The Egg Freezing Revolution? Gender, Technology and Reproductive Waithood

Single professional women in their late 30s are increasingly opting for oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing) as a way to preserve their fertility. Contraryto media reports, which suggest that women’s “selfish” career ambitions are the main determinant of women’s fertility postponement, women themselves offer different explanations for their fertility preservation. Indeed, the growing momentum toward egg freezing masks an underlying but little discussed global reality: Namely, women in the United States and more than half the world’s nations are outstripping men in higher education, resulting in the lack of educated, eligible, and equal partners with whom to pursue marriage and childbearing. In this ethnographic study of more than 100 highly educated, American professional women, most lamented this mating gap, which was the main reason for their pursuit of fertility preservation. Although egg freezing has been touted for its “revolutionary” potential-namely, as an empowering technology that creates new career options and family formations such as “single motherhood by choice” – egg freezing today is rarely experienced by highly educated single women in these feminist terms.
Rather, egg freezing is costly technological concession to growing gender inequalities, whereby educated women are literally “buying time” while experiencing reproductive waithood beyond their individual control.