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Culture, Health & Sexuality, 2015

Vol. 17, No. 4, 470–482, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2014.951881

‘Banking time’: egg freezing and the negotiation of future fertility


Catherine Waldby*

Faculty of Arts, Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
(Received 23 January 2014; accepted 2 August 2014)

This paper examines the relatively recent practice of non-medical egg freezing, in
which women bank their eggs for later use in conceiving a child. Non-medical egg
freezing has only been available for about the last five years, as new vitrification
techniques have made the success rates for actual conception more reliable than the
earlier method of slow freezing. I draw on interviews with both clinicians and women
who have banked their eggs to consider how this novel practice articulates with broader
issues about the relationship between sexuality, reproduction and the political economy
of household formation. Non-medical egg-freezing provides a technical solution to a
number of different problems women face with regard to the elongation of the life
course, the extension of education, the cost of household establishment and the iterative
nature of relationship formation, thematised by the ubiquity of internet dating among
the interviewees. I focus on the ways women used egg freezing to manage and
reconcile different forms of time.
Keywords: egg freezing; gender; fertility; time; new reproductive technologies

Introduction
Since the 1960s, human reproduction has become far more malleable, as the life sciences
revolution has found a ready market for its innovations among men and women who wish
to limit, augment and manage their fertility (Murphy 2012). While improvements in
contraception have dramatically enhanced women’s capacity to limit their numbers of
children, the advent of in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the late-1970s offers some methods for
prolonging fertility. The core business of the fertility clinic sector is assisting women over
35 to conceive children, as more women delay motherhood in order to establish careers
and household stability.1 The technical repertoire of this field has steadily developed to
address and manage more and more aspects of the biology of fertility, so the technique of
IVF itself is only one among many other strategies to reorder human reproduction in the
laboratory (Thompson 2005).
This paper is concerned with one aspect of the burgeoning reproductive bioeconomy:
the private tissue banking sector. While public tissue banks, for example blood banks,
depend on altruistic donation, where one person gives to another for therapeutic purposes,
private tissue banks allow clients to preserve their own tissues for future use (Healy 2006).
A significant segment of private tissue banking is focused on reproductive tissues and the
preservation of personal reproductive capacity through time. Women may variously bank
their child’s cord blood (Brown and Kraft 2006), their IVF embryos (Nisker et al. 2010)
and their breast milk (Ryan, Team, and Alexander 2013), while men may bank semen,
if, for example, they are facing a tour of duty in the military or a gonadotoxic cancer
treatment (Johnson et al. 2013). This paper examines a recent addition to this service

*Email: catherine.waldby@sydney.edu.au

q 2014 Taylor & Francis


Culture, Health & Sexuality 471

sector, the practice of elective egg freezing, where women bank their eggs for later use in
conceiving a child. ‘Social’ egg freezing, as it is sometimes called, has only been available
for about the last five years, as new vitrification techniques have made the success
rates for actual conception much more reliable than the earlier method of slow freezing.
As I describe in detail in the next section, the uptake for this new kind of private tissue
banking is set to accelerate with the recent publication of peak medical guidelines
(ESHRE Task Force on Ethics and Law et al. 2012; American Society for Reproductive
Medicine 2013) declaring the practice no longer experimental.
In what follows, I will first consider the technique of egg-freezing and its relationship to
the broader field of cryobiology, the cold storage of living tissues so essential to the history
of biomedical innovation (Radin 2013). I will then draw on a series of interviews I recently
conducted in London, with women who had banked their eggs, and with clinicians and
business staff at two private fertility clinics that offer non-medical egg freezing.
In discussing this material, my analysis is broadly guided by my ‘tissue economy’ approach
(Waldby and Mitchell 2006). The idea of a tissue economy is that donated human tissues
(e.g. blood, embryos, organs, sperm, oöcytes) have a productivity that can be ordered in
different ways. While still inside the donor’s body, tissues are part of the self and help to
sustain the person. Once donated, they can sustain the life and health of the recipients
(for example blood and organ donation), they may be banked for future use (for example
cord blood) or they may become elements in laboratory research (for example embryonic
stem cell lines). In each case, tissues are procured, managed, banked and circulated in a
system designed to maximise their latent productivity. Tissue economies are not simply
technical matters, however, as the ways human tissues are procured and distributed involve
fundamental social questions about power relations (who donates to whom, under what
circumstances, with what regulatory protections?) and social values (what do particular
tissues mean and how do they count to donors, recipients, research facilities, commercial
biomedicine?).
One of the major features that shape a tissue economy is the degree of affordance
particular tissues offer to technical intervention, the extent to which their biological
capacities can be preserved, controlled, amplified and redirected. Some tissues are durable
once outside the body (blood plasma for example), while others are extremely fragile and
rapidly lose functionality (e.g. solid organs like the heart and liver). Oöcyte banking is of
particular interest to considerations of tissue economy because, as I will describe in the
next section, oöcytes are historically very difficult tissues to manage compared to human
semen, for example, because they have proved so resistant to freezing and banking. While
oöcytes have been donated between women since the early-1980s (Trounson et al. 1983),
their extremely rapid loss of fertility once outside the body has meant that donation
involves very careful coordination and the co-presence of donor and recipient, in the same
clinic at the same time. The capacity to freeze tissue, and hence to preserve it through time
and transport it through space, is perhaps the single most important technical consideration
for the malleability of a tissue economy, because it dramatically expands the possible uses
of the material and hence its clinical and commercial value (Waldby and Mitchell 2006).
In what follows, however, I am interested in the ways those who bank their oöcytes
make sense of and utilise this technical capacity as an aspect of their fertile life course and
personal biography. To put it another way, how does the technical ability to preserve
fertility through time interact with quotidian and qualitative understandings of time and
different trajectories – of career, relationships, aging – that interweave at different rates
through the life course? In terms of an oöcyte tissue economy, what does this new ability to
freeze women’s fertility mean to the women themselves?
472 C. Waldby

