Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs by Marcia C. Inhorn (NYU Press, 2023)
Since 2012, when egg freezing by vitrification (flash-freezing) emerged from experimental trials and entered clinical practice in the United States, opinions on its use for non-medical reasons have been deeply divided. The dominant media portrayal of women “electing” to freeze their eggs suggests that these women are strategically delaying motherhood for career advancement. Feminist academic discourse has responded to such stereotypes by offering competing claims. For instance, whereas liberal feminists propose that egg freezing empowers women against the constraints of their biological clocks (Goold and Savulescu 2009; Lockwood 2011; Mertes 2013), structural feminists emphasize its exploitative potential within patriarchal structures (Petropanagos 2010) and neoliberal rationality (Rottenberg 2017). Notably, women’s voices have often been missing in this polyvocal milieu. Only recently, a few qualitative studies have tried to examine women’s motivations and experiences of elective egg freezing (Baldwin 2017; Waldby 2015).
Following their lead, Marcia C. Inhorn’s book Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs weighs in on the debate. Through in-depth interviews with 150 participants in the world’s largest ethnographic study on egg freezing in the United States, Inhorn discovers a disjuncture between the feminist discourse on egg freezing and the lived experiences of its users. Most of the “egg freezing women” (Inhorn’s term for this group) are racially and ethnically diverse, secular, in their late thirties, highly educated, professionally successful, and heterosexual but single or in unstable relationships (13). These women, Inhorn learns, are preserving their fertility not because they want to delay motherhood, but because they cannot find reproductive partners. A central concern of Motherhood on Ice is to unravel this problem by tracing the real-life narratives of egg freezing women.
The first section of the book captures egg freezing women’s motivations. Chapter 1 talks about the disjuncture between women’s “reproductive desires” and “reproductive realities” (49). Egg freezing women aspire for biogenetically connected motherhood with men who are equals, in terms of education and socioeconomic status, and committed to marriage and parenthood. That such men are in short supply leads to a “mating gap” (45). Chapter 2 argues that for women who choose to freeze their eggs at the end of a relationship, egg freezing acts as a “technology of repair” that liberates them from depending on men for romantic partnership in the pursuit of future motherhood (57). Chapter 3 examines why certain racial and religious minorities are under-represented (Black and Latina women) or over-represented (Jewish American and Asian American women) in the egg freezing demographic. Chapter 4 discusses threats to female fertility and underscores the importance of timely intervention by gynecologists in educating their patients about fertility preservation.
The second section of the book explores egg freezing women’s experiences. Chapter 5 delineates the physical, financial, and emotional difficulties involved in egg freezing. Chapter 6 is about the “webs of care” composed of friends and family that develop around egg freezing women to provide support throughout their arduous journeys (176). Chapter 7 confronts the aforementioned feminist discourse and mobilizes empirical evidence from the study to challenge it. According to Inhorn, egg freezing women are “reluctant feminists” (214) because they feel that neither advocacy nor criticism by the dominant strands of feminism speaks to their lived experiences. Chapter 8 charts the uneven terrain of egg freezing from banking to thawing, and raises ethical questions about “egg disposition,” specifically the ambiguities around the decision to either discard or donate unused frozen eggs (254).
In the conclusion, Inhorn returns to the issue of the “mating gap” and provides two reasons to explain why it exists. First, she contends that men in the United States, unencumbered by a masculine marriage imperative, a social mandate for fatherhood, and the pressure of reproductive time, are intentionally deferring marriage and children. Second, drawing on the ideas of journalist Jon Birger (2015) about the ramifications of the higher education gender gap on dating outcomes, she says that men’s withdrawal from college education disqualifies them from meeting the marriageability criteria of highly educated women seeking homophily in their partnerships. Consequently, men find themselves pushed into a state of unintentional reproductive delay. Inhorn’s analysis suggests that healthy women are opting for egg freezing as a “technomedical solution” to what, she argues, is a heterosexual relationship problem: men’s intentional or unintentional reproductive delay is imposing unwanted reproductive delay on the lives of women (50).
