The Big Freeze
Richards' piece, accompanied by a huge photograph, spanned the whole front page of the Review section, and most of page 2. The visual rhetoric suggested nothing so much as triumphalism: Richards is posed in ¾ frontal position standing against a black background wearing a scarlet sweater and camisole set matched by her fingernail polish. On her face is a look of either bemusement or smugness, or maybe both. She's looking offstage with steely eyes and the fingers of her left hand clutch a white stuffed lamb by the belly—rather too tightly for the lamb's comfort, it seems to me. In white type, the caption reads, "It was the best investment I ever made.” That investment was having her eggs retrieved and cryopreserved.
The headline is pure sales: “Why I Froze My Eggs (And You Should, Too),” while the pull quote under it invokes both present and past discourses regarding working women: “Amid the talk of ‘leaning in,’ and ‘having it all,” we’ve ignored the most powerful gender equalizer.” The first allusion suggests that Richards thinks she can go Cheryl Sandberg one better. The second allusion seems dated, but introduces the essential element of childbearing, which is, after all, Richards’ paramount goal.
Now, Richards says, women can achieve biological parity with men by using technology to provide themselves with the reproductive equivalent of a time machine: their bodies might be old, but their frozen eggs will be forever younger. The implication is that in the business arena, the only thing that matters is being able to compete in one's youth—to fight it out on the lower corporate rungs, where the battle is most intense, in order to rise in the ranks. Only then can one take a breath and think about one's personal life. Richards buys into this world view, and in the process, renders motherhood just one more CV item.
The lack of sentimentality in Richards’ whole description of the enterprise of freezing eggs is pronounced: that cuddly little lamb, clutched so tightly, seems to advertise that a desire for motherhood should not be confused with having warm and fuzzy feelings (those might render one vulnerable in the workplace, after all). Richards discloses some emotional responses regarding her quest to freeze her eggs, but they have mostly to do with control: when she awakes from an egg retrieval procedure she feels heartened, but she also feels empowered, freed of the "punishing pressure to seek a new mate." (At least in this piece, Richards never mentions the possibility of single parenthood and frequently invokes online dating.) The tales she recounts of other women who have also frozen their eggs read like descriptions of partners in some supply chain relationship ensuring that a product moves to market.
At the same time, Richards is singularly naïve in her acceptance of the rationales and arguments offered by the industry. She cites the American Society of Reproductive Medicine’s recent recategorization of egg freezing as non-experimental without mentioning that ASRM is referring to medical applications (such as chemotherapy) and explicitly disagrees with her:
“Marketing this technology for the purpose of deferring childbearing may give women false hope and encourage women to delay childbearing. Patients who wish to pursue this technology should be carefully counseled.”
Richards deploys straw men, such as an argument supposedly advanced by "critics of 'social freezing' ... that biological deadlines serve a purpose in life: Without them, a woman would have little incentive to sit through dozens of Match.com dates to find a partner and father for her children.” Surely, no reputable critic of egg freezing has suggested that oocytes evolved the way they have in order to ensure that women would get with the program and take mating seriously.
In fact, critics have challenged the procedure on numerous grounds, including risks involved in egg retrieval, side effects from the drugs used to stimulate the ovaries to produce multiple eggs, potential complications from the surgical removal of the ripened eggs, and possible development of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. Christine Rosen mentions other legitimate criticisms in her piece on ethics, including the ways in which “egg freezing could undermine arguments for greater workplace accommodation and flexibility for women and children,” and the ways in which egg freezing furthers the march toward ever more manipulation of human eggs, sperm, and embryos under the neo-eugenic banner.
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Previously on Biopolitical Times: