Frozen Freedom

Artificial Reproductive Technologies (ART) have grown exponentially this century, showcasing the emancipatory and risk-management power of biotech. ART promises not only “reproductive freedom” for individuals and couples unable to procreate through sexual intercourse, but also, for fertile, heterosexual women, the freedom to begin motherhood at later ages. Celebrity forty-somethings sport tech-assisted babies on immaculate figures, boutique clinics advertise domestic bliss on individual terms, while egg freezing has become an increasingly ubiquitous insurance policy for professional thirty-something women uncertain about their romantic and reproductive futures. 

The number of egg-freezing cycles in the US performed annually climbed from 7,600 in 2012 to 29,803 in 2022, with roughly a million eggs and embryos stored in the country today. Women are freezing eggs at progressively younger ages, with fertility clinics actively targeting women in their 20s. The “baby panic” of the early aughts, in which professional women worried about waiting too long to have a baby for career or romantic reasons and regretting it, has putatively been solved. Women, it seems, really can now have it all, free to pursue professional, maternal, and romantic goals and dreams with greater independence and optionality. No longer enslaved by their “biological clock,” women have gained control of what psychoanalyst Katie Gentile calls their “reprofuturity.” But what sort of freedom is actually offered through reproductive technologies—and to whom?