmatic solution, egg freezing operates at the tension between the simultaneous rejection and suggested inevitability of the future nonreproductive body that is invoked in OC’s newspaper coverage. Egg freezing is, then, not simply a solution to a preexisting issue of female fertility decline, but its introduction provides the occasion for a public reconceptualization of reproductive aging as profoundly precarious—and thereby in need of social or medical management.
At the heart of the following chapters, then, is the question of what power relations are reproduced in the resultant contemporary management of female reproductive aging.