Oöcytes, cryobiology and the problem of time


Cryobiology, the science of tissue freezing and thawing, has been part of the
infrastructure of the biological sciences since the mid-twentieth century. Its repertoire of
techniques emerged in particular from the field of animal husbandry and attempts to
improve the synchronisation of herd reproduction (Wilmot 2007b). Cryobiology has since
become a central technique of the contemporary life sciences, as more and more kinds of
tissue and cellular material can be frozen and thawed without loss of vitality. This ability
to stop and start biology, to arrest and suspend cellular activity and reanimate it at some
future date, involves a rearticulation of the terms of life, its given temporal pathways.
As Hannah Landecker (2005) observes, biotechnology does not simply change what it
means to be human, it changes what it means to be biological. In that sense cryobiology:
the ability to freeze, halt, or suspend life, and reanimate, [is] an infrastructural element of
contemporary biotechnology. In short, to be biological, alive, cellular, also means (at present)
. . . to be suspendable, interruptible, storable, freezable in parts.
Landecker’s point is that the ability to freeze and defrost tissues presents issues not
merely of utility but of fundamental reordering of life’s trajectories. It demands we think
differently about the relations between biology and time, and facilitates uncanny reversals
and dis-synchronies. In the area of fertility preservation, for example, cryobiology allows
gametes to outlive their donor, so that children can be posthumously conceived with a dead
man’s semen, with attendant social and legal anxieties about the ethics of such a practice
(Kroløkke and Adrian 2013).
However, until very recently, the secure freezing and thawing of human oöcytes has
remained beyond the abilities of cryobiology. Mammalian oöcytes of all kinds are
particularly difficult tissue to freeze because of their high cytoplasm volume and the
tendency of the chromosomes lined up by the meiotic spindle to be disrupted by ice crystal
formation. Human oöcytes have proved more difficult to freeze and thaw successfully than
those of most other mammals (Mullen 2007). Slow freezing has been used since the 1980s
to preserve fertility for female oncology patients, whose treatment often compromises
their ability to have children (Kondapalli, Hong, and Garcia 2010). However, the success
rates for assisted reproductive technology fertilisation, pregnancy and live births using
slow-freeze oöcytes remained significantly lower than those for fresh cycles.
More recently, clinics and cryobiologists have turned to the technique of vitrification,
with better results. To vitrify is to transform a substance into ‘glass’, to render it stable and
inert through very rapid cooling to about 2 100C, where molecular activity ceases.
Various studies indicate significantly more success with this approach when compared to
slow-freeze oöcytes (Smith et al. 2010). More importantly, a few clinical trials have
compared vitrified oöcytes with fresh cycles and found only slight, or no, differences in
terms of fertilization and pregnancy rates (Cobo et al. 2010). After reviewing these data,
both the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology and the American
Society for Reproductive Medicine recently declared that oöcyte vitrification was now
sufficiently advanced that it should no longer be regarded as experimental (ESHRE Task
Force on Ethics and Law et al. 2012; American Society for Reproductive Medicine 2013).
These declarations effectively legitimise the expansion of non-medical egg freezing
services and generally boost the process of market formation. While the clinics involved in
my study had offered non-medical egg freezing for about five years, the staff I interviewed
considered the declaration something of a tipping point, insofar as they reassure potential
clients that they are not undergoing an experimental procedure, with its connotations of
risk and uncertainty. So my study maps a particular moment in the history of women’s
Culture, Health & Sexuality 473

