By Karey Harwood
For as long as I have been thinking and writing about egg freezing, its characterization as “a technological solution to a social problem” has adumbrated a core criticism: egg freezing falls short because there is a deeper problem it doesn’t solve. Egg freezing may help the individual woman who can afford it, yes, but not much more. The deeper problem is generally assumed to be workplace norms molded around men’s life cycle. Pushing hard to advance one’s career during one’s 20s and 30s does not cost men the opportunity to father children, primarily because their fertility does not decline precipitously after age 35. In addition, stay-at-home wives have historically played a supportive role in freeing up men to focus on work. By contrast, women have a more limited window of fertility and are not as likely to have a stay-at-home partner who can take primary responsibility for childrearing.
The debate about egg freezing has thus often focused on whether technology can or should ever be used to mitigate socially constructed and/or biologically based (and socially exacerbated) inequalities. Opinions about this question generally track one’s overall technological optimism or pessimism, as well as whether one sees the biological difference between men’s and women’s fertility as something society ought to try to accommodate and equalize or simply ignore. Relatedly, critics have assailed the inflexibility of workplace structures in the U.S., inadequate family leave policies, and the general culture of American overwork that leaves many people of all genders without healthy work-life balance.
But what if the egg freezing debate has made an erroneous assumption about the deeper social problem for which egg freezing is the inadequate fix? What if instead of using egg freezing as a way to adhere to men’s timetables for educational and career advancement and “lean in” to the demands of corporate America, women were using egg freezing for a different set of reasons? And would those reasons make a difference in the ethical appraisal of egg freezing?
In her new book, Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs (New York University Press, 2023), anthropologist Marcia Inhorn examines exactly this point, using empirical data derived from interviews with 150 women who froze their eggs. Rather than embracing this technology proactively or strategically to delay childbearing while focusing on careers, the women in Inhorn’s study overwhelmingly turned to egg freezing as a way to cope with the “mating gap,” which she defines as a lack of eligible male partners. Eighty-two percent of the women in Inhorn’s sample were single, “with no partner in sight” (p. 19). In their own words, they were using egg freezing to “buy time” and hold onto their dream of heterosexual marriage with biologically related children. These women were a notably high achieving group: one-third of her sample had attended an Ivy League institution and nearly 80% had advanced degrees. While it might be tempting to dismiss this phenomenon as a “First World professional women’s problem,” it is disturbing to think that women’s high achievement now exacts a “fertility penalty,” (p. 107) as Inhorn labels it.
Inhorn, in fact, relays a number of concerning trends: men are falling behind in college enrollment, men are falling away from the institution of marriage, and men are not seeing fatherhood as an important marker of adulthood. Women are outpacing men in educational attainment, and this is happening globally, not merely in the U.S. In China, many highly educated women are being rejected as marriage partners “because they have excelled beyond expected measures and Chinese men feel threatened by these women’s overachievement” (p. 275). They are called “surplus women,” “leftover women,” and the “third gender.”
The statistics are striking. In the U.S., according to Inhorn’s reporting, “59.5 percent of students enrolled in college in 2020-21 were women, as opposed to only 40.5 percent who were men. This was an all-time high for women but a generational decline for men. Of the one and half million fewer students who enrolled in college in 2021 compared to the previous five years, 71 percent of the decline occurred among men. If men continue to give up on college at these growing rates, then there will soon be only one college-educated male for every two female college graduates” (p. 271-272).
It is lamentable that women’s educational attainments cannot be celebrated unreservedly, without worries about men’s educational declines, which brings me back to the nature of the underlying social problem that should most concern us. However convincing Inhorn’s argument may be that the mating gap is the primary driver of egg freezing – heterosexual women who desire biologically related children conceived with partners they love are using egg freezing to buy time while they wait for desirable partners to materialize – this insight may not fundamentally alter the critique that egg freezing is a Band-Aid that does nothing to address underlying inequalities.
Inhorn predicts women will need to marry “down” into “mixed-collar” marriages. Likewise, if men want marriage and families, they will need to not be intimidated by women’s accomplishments but rather see them as good fortune in a marriage. She is sympathetic to women in their 30s who turn to egg freezing, but does not believe it is an appropriate choice for women in their 20s and wouldn’t recommend it to her own daughter. The cost-benefit analysis just doesn’t support it. Given the health risks of egg freezing and the fact that there are no guarantees of success, I agree it makes sense for women in their 20s to keep working on a Plan A, rather than jump to egg freezing.
But the situation of women waiting on men (to grow up, to commit, to be comfortable in a partnership of equals) and women making themselves unmarriageable by their overachievement ultimately suggests not much has changed in terms of gender norms. While egg freezing goes a long way toward relieving anxiety and sustaining hope, it also allows for conformity to heteropatriarchy and bionormativity. For anyone who longs for a radical revisioning of what family could be, what relationships could be, and what individual fulfillment could look like, egg freezing will always feel like a second-best alternative.
Karey Harwood is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at NC State and also an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies in Interdisciplinary Studies.
