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Lucy van de Wiel, Review of “Freezing Fertility Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging”, Social Forces, Volume 100, Issue 2, December 2021, Page e8, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soab061
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Reviewer: Skye A. Miner, National Institutes of Health Department of Bioethics, Bethesda, MD, USA
Lucy van de Wiel expands the concept of reproductive aging in her book Freezing Fertility by examining how oocyte cryopreservation (OC) creates a postfertile condition, being neither fully fertile nor infertile. This cultural analysis critically reimagines what fertility means once preservation becomes “commonplace,” an accepted way of anticipating infertility (16). Thus, Freezing Fertility asks us to think about frozen eggs outside of individual means of empowerment or undue inducement but rather as a technology that provides a redefinition of fertility—one that destabilizes national boundaries, kinship structures, and gendered organizations of time.
The argument that OC has allowed for the neoliberal postponement of fertility, making the individual solely responsible for not reproducing during her “fertile time,” is not new. However, Freezing Fertility goes beyond investigating the societal pressures that have led to delayed childbearing—educational attainment, establishment of a career, inability to find a suitable partner, rising costs of living, etc.—and uses the societal pressures for egg freezing as a starting point to examine how egg freezing is part of a broader gendered politics of reproductive aging that starts with the contraceptive pill.