ability to manage their fertility, although, as we will see, this management is not at
all straightforward, as they try to gain both time and leverage in the high-stakes game of
family formation.

Other studies and methods


While there is a policy and commentary literature focused on egg-freezing (Martin 2010;
Shkedi-Rafid and Hashiloni-Dolev 2011; Mohapatra Forthcoming) there are, to date,
only two published studies of egg-freezing that base their research directly upon women’s
experience and motivations. Hodes-Wertz and colleagues (2013) conducted an
anonymous 30-question survey with 183 patients in the USA who had completed oöcyte
cryopreservation over the period 2005– 2011. A more recent study carried out interviews
with 20 women on the waiting list for oöcyte freezing at a Dutch center for Reproductive
Medicine (De Groot et al. 2013). In both studies, the majority of respondents was over
35, single and was freezing their eggs as a way to extend their reproductive life span
in order to increase their chances of having a child within a family, rather than as a
single mother. In both studies, the women expressed optimism about the technology,
and felt that they had improved their reproductive future. In the Hodes-Wertz (2013)
study, 20% of women reported that they used egg-freezing to manage workplace
inflexibility. These studies describe a group of women whose demographic characteristics
are broadly similar to the women interviewed for this study. However, unlike the study
presented here, neither engages in any depth with the qualitative reasoning that informs
women’s decision to freeze their eggs, and neither touches on questions of time in an
explicit sense.
The following analysis is based on interviews conducted by the author with 15 women
who had banked their eggs and with 10 counselling, clinical and business staff who worked
at two fertility clinics in central London. These clinics were approached because they
has significant egg-banking facilities, and comparatively long-term (5 years in one case,
10 in the other) experience with both slow freezing and vitrification techniques.
Approval for this research was granted by the Human Research Ethics Committee of
Sydney University. The women were recruited through the two clinics’ patient databases
by the patient coordinator, who initially e-mailed 35 potential interviewees with an
invitation letter to participate in the study. All interviewees formally consented and were
given the option of not being audio-recorded and of receiving follow up reports on the
findings of the study. All interviews were, in fact, recorded. The interviews were in-depth
and semi-structured, with an interview schedule containing open-ended questions
(Kvale 1996). They lasted between 50 and 90 minutes.
Clinical staff were recruited for interview via a circular e-mail sent by the patient
coordinator, with an information sheet about the study and the interviewer’s contact
details. Interested staff then contacted the researcher and all interviews were conducted in
clinic offices and proceeded after formal consent was given. The expert interviews were
between 45 and 60 minutes long, were semi-structured and were digitally recorded.
In addition to interviews, the author attended a seminar for single women provided by one
of the clinics, which included information about egg-freezing as well as other services like
sperm donation.
All names used in this article are pseudonyms. All interviews were transcribed
verbatim by a professional transcriber and checked by the researcher. Data analysis for the
wider project followed thematic coding (Boyatzis 1998) using NVivo software.
474 C. Waldby

