By Karey Harwood

For so long as I’ve been considering and writing about egg freezing, its characterization as “a technological answer to a social downside” has adumbrated a core criticism: egg freezing falls brief as a result of there’s a deeper downside it doesn’t resolve. Egg freezing might assist the person lady who can afford it, sure, however not far more. The deeper downside is usually assumed to be office norms molded round males’s life cycle. Pushing exhausting to advance one’s profession throughout one’s 20s and 30s doesn’t price males the chance to father kids, primarily as a result of their fertility doesn’t decline precipitously after age 35. As well as, stay-at-home wives have traditionally performed a supportive function in releasing up males to give attention to work. In contrast, ladies have a extra restricted window of fertility and usually are not as prone to have a stay-at-home companion who can take major duty for childrearing.

The talk about egg freezing has thus usually centered on whether or not know-how can or ought to ever be used to mitigate socially constructed and/or biologically primarily based (and socially exacerbated) inequalities. Opinions about this query typically observe one’s total technological optimism or pessimism, in addition to whether or not one sees the organic distinction between males’s and girls’s fertility as one thing society should attempt to accommodate and equalize or just ignore. Relatedly, critics have assailed the inflexibility of office buildings within the U.S., insufficient household go away insurance policies, and the final tradition of American overwork that leaves many individuals of all genders with out wholesome work-life steadiness.

However what if the egg freezing debate has made an faulty assumption in regards to the deeper social downside for which egg freezing is the insufficient repair? What if as a substitute of utilizing egg freezing as a technique to adhere to males’s timetables for instructional and profession development and “lean in” to the calls for of company America, ladies had been utilizing egg freezing for a distinct set of causes? And would these causes make a distinction within the moral appraisal of egg freezing?

In her new ebook, Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Hole and Why Girls Freeze Their Eggs (New York College Press, 2023), anthropologist Marcia Inhorn examines precisely this level, utilizing empirical information derived from interviews with 150 ladies who froze their eggs. Reasonably than embracing this know-how proactively or strategically to delay childbearing whereas specializing in careers, the ladies in Inhorn’s examine overwhelmingly turned to egg freezing as a manner to deal with the “mating hole,” which she defines as an absence of eligible male companions. Eighty-two p.c of the ladies in Inhorn’s pattern had been single, “with no companion in sight” (p. 19). In their very own phrases, they had been utilizing egg freezing to “purchase time” and maintain onto their dream of heterosexual marriage with biologically associated kids. These ladies had been a notably excessive reaching group: one-third of her pattern had attended an Ivy League establishment and almost 80% had superior levels. Whereas it may be tempting to dismiss this phenomenon as a “First World skilled ladies’s downside,” it’s disturbing to assume that ladies’s excessive achievement now exacts a “fertility penalty,” (p. 107) as Inhorn labels it.

Inhorn, the truth is, relays numerous regarding traits: males are falling behind in faculty enrollment, males are falling away from the establishment of marriage, and males usually are not seeing fatherhood as an vital marker of maturity. Girls are outpacing males in instructional attainment, and that is taking place globally, not merely within the U.S. In China, many extremely educated ladies are being rejected as marriage companions “as a result of they’ve excelled past anticipated measures and Chinese language males really feel threatened by these ladies’s overachievement” (p. 275). They’re known as “surplus ladies,” “leftover ladies,” and the “third gender.”

The statistics are putting. Within the U.S., in keeping with Inhorn’s reporting, “59.5 p.c of scholars enrolled in faculty in 2020-21 had been ladies, versus solely 40.5 p.c who had been males. This was an all-time excessive for ladies however a generational decline for males. Of the one and half million fewer college students who enrolled in faculty in 2021 in comparison with the earlier 5 years, 71 p.c of the decline occurred amongst males. If males proceed to surrender on faculty at these rising charges, then there’ll quickly be just one college-educated male for each two feminine faculty graduates” (p. 271-272).

It’s lamentable that ladies’s instructional attainments can’t be celebrated unreservedly, with out worries about males’s instructional declines, which brings me again to the character of the underlying social downside that ought to most concern us. Nonetheless convincing Inhorn’s argument could also be that the mating hole is the first driver of egg freezing – heterosexual ladies who want biologically associated kids conceived with companions they love are utilizing egg freezing to purchase time whereas they await fascinating companions to materialize – this perception might not basically alter the critique that egg freezing is a Band-Support that does nothing to deal with underlying inequalities.

Inhorn predicts ladies might want to marry “down” into “mixed-collar” marriages. Likewise, if males need marriage and households, they might want to not be intimidated by ladies’s accomplishments however moderately see them as success in a wedding. She is sympathetic to ladies of their 30s who flip to egg freezing, however doesn’t imagine it’s an acceptable selection for ladies of their 20s and wouldn’t advocate it to her personal daughter. The fee-benefit evaluation simply doesn’t assist it. Given the well being dangers of egg freezing and the truth that there aren’t any ensures of success, I agree it is sensible for ladies of their 20s to maintain engaged on a Plan A, moderately than soar to egg freezing.

However the state of affairs of ladies ready on males (to develop up, to commit, to be comfy in a partnership of equals) and girls making themselves unmarriageable by their overachievement in the end suggests not a lot has modified by way of gender norms. Whereas egg freezing goes a good distance towards relieving nervousness and sustaining hope, it additionally permits for conformity to heteropatriarchy and bionormativity. For anybody who longs for a radical revisioning of what household could possibly be, what relationships could possibly be, and what particular person achievement might appear like, egg freezing will all the time really feel like a second-best different.

Karey Harwood is an Affiliate Professor of Spiritual Research within the Division of Philosophy and Spiritual Research at NC State and likewise an Affiliate Professor of Girls’s and Gender Research in Interdisciplinary Research.

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