In Inhorn’s assessment then, egg freezing is a “promissory technology” that can extend fertility but cannot guarantee motherhood because reproduction is inherently relational in both biological and social terms (270). Although egg freezing allows women to proactively prevent their eggs from biological aging, ultimately eggs require sperms to produce embryos. Thus, for Inhorn, egg freezing can only be a “stopgap measure” for women who yearn for motherhood coupled with partnership (21). It does not address the gender issue of the mating gap, for which she proposes the solution of “mixed-collar mating:” marrying down (hypogamy) by highly educated women and marrying up (hypergamy) by non-college educated men (272).
This recommendation is vexing coming from an anthropologist. It fails to engage with the dialectical relationship between agency and structure. Even if men and women recalibrate their marriage expectations at the individual level, marriage is a social institution, and the viability of mixed-collar mating will require transformation at the level of the normative order. The other obstacle is that hypogamy and hypergamy require non-equivalent material compromises. By marrying up, men stand to improve their lot materially, whereas the same is not true for women marrying down. Within the logic of a capitalist society, this puts women at a disadvantage, and in this way, mixed-collar mating can end up reproducing unequal gender relations instead of improving them.
A second point of critique is that while Inhorn says that the aspiration for motherhood drives egg freezing decisions, what drives the aspiration for motherhood itself is left unqualified, except in the discussion of minority groups, where examples such as the “Jewish maternal imperative” show the significant role that social forces play in conditioning women’s motherhood desires (101). A fair evaluation of egg freezing would require an explanation of women’s motherhood aspirations, given that some feminists argue that by linking genetic motherhood to womanhood, egg freezing creates a social obligation on women and reinforces gendered ideologies that link womanhood to motherhood (Martin 2010).
Despite these lingering concerns, the merit of Inhorn’s book is in its rich ethnographic span that foregrounds the social context in which an emerging biomedical technology is embedded. This aspect of Motherhood on Ice will capture academic readers from fields such as STS, medical anthropology, and gender studies. But given that the book’s main preoccupation is with public debates on egg freezing, and disputing the stereotypes held therein, perhaps the book will draw its largest readership from outside academia: physicians, journalists, and the general public interested in developing an analytical understanding of egg freezing in the United States. Indubitably, the book’s greatest value will be for women who are considering egg freezing or have already frozen their eggs, serving as a reassuring reminder of a shared social reality that constitutes the complexities of modern-day womanhood.
References
Baldwin, Kylie. 2017. “‘I Suppose I Think to Myself, That’s the Best Way to Be a Mother’: How Ideologies of Parenthood Shape Women’s Use of Social Egg Freezing Technology.” Sociological Research Online 22 (2): 1– 15.
Birger, Jon. 2015. Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game. New York: Workman Publishing.
Goold, Imogen, and Julian Savulescu. 2009. “In Favour of Freezing Eggs for Non-medical Reasons.” Bioethics 23 (1): 47–58.
Lockwood, Gillian M. 2011. “Social Egg Freezing: The Prospect of Reproductive ‘Immortality’ or a Dangerous Delusion?” Reproductive BioMedicine Online 23 (3): 334–340.
Martin, Lauren Jade. 2010. “Anticipating Infertility: Egg Freezing, Genetic Preservation, and Risk.” Gender & Society 24 (4): 526–545.
Mertes, Heidi. 2013. “The Portrayal of Healthy Women Requesting Oocyte Cryopreservation.” Facts Views & Vision in ObGyn 5 (2): 141–146.
Petropanagos, Angel. 2010. “Reproductive ‘Choice’ and Egg Freezing.” In Oncofertility: Cancer Treatment and Research, edited by Theresa Woodruff, Laurie Zoloth, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, and Sarah Rodriguez, 223–235. Boston: Springer.
Rottenberg, Catherine. 2017. “Neoliberal Feminism and the Future of Human Capital.” Signs 42 (2): 329–348.
Waldby, Catherine. 2015. “‘Banking Time’: Egg Freezing and the Negotiation of Future Fertility.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 17 (4): 470–482.