The fertility cliff


Egg freezing is an expensive, elective medical procedure that is not subsidised through the
National Health Service. As such, it finds the majority of its clientele among a particular
UK demographic: well educated, single women in their 30s and 40s, with high disposable
incomes. This demographic is well represented in London (Skeggs 2004) and, as we will
see in the analysis, some of the drivers that propel women into freezing their eggs relate to
the sexual politics and political economy of London as one of the great global cities. Since
the 1980s, London has been at the forefront of urban globalisation, with city and national
governance that favours flexible labour markets, high levels of mobility and global
commercial competition, particularly in financial services, the culture industries and the
knowledge economy (Syrett and Sepulveda 2012). It is a magnet for a highly credentialed
professional workforce and, like other such global cities, well-educated women are
attracted to the employment opportunities and service cultures they offer, while at the
same time struggling to reconcile the conflicting demands of professional expectations
with household formation and child care (Zimmerman, Litt, and Bose 2006). London is
also historically at the forefront of new forms of consumption and markets for niche
services, including personalised medical services (Karpik 2010), and a major centre for
biomedical research and advanced clinical expertise (Lucci and Harrison 2011).
The proliferation of fertility clinics in London is testament to these dynamics, taking
advantage of the British leadership in the reproductive sciences (Wilmot 2007a) to
translate laboratory science into advanced client services.
The women recruited for the study belonged to the professional class described above.
They were aged between 26 and 45, with the vast majority (80%) aged over 36. Only three
women were under 35. All were well educated, with either a Bachelors Degree (60%) or a
Postgraduates Degree (40%). All the women were professionals. Their occupations
included: a personal assistant in the financial sector, a police officer, a human resources
professional and a charity association professional, three business owners or managers, a
commercial lawyer, an occupational therapist, a project manager, an environmental
engineer and three media producers. Four of the women had a longer-term partner, two
were in relatively new relationships and the rest were single. One woman was in a lesbian
relationship, while the others identified as heterosexual. One woman had a child (Mellissa,
late-30s) and one was expecting (Eleanor, early-30s), in each case conceived without use
of their frozen eggs. One woman was from a south Asian background, while the rest were
of European descent.
For most of the interviewees, their initial knowledge of egg freezing came either from
print media coverage or from the experience and knowledge of their peer group. Clinical
staff repeatedly stated that they had little need to advertise the service as it had become a
popular topic in both the human interest/women’s sections of the news media and in
high end women’s magazines, for example Vogue (Hass 2011) and Grazia Magazine
(Shane 2012). In cases where they were made aware by the experience of friends, this was
either because a friend had investigated egg-freezing directly or they had had age-related
difficulties with conception. Participants spoke of friends who had miscarried, friends who
had sought sperm donation and friends who had been through IVF.
Interviewer (I): how were you aware about fertility decline in the second half of your 30s?
Participant (P): I think actually it’s something that’s generally spoken about, and I think
I didn’t really know a lot. It was just something I had heard. . . . . I have friends who’ve had
children in their 40s and I’m kind of aware that that’s the last window. One of my really good
friends, actually, she’d gone through IVF at the age of 44, and because of her age she actually
Culture, Health & Sexuality 475

went for egg donation, and she went to Cyprus last year to do it, and she asked me to be her
support person.
I: Oh! Did you go to Cyprus?
P: Yes. In summer last year, and that was really good, I think, for opening my eyes about how
the procedure worked. . . . [and] last year I went to a few information evenings, and I didn’t
know the actual statistics until they were put in front of me, and I just thought, ‘Oh, my god,
that’s so scary!’ Like, every year matters, you know? (Phoebe, late-30s, Environmental
Engineer)
Here we see Phoebe referring to the statistical analysis known as the ‘fertility cliff’.
This analysis demonstrates that the probability of conception falls away sharply after the
mid-30s. It has its origins in mathematical modelling of the rate of loss of ovarian follicles
(the biological structures that produce oöcytes), which shows accelerated exponential loss
after the median age of 37 (Faddy et al. 1992). This truncation of fertility in the late-30s
was felt to be quite out of step with their sense that they themselves were not ‘old’:
I thought about it [egg freezing] maybe for half a year, and I was 39 then. I’m now 40,
and I thought, ‘Well, I read that by 40 your fertility’s declining’. . . . My grandma, she had
a child in her 40s. So I’m not concerned about myself – I wasn’t – but I thought I’d just go
and see someone. . . . when you turn 40, even though I don’t feel 40, it is kind of a society
[pressure], I think it was more outside influences than an internal thing, ‘Oh, I’m getting
old!’ It was more like that thought, ‘Well, I’m told I’m getting old, so I better do something
now!’ (Melissa, early-40s, media producer)

