Anatomy of an Egg Freezing Infomercial: Where “Our Fertility, Ourselves” Meets “Fertility (A)ware” Party

• In Event: Cryo-innovations: Life in the Age of Artificial Cold

Abstract

Now (since November 2018) that the Ethics Committee of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine has shifted its earlier position recommending against egg freezing “for the sole purpose of circumventing reproductive aging in healthy women”( 2013, 42) to finding it “ethically permissible,” it has also raised the obligation of providers to ensure informed decision-making regarding the method’s uncertain “efficacy and long-term effects” (1022). New York City is a major hub for social egg freezing. It is the location of many for-profit fertility clinics as well as single working women who are the targets of clinic marketing strategies. Through participant observation at egg freezing informational events in New York City, I analyze the art of persuasion employed in these information sessions cum commercials focusing on what information is withheld, and how these events cultivate anxiety, and link SEF to desireable traits or lifestyles. I contextualize them against the background of classic forms of event organizing designed for and by women such as health consciousness raising and entrepreneurship as embodied in Our Bodies, Ourselves and tupperware. Indeed, the SEF infomercial demonstrates how the anatomy of information relates to the constitution of particularly feminized bodies and lives, speculative reproduction and family futurism. The meaning of reproduction shifts when it is no longer contingent upon the deliverable of a baby but the production of a particular form of “sociable happiness” (as per Sara Ahmed) in the presently imagined future.

Author

• Rajani Bhatia, University at Albany, SUNY