Ice, Ice Baby

Egg freezing is being sold at growing rates to a younger and younger population. But what exactly are women buying?

- Cotton Codinha

You’d be forgiven for mistaking the egg-freezing advertisement for a women-only coworking space or a networking happy hour as you flicked through your feed. The ad might have shown a group of open-faced women in stylish button-downs and statement glasses toasting to one another’s good fortunes above a single phrase: “Preserve your options.” Or perhaps it was a woman with curls that betray a certain amount of effort, her hands grabbing the zipper of her moto jacket, next to the command “Own your future.” We are Americans in 2018, and we are in the business of sales, and the best way to sell anyone anything is to tell them they need it and it is their right to have it—even if, as in this case, the “it” in question is eternal youth.

Welcome to the business of egg freezing. It seems like everyone—fictional characters on Freeform’s The Bold Type; celebrities, like Olivia Munn, Whitney Cummings, and Rita Ora; friends and coworkers—is investing.

It’s only been six years since the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) lifted the “experimental” label from egg-freezing procedures (known formally as oocyte cryopreservation), which had been growing in number since the first live birth of a baby that had been an embryo on ice (also known as Zoe Leyland) in 1984. The New York Times has reported that more than 20,000 American women have elected to freeze their eggs—that number includes a 1,500 percent rise from 2009 to 2016, says the ASRM. Another thing they say? More than 85 percent of these women have not yet attempted to thaw those eggs and use them. Data is limited regarding live births resulting from frozen eggs, and it’s often combined with statistics on births from frozen donor eggs from women in their 20s, muddying the figures further. The marketing, of course, is crystal clear.