Stopping the biological clock


The participants found the idea of aging eggs incongruous with their experience of
themselves as youthful, as though their eggs and the rest of their bodies were on two quite
different schedules. The idea most commonly used to describe this was that of the
biological clock, ominously ticking at a rate that seemed at odds with other rhythms in
their lives:
I think the problem is that women are not made aware of their biological clock, and
they’re not routinely tested for that. But that probably doesn’t apply to every woman. . . .
But I certainly think that if you’re thinking of delaying it, you should check, you should be
encouraged to check out what your parameters biologically are. (Jennifer, early-40s,
company director)
The attraction of egg freezing was precisely its promise to synchronise their biological
clocks with other timelines in their life course. By freezing their eggs, the women draw on a
particular temporal quality associated with cryobiology. To freeze tissue is to remove it
from the integrated milieu of the organism and from its web of temporal, biological
interactions, and to arrest its developmental pathway. It is for this reason that cryobiology is
central to many forms of assisted fertility treatment, as it enables complex forms of
synchronisation, bringing together carefully timed, discreetly preserved elements – frozen
sperm, frozen embryos – in precise combinations, that would otherwise move along
intractable, incompatible trajectories. Charis Thompson singles out synchronisation as a
particular art in the fertility clinic, as quite heterogeneous temporal orders are coordinated –
the cyclical (menstruation) with the linear (the biological clock) with the biographical time
of the life course, running both backward into personal history and forward into hopes and
plans (Thompson 2005, 10).
It is this quality that leads Naomi to describe egg-freezing as ‘banking time’, diverted
fertility from its otherwise intractable trajectory and storing it to be redeployed at a more
476 C. Waldby

opportune time. Michelle commented on the uncanniness of such an arrangement, the


division of self into frozen and non-frozen parts:
It’s a bit odd, isn’t it, thinking, ‘I’ve got a part of me frozen somewhere.’ I found that a bit odd,
and then I’m thinking, ‘Alright, so essentially I’ve got to pay rent every year [laughs] to keep
it!’ It’s quite a bizarre process. It’s not something you do every day. But mentally I was, oh,
I’ve got a back-up now. It’s quite a nice feeling, in a way, that you’ve got that option.
(Michelle, late-20s, police officer).
This capacity to synchronise different temporal strands of their bodies’ physiology was
not, however, simply an issue of pragmatics or logistics. Rather, as Thompson (2005, 10)
suggests, it had complex implications for the way they could redeem their pasts and
envisage their futures.

Sexuality and household formation


The participants wanted access to their fertility after they had established a stable
household, with a reliable, trustworthy partner. They reported the difficulties of securing a
relationship and the prohibitive expense of the London housing market as the two aspects
of life inimical to childbearing at this point in their lives. In most cases, they reported a
long-term relationship during their 20s and early-30s that had come to an end, leaving
them with the problem of identifying a partner interested in children and the creation of a
stable family. Here the dynamics of the global city, with its mobile young professionals
and rapid inflows and outflows of expertise, worked against the interviewees. The ubiquity
of internet dating and the problems specific to this technique thematised the difficulty of
reconciling the churn of quick turnover relationships in the anonymity of London with the
urgency of dwindling fertility:
I went through a point [of internet dating] where I was doing so many that the . . . . One
internet date that went on any longer than a second date, it was a guy that I saw for three
months, and . . . . It just felt relaxed. It just felt like two people connected. And so . . . yeah,
but it turned out he was seeing – he was seeing three other people. So this is the thing. You
don’t really know who you’re meeting. (Anita, early-40s, small business owner)
Several of the women stated that they banked their eggs primarily to take the pressure
off their relationships with prospective partners. The quick-turnover effects of internet
dating, the pressure it put on the parties to evaluate each other, the difficulty of establishing
trust in the absence of context – all of these aspects of internet dating were rendered more
acute when considered from the point of view of dwindling fertility. Several stated that
they feared forming an unwise relationship if they did not do something to gain more time.
Louise saw egg freezing as a way to redeem the time she spends as a single woman, and to
use it wisely, rather than impetuously invest it in the wrong relationship:
Being single for five or six years, I thought . . . I’m wasting all this time. I don’t want
the pressure of feeling I’ve got to settle down, I’ve got to have kids, and everything’s got to
happen so quickly, because what I was realising from dating is that it takes a long time
to get to know somebody. Most of the time, when you have relationships in your teens or
your 20s, you’re working together or you’re living together, a small group of people, so
you get to know people in many varieties of situations over time, and it’s easier. It’s not
like that in your 30s. You’re internet dating. It’s very much dinner dates. It’s one-to-one.
It’s quite intense. You have to be a very good judge of character. So for something to
happen, I was like, ‘Well, if I’m not going to do anything about this, I’m going to have to
meet someone and get married and have a baby within two years of meeting them, and
I just felt that was too much pressure. (Louise, late-30s, PA finance sector)
Culture, Health & Sexuality 477

