Abstract
Oocyte cryopreservation (OC) is a technology by which human ova are extracted and set on ice with the intention of fertilizing them in the future. Most often, this practice is targeted to cisgender women as a means for them to extend their “reproductive years.” OC users may freeze their eggs in order to have “more time” to build a career, achieve financial stability, or meet “Mr. Right”—and start a family with him, later, at the “right” time.
In Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging, Lucy van de Wiel focuses on two interlinked aspects of OC: (1) the political economy of this technology and its associated global market, and (2) how the practice alters experiences of gender, aging, and reproduction, leading to “postfertility.” OC in the context of postfertility (defined as “new states of being that are neither exactly fertile nor exactly infertile” [p. 231]) is revealed as paradoxical: it contains revolutionary potential yet is delimited by normative ideas about how to live; it exudes the promise of immortality yet forces a confrontation with finitude; and it is thoroughly technocultural yet regularly used in the service of the “natural.”
One of the best things about this book is its rich methodology. Van de Wiel utilizes diverse texts and data to make her bio-/cryopolitical case, examining widely circulated statistics on female fertility decline, newspaper articles tracking the emergence of the notion of a gendered “biological clock,” fertility companies’ marketing materials, documentary films detailing rationales for egg freezing and experiences of “older motherhood,” blogs by those who have frozen their eggs, and a truly impressive body of data drawn from the reproductive technology industry and regulatory decision-making bodies around the world.
Early in the text, van de Wiel elucidates the history of the “biological clock,” linking it to the widespread notion that as women age, their fertility becomes precarious. The feminized reproductive body is a site in which social debates about the “proper” age for childbirth and starting a family play out, and the medicalization of gendered aging hinges on discursive framings of “good” versus “bad” OC subjects. Egg freezing is often seen as either a social “lifestyle” choice (e.g., due to the career aspirations of women who “want to have it all” or who currently lack an “appropriate” male partner/father) or as a medically necessitated choice (e.g., due to a cancer diagnosis that may cut one’s life short). Feminine loss and failure are affectively experienced by individuals and also mobilized by OC start-ups, fertility test providers, and the industry at large—while neoconservatives stigmatize those who choose to freeze their eggs. These agendas—”self-empowerment” versus a naysaying traditionalism—are not always so distinct, however (i.e., the OC start-up deploys its own vision for when egg freezing is “most desirable” and sets limits accordingly).
The second chapter examines the Dutch documentary Eggs for Later, which tracks one woman’s decision to freeze her eggs due to fears of future infertility. Van de Wiel theorizes “regimes of anticipation” operating within the speculative logic of OC—”you’ll never be more fertile than you are today” is a common refrain. There is a repronormativity that haunts the world of OC, a promissory technology that becomes an end in itself (albeit one that is ongoing and requires further investment), as it is about securing “peace of mind” regarding potential future fertility, rather than a pregnancy per se. This is one of the many places in the book wherein van de Wiel tracks a kind of double movement or paradox: OC functions as “an obligation to live the future in the present body” (p. 70).
Chapters Three and Four explore the commercialization of OC—what happens during the process and after the eggs are frozen, including with in vitro fertilization (IVF). OC users are encouraged (by statistical data, which emerge from the technology itself) to freeze more and more eggs in order to avoid risk of failure; this often results in financial debt and the perceived need for fertility insurance. Via a technology that seeks to ensure that individuals may have genetically related “biological” children with their previously extracted eggs (and the appropriate partner) later in life, OC enacts a kind of cyborgian reproductivity (various technologies are inextricable from the process) and a “chimerical model of reproductive aging” (p. 94), as the ovum that is to be fertilized in the future belongs to a past version of the egg freezer herself. Time-lapse embryo selection imaging visualizes the “building blocks” of a future child, and patented visualization technologies then reconfigure how we understand the beginning of a life and what it means to be fertile.
Chapter Five returns to popular media depictions and experiences of “older motherhood” and what van de Wiel calls “distributed reproductive aging” (p. 143). The “problems” with “older mothering” are read through a repronormative and conservative lens, but OC also brings the possibility of queer kinship. However, OC users often make decisions based on how well they conform to neoliberal/conservative ideologies that centralize the bourgeois nuclear family, and this is often how they are judged. If they assimilate to this vision closely enough, their choice to postpone motherhood may be rewarded. Thus, the family is secured as a “redistributive unit that requires investment—of eggs and capital alike” (p. 163). But OC doesn’t always work; if fertilization and pregnancy are unable to be secured upon egg thawing and IVF, then what has been expanded and extended is not only fertility itself, but also its loss.
The final chapters of Freezing Fertility attend to the global flow of frozen eggs and point to the politics and ethics of the associated technology, research, and market. Van de Wiel describes the OC “cold chain” through which frozen ova are preserved and transported across borders. Ultimately, this transnational flow mimics the racialized and colonial global “care chain” as outlined originally by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas. How this re-/deterritorialization of OC operates (and which demographic groups are most likely to be egg donors versus egg recipients) is revealed as a eugenicist, racial, capitalist project. As the frozen ova market is increasingly platformed, technologized, and financialized, OC consumers have more and more choice—egg donors’ eye color, hair color, ancestry, and “disability history” are all tracked, menu-ized, and commodified. There is also a booming research industry, and via new technologies (e.g., somatic cell nuclear transfer [SCNT], aka “therapeutic cloning”), another chimera is produced—the egg that consists of a nucleus from the recipient but utilizes a donor’s cytoplasm, and thus which only carries the genetic material from the recipient. This is the future of OC—fertility management that ensures “biodesirability” (i.e., postfertile individuals can choose from the “best” donor eggs or they can have their “own” “native” babies while using other people’s cytoplasm as a kind of regenerative “fountain of youth”). In practice, OC too often ensures that race, class, and colonial relations are produced and reproduced. It also raises the specter of ethical conundrums surrounding, for example, posthumous and “three-parent” pregnancies.
This book covers a lot of material. It is truly a deep dive into the world of OC—the technological structure, popular framing, and political and ethical implications that arise with this lucrative and stratified practice. Van de Wiel deeply and brilliantly theorizes time, aging, and the gender politics of OC and offers some analysis of race and class. We don’t learn as much about what happens in the global South, in terms of the OC cold chain, egg donors’ experiences, or the material circumstances of this new type of surrogacy (nor do we learn about the locales in which the technological materials are undoubtedly produced). This part of her political economic exploration is less prominent, but fortunately there are plenty of other people writing on this aspect to which her project is complementary (Kalindi Vora comes to mind, with whom van de Wiel engages).
Although it is implicit, the book also spends less time theorizing how OC is a feminizing process. Early on, van de Wiel tells us, in an endnote, that she will be using the term “women” throughout the book (when discussing ova donors, recipients, and the general practitioners/targets of OC). This makes sense. However, I would argue that a technique like OC, and the discourses and material practices that constitute it, produce women as such. Women, via OC, are materialized as a (white, well-to-do) population to be marketed to, managed, and “empowered” to analyze the costs and benefits of fertility management—at the expense of others. And women, as a postfertile population, are biopolitically configured precisely through techniques such as OC—along with the broader (repro)normative technologies of (white) “motherhood” and (bourgeois) “family-making.”
In sum, van de Wiel’s book is excellent—smart, informative, theoretically astute, and well written. She tells us so much about changing temporalities and new configurations of fertility, gender, and life itself via the figure of the cryo-egg. Read it if you want to learn a ton about what can actually be frozen.