Abstract
Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging offers a thought-provoking look at the ways in which egg freezing rearranges our notions of infertility, aging, and consumer medicine. Drawing on cultural analyses of a documentary film, egg freezing blogs, and advertisements of egg freezing companies, Freezing Fertility follows the egg from extraction, to freezing, to fertilization and maturation, to global trade and research. Freezing Fertility is reminiscent of such reproduction classics as Emily Martin’s (1987) The Woman in the Body and Sarah Franklin’s (1997) Embodied Progress in its attention to representations of the body, discourse and metaphor, and ambiguity and uncertainty.
Freezing Fertility moves beyond asking why people freeze their eggs to interrogate the effects of the advent and popularization of egg freezing. The book’s central argument is that egg freezing redefines the binary division between fertility and infertility by creating postfertility, or “the ambiguously in/fertile states that emerge when the possibility of egg freezing reconfigures the temporal logic of reproductive aging” (p. 16). Freezing Fertility shows how egg freezing enlists healthy women as potential candidates for medical treatment. Through this argument, van de Wiel makes a convincing case for why egg freezing matters to many more people than the very small number who actually pursue it.
Freezing Fertility begins by following egg freezing coverage in the United States, United Kingdom, and Dutch media to showcase the emergence of a gendered politics of aging, in which the temporality of women’s reproduction is a major public concern. Chapter two analyzes the Dutch documentary Eggs for Later (2010) and highlights how egg freezing serves as a means of toggling between past and anticipated affective states. Chapter three follows the bioeconomies of egg freezing, with a focus on U.S.-based egg freezing companies. Chapter four centers on the time-lapse imaging of embryos (in the United Kingdom, it is a controversial add-on to fertility treatments), which rearranges the temporality of cellular maturation. Chapter five considers the cultural meaning of “older motherhood” through the narratives of women who thawed their frozen eggs. Chapter six expands the scope of the book by interrogating the meaning of frozen eggs in global research networks and international donations.
Van de Wiel is particularly insightful when illustrating the contradictions of egg freezing: It postpones and extends fertility; it avoids and achieves reproduction; it offers independence from the “biological clock” but makes its users dependent on medical assistance; it extends the hope for a nuclear family but provides time for its users to come to terms with single motherhood; and it promises to free its users from the uncertainties of reproduction but presents new risks that need to be evaluated. Notably, Freezing Fertility highlights how frozen eggs can be both singular, representing a unique genetic connection between parent and progeny, and anonymous, as cells meant for research at laboratories around the world.
Another key contribution of Freezing Fertility includes the concept of a “calculus of fertility” (p. 102). Van de Wiel smartly illustrates not only the rationalizing practice of pursuing egg freezing at all but also of freezing enough eggs, often through multiple cycles, in order to achieve a higher likelihood of creating embryos that will result in future pregnancies. Because the value of frozen eggs lies in reducing reproductive uncertainty rather than a baby, there is no definite limit to investments in egg freezing’s potential, or “fertility accumulation” (p. 227). Freezing Fertility adeptly illustrates how egg freezing is not a single event but instead a part of ongoing fertility management throughout the life course.
Freezing Fertility draws from cases from the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, but van de Wiel suggests that “their locus is often more networked, distributed, and dynamic than the frame of the nation-state permits” (p. 9). That said, several of the primary cases covered in the book are perhaps more situated in particular national contexts that van de Wiel acknowledges, such as the salience of age limits in the Netherlands. What’s more, in arguing that through its existence egg freezing impacts everyone’s in/fertility status, van de Wiel elides the degree to which egg freezing is specifically marketed toward and pursued by White high-income heterosexual cisgender women in high-income countries. As expansive as Freezing Fertility is, it could have engaged more with egg freezing for transgender men or genderqueer people (p. 38). For a book on the “gender politics of aging,” it seems a missed opportunity to interrogate how gendered temporalities are rearranged through the promotion and adoption of transgender fertility preservation.
Freezing Fertility will be interesting to reproduction scholars, as well as broader social science and cultural studies audiences interested in aging and the life course, risk and precarity, and consumer medicine. It is a significant addition to the burgeoning subfield on gendered temporality.