It is evident that egg-freezing is commonly caught up in a particular kind of


heterosexual romance, one in which women hope to secure an ideal future family along
relatively normative lines. In contrast, one of the interviewees, Phoebe, an engineer,
identified as lesbian and was in a relationship with another woman. Nevertheless, her
reasons for egg-freezing were also caught up in broader concerns about how to negotiate
the early days of a new relationship and a sense that it would remove a certain kind of
pressure on a tenuous situation.
I: Did you discuss [egg-freezing] with the new partner?
P: No. I went to the information evenings without telling her. I just felt like it was really early
to talk about anything like that. Also, too, I just thought maybe we’ll break up next month. . . .
I know that things can change really quickly sometimes unless you know someone very, very
well already. So yes, I did that without speaking to her about it, and I don’t think I’d even told
her I was thinking about it. (Phoebe, late-30s, environmental engineer)
So for both the heterosexual and lesbian interviewees, egg-freezing was a way to
ensure that they were not ‘wasting time’, that is, ‘fertile time’, while they sought a partner
and pursued household stability. Egg-freezing was invested with the redemptive power to
render both past and future as meaningful and valuable, rather than as time lost or wasted.
Here, the power to synchronise meant that fertile capacity could be stopped at a viable
point, while other strands of the life course were ordered into line.

The ovarian reserve test: calculating fertility futures


In order to freeze her eggs, each woman was obliged to have what is termed an ‘ovarian
reserve’ test. The test comprises a set of procedures that detect the number of primordial
oöcyte follicles in the ovaries. Follicle count decreases steeply with age, accelerating in
the late-30s, and the test provides a guide to overall fertility (Barad, Weghofer, and
Gleicher 2009). While women in IVF treatment have already endured many unsuccessful
attempts to conceive or to carry pregnancies to term, for the women seeking egg freezing,
the ovarian reserve test is often the first objective indication of their fertility. They
generally have no direct experience of attempted or failed conception to draw on, and only
population statistics to give them an idea where they may sit on a probability curve. Most
waited anxiously for the test results:
I: OK. So, were you – did you feel kind of anxious waiting for the test results? Or were you
fairly calm about it?
P: Uh . . . yeah, a little bit, I suppose, because, well, things like the ovarian reserve, it’s quite a
big determining factor of your future, isn’t it. It’s one of those things that you can’t really
change. So I have to get on with it. Yeah. It was nice, actually. It was good news when it came
through. (Meredith, early-30s, occupational therapist)
Phoebe reports similar feelings of trepidation:
I: Did you have the test when you presented to the clinic to tell you what your fertility level was?
P: [Yes the] AMH test that you can get. It came back really low. I was like, ‘Oh, damn. I’m too
old, I waited too long.’ I’ve had one egg collection so far, and they got about 13 or 14 eggs.
(Phoebe, late-30s, engineer)
So for Meredith, the test was measuring her future possibilities and the results confirmed
that she had reason to hope. For Phoebe, the test results suggested that she was too far
along the declining curve of fertile life, yet these results proved somewhat misleading.
She had one cycle of treatment and retrieved an encouraging number of eggs. She plans to
have further cycles.
478 C. Waldby

In the clinical setting, the ovarian reserve tests are designed to give patient and
clinician a metric for future fertility and to introduce a degree of calculative rationality into
what until then had been experienced as incoherent anxiety and a subjective sense of lost
time. Poignantly, as this clinician observes, poor test results can themselves exacerbate a
sense of lost time:
People who freeze their eggs tend to think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them,
and for some of them it’s a real shock when the egg quality is [poor] . . . . You’ve made that
decision . . . . You’re empowered into thinking, I’m going to do this, I’m not going to
worry about it. But then you have your AMH test and it makes you [start] thinking, what
have I done with my life? (Fiona, Patient Coordinator and Embryologist)
Here we can see that test results are not simply decisional devices for the women
seeking to preserve their fertility. While they introduce some quantified, objective
information into a situation heretofore experienced as personal and opaque, the
interpretation of their meaning for the woman being tested is inflected through a complex
and deeply felt field of desires for the future and regret for time past. It is for this reason
that the result itself did not determine the subsequent course of action. As is evident in the
above two cases, tests that indicated a low ovarian reserve did not necessarily deter women
from proceeding. For some of those interviewed and for other clients described by clinic
staff, a low count was reason to proceed with haste, to leverage what possibilities
remained. In other words, the decision emerged from a complex sense of personal
biography and the way the woman understood their body’s history and future possibilities.

