On frozen eggs and mating – Anne Diebel in NYRB:

‘In the early 2000s reproductive medicine doctors in the United States, using methods developed in Italy, started offering to freeze their patients’ eggs. The far simpler process of cryopreserving human spermatozoa had been explored as early as 1776 (by an Italian priest-scientist who found that sperm, of unstated origin, became motionless when cooled by snow and then started swimming again when warmed), but it wasn’t until 1965 that oocytes, which are water-laden and comparatively huge, were successfully preserved, and not until the 1990s that the technology really caught on. When early egg-freezing trials showed promising results, the procedure was extended to cancer patients who were about to start chemotherapy, which can permanently impair fertility, and then to women who for personal, nonmedical reasons wanted to prolong their ability to have children.
Elective egg freezing soon attracted attention as a way for women to take control of their fertility during the stage of life when biological countdowns purportedly compete with other metaphorical clocks—those of building a career and finding a mate. A 2005 New York magazine article described the women availing themselves of this new service as “the aspiring law-firm partners, the ambitious actresses, the medical-school residents.” A 2014 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek featured the cover line “Freeze Your Eggs, Free Your Career”; the article imagined that “if a 25-year-old banks her eggs and, at 35, is up for a promotion, she can go for it wholeheartedly without worrying about missing out on having a baby.”’

(…)

‘ An Instagram ad for Extend Fertility, a New York City–based egg-freezing company, showed a manicured hand next to an anthropomorphic egg, with the caption “If you can afford this” (the nails) “you can afford this” (the gamete). The cost of one egg-freezing cycle in the US is around $12,000, or about ten years of fortnightly manicures.’

(…)

‘Inhorn’s findings, which are consistent with those of smaller studies over the past decade (including one conducted in 2018 by Inhorn herself), plainly contradict the pervasive cliché that women freeze their eggs for career reasons. Only one of Inhorn’s subjects cited career planning as her main motivation. “I’m not doing it because I want to spend more time on my career,” Inhorn was told by Kayla, who worked at a tech start-up, was single for much of her thirties, and completed two egg-freezing cycles at the age of thirty-eight. “Like, I’m pretty sick of my career.” The women Inhorn interviewed talk with analytic clarity about their romantic histories, their jobs, how they came to freeze their eggs, and how they feel about it now. Aziza, an academic physician who had dated very little (one boyfriend for one year, long ago), found herself in her mid-thirties with no real prospects: The only reason why I did this egg freezing is because I hadn’t found someone…. So, even though I’m 1,000 percent happy I did it, it felt somewhat like a defeat. I felt like I gave up, because I couldn’t find a man.’

(…)

‘Lily, a curator in Manhattan, spent her thirties in a relationship with Jack, a humanities professor. When, at the age of thirty-eight, she told Jack that she was going off the Pill, he refused to have sex with her for over a year. As she approached forty, she left him.’

(…)

‘For decades both marriage and fertility rates in the US, as in the rest of the developed world, have been dropping, and the ages at which Americans get married and have children have been rising. (The reasons for both are many and frustratingly hard to pin down.) Two thirds of Americans under the age of thirty-five live without a spouse or partner, and nearly half of childless adults under fifty say they aren’t likely to have children.
Women who freeze their eggs occupy an ill-defined spot in the culture in relation to these trends. Their predicament is inevitably shaped by the broad global decline in the total fertility rate: with fewer people having children at all, there’s going to be a smaller mating pool for those who are affirmatively interested in doing so.’

(…)

‘Changing male attitudes toward marriage and children are beyond Inhorn’s remit, but the stories she includes suggest that delayed maturity in men is a determinant of women’s delayed childbearing. The men in the background of her book are successful professionals (doctors, lawyers, professors), and most of them are ruinously indecisive. She writes, “Many men in the US no longer face a masculine marriage imperative, or any kind of social mandate requiring them to become a father.” One group that has actually followed a pronatalist cultural imperative is conservatives, who are now outbreeding others in the US and Europe.’

(…)

‘For Gen Z, fertility anxiety is trending,” Women’s Health reported in 2024. Perhaps the bleakness of contemporary mating is behind the change. Perhaps the new generation has learned to be more clear-eyed, more calculating about motherhood. All it took was becoming a little less hopeful.’

Read the article here.

The bleakness of contemporary dating. Yes, indeed.

But has dating not always been a little bleak? Or being ‘sold’ by yoiur parents or by a matchmaker maybe less bleak? No choice is less bleak?

The conservatives and the progressives are outbreeding the liberals. The Amish could be the new majority in the US in let’s say a century.

But who knows, maybe the liberals might find five or six children sexy again in a decade or so.