The future family and generational time


At one level, egg-freezing is a highly rational strategy for management of the life
trajectory. In one light, it could be framed as a form of instrumental consumer risk
calculation, another example of the entrepreneurial subject of commercial medicine
(Rose and Novas 2004; Waldby 2006). However, such an analysis would ignore the
poignant, deeply felt ethos each interviewee brought to the issue and, more tellingly,
the way egg-freezing involved a refusal of more pragmatic, efficient reproductive options.
For the women, the primary value of retaining their own eggs was their promise of genetic
continuity and the ways they positioned the woman in what I would term generational
time. The gametes, eggs and sperm, are the only cells in the body that carry and transmit a
complete copy of the parent’s genome to an offspring, which then recombines with the
other partner’s genome through fertilisation. The germ line, as it is known, is effectively
immortal, and links the generations to each other, passing each generation back through its
single-cell evolutionary origins (Margulis and Sagan 1986). While none of the women
used these terms, this logic was evident in their insistence on egg-freezing, rather than the
other, more certain fertility options open to single women. One of these options is to seek
oöcyte donation from a younger woman, from either within the UK or through fertility
travel. When asked about this option, participants were generally negative, as it would
obviate precisely the kind of biological relationship with the child they were going to some
lengths to pursue. Jennifer’s comments are representative:
I: Did you ever think about a donor egg?
P: I just don’t think there would be any point – I can’t see the point. I mean, you might as well
adopt. . . . You don’t know what you’re going to get, do you. [laughs] You don’t know what
you’re going to get with yourself, at the best of times! So no, I wouldn’t do that. I mean, I’m
not having a child – I’m not having it just to have a designer child. I’m doing it because
I would like a child myself; I think most women . . . would have chosen their own egg over a
Culture, Health & Sexuality 479

donor. [I think] . . . genetics play quite a strong part in personality and character. It’s
fascinating. Which is why I wouldn’t have a donor. (Jennifer, early-40s, company director)
Jennifer wants to conceive with her own oöcytes because she wants to maintain the
genetic relation with the future child, as well as the gestational relationship. She cannot see
the point of maintaining the genetic legacy of another, unknown woman.
The logics of generational time were also evident in the ways many of the interviewees
evoked their own happy childhoods and families in their thinking about egg-freezing, and
in the frequency with which parents, particularly mothers, offered support and attended
clinics and surgery with their daughters as they went through the process. In five cases,
families contributed money, paying either for part or all of the procedure. In these cases,
we can see that egg-freezing was regarded as a way to enable family continuity and the
transition from one generation to the next, a technology so valued not only by the women,
but by their parents.
Participants also desired a genetic relation with the future partner – not a relation of
descent, but rather a horizontal genetic relation, in the sense that they wished for their
combined genetic contribution to the conception. This is evident in the fact that the
majority of the participants had not actively entertained the option of sperm donation to
conceive a child or to create and bank embryos.2 In the case of sperm donation, the woman
is committed to single motherhood and any resulting child would be her genetic offspring,
but not related to any future partner. For the single lesbian respondent, this desire for a
horizontal genetic relation was also in evidence. While only one woman in a same-sex
couple can have a direct genetic relation with a child, one of the clinics involved in this
study specialised in giving lesbian couples the option for one to donate eggs to the other,
who then gestates the child. This strategy is compatible with egg-freezing and Phoebe
planned to use her eggs in this way if she found the right partner. Here we can see the ways
lesbian couples use Assisted Fertility Technologies to ‘weave together old and new
understandings of relatedness in complex patterns and that this enables them to assert
authority as parents’ (Nordqvist 2012).

Conclusion
So, in summary, what does the new oöcyte tissue economy made possible by non-medical
banking mean to the women who use this service? As we have seen, women use egg-
freezing to reconcile otherwise incommensurable differences between the time scale of
their reproductive biology, the steadily elongating nature of the life course and the
increasingly iterative structure of portfolio careers and relationship formation. These
differences involved not only the instrumental calculation and management of time, its
allocation among competing priorities, but also the value and meaning of time. While the
women interviewed habitually resorted to the motif of the biological clock, I would argue
that it is inadequate to the experience it is deployed to describe, precisely because of
these issues of value and meaning. Clock time ticks away in regular increments, each the
same value as the last, equalising one moment to the next and organising time in an
instrumental, homogenous forward flow. However, for the women interviewed, their sense
of urgency arises from the way the loss of fertile capacity steadily accelerates, compounding
loss on loss, so that the sense of lost time becomes more and more acute and compelling.
It is this cascading loss that forced an acute awareness of the ways egg freezing could
potentially redeem both past and future, by arresting fertile time, stabilising its power to
create new lifetimes. Once stabilised, they hoped to better synchronise the otherwise
conflicting timescales that shaped and constrained their lives. Here the synchronic arts of
480 C. Waldby

the IVF clinic have been extended beyond the logistics of in vitro fertility into a more
general social space. Women purchase this synchronic power not in the service of
immediate conception, but as a way to create a margin for deliberation and relational
negotiation, without the ever-accumulating pressure created by dwindling fertility.
The women needed this margin so that they could grapple with their place in the flow of
generational time and the best way to ensure family continuity in both the genetic and the
social sense. Their actions were not prudential, but hopeful, oriented to the creation of
future possibilities for life and family.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thanks Rachel Carr and Michelle Jamieson for invaluable research assistance and the
women who generously shared their stories.

Funding
This work was supported by an Australia Research Council Future Fellowship FT100100176.

Notes
1. So in Australia for example, between 2007 and 2008, 55% of births were due to women aged 30
to 39, with a significant proportion of them to women over 35 (Australian Bureau of Statistics
2009). In Britain, the number of live births to mothers aged 40 and over nearly trebled between
1990 and 2010 (Office for National Statistics 2011).
2. Four of the women acknowledged that they were prepared to consider sperm donation if they
could not find the desired partner.

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Résumé
Cet article examine la pratique relativement récente de la congélation non médicale d’ovules, grâce à
laquelle les femmes conservent leurs ovules pour un usage ultérieur, en vue de concevoir un enfant.
Cette pratique n’est possible que depuis environ ces cinq dernières années, c’est-à-dire depuis qu’il
est démontré que les nouvelles techniques de vitrification ont de meilleurs taux de succès pour la
conception réelle – et sont donc plus fiables – que la première méthode de congélation lente.
J’utilise le contenu des entretiens conduits aussi bien avec des cliniciens qu’avec des femmes qui ont
conservé leurs ovules pour envisager comment cette nouvelle pratique s’articule avec des questions
plus larges sur le rapport entre la sexualité, la reproduction et l’économie politique de la formation
d’un foyer. La congélation non médicale des ovules constitue une solution technique à un certain
nombre de problèmes rencontrés par les femmes au regard de l’allongement de la vie, du
prolongement des études, du coût représenté par la formation d’un foyer et de la nature itérative de la
manière dont se forment les relations, thématisée par l’ubiquité des rencontres sur Internet parmi les
participantes. Je prête une attention particulière à la manière dont les femmes utilisent la congélation
non médicale des ovules pour gérer et agencer différentes formules du temps.

Resumen
El presente artı́culo examina la relativamente nueva práctica de congelación de óvulos, que permite
que las mujeres guarden sus óvulos con el fin de usarlos posteriormente para concebir. La
congelación de óvulos para usos no médicos se encuentra disponible desde hace aproximadamente
cinco años. Las nuevas técnicas de vitrificación han dado lugar a tasas más elevadas de concepción
exitosa que el anterior método de congelación lenta. Con base en varias entrevistas realizadas tanto a
médicos clı́nicos como a mujeres que han utilizado este proceso, la autora analiza cómo esta práctica
novedosa se articula con cuestiones más amplias vinculadas a la relación entre sexualidad,
reproducción y la economı́a polı́tica de la creación de hogares. La congelación de óvulos con fines no
médicos brinda una solución técnica a distintos problemas enfrentados por las mujeres en términos
de la elongación de su ciclo vital, la prolongación de su escolaridad, el costo de establecer un hogar y
la naturaleza iterada de la conformación de relaciones. Esta última es ejemplificada por el uso de los
ubicuos servicios de citas en Internet por parte de las entrevistadas. La autora se centra en las
maneras en que las mujeres aprovecharon la congelación de óvulos para administrar y reconciliar
distintas formas de tiempo.
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