Medicine for Demographic Anxieties?: Egg Freezing and Social Structural In-Fertilities in Japan

• In Event: Demographic Anxieties

Abstract

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) is a key site where neoliberal and capitalist logics of technological innovation intersect with, and continually reshape, gendered and familial norms (Bharadwaj 2016; Inhorn et al. 2017; Bühler and König 2015). ART offers a lens for examining how technologically mediated reproduction is justified in relation to local concerns, cultural values, and gender expectations, and how it, in turn, reorganizes reproductive norms and practices. Egg freezing, in particular, has emerged as a contested technology that highlights the politicization of women’s reproductive decisions within a web of biopolitics and commercialization of reproductive life course, often marginalizing women’s lived subjectivities (Van de Wiel 2014). This paper traces how egg freezing destabilizes understandings of “in-fertile” bodies (Franklin and Inhorn 2025), reshapes regulatory and clinical practices, and is mobilized by state and market actors in response to demographic anxieties. Drawing on Foucault’s (1978) concept of biopolitics, the governance of populations through the management of bodies and reproduction, and Radin and Kowal’s (2017) notion of cryopolitics, the governance of life suspended between vitality and death, I examine how egg freezing reconfigures the ways in which in-fertile bodies are politicized and medicalized, while transforming legal and regulatory regimes. I then analyze how fertility industries operationalize these shifting ART frameworks, reframing discourses of health, risk, and responsibility to craft new commercial narratives. Finally, I explore how fertility clinic doctors adapt traditional medical practices and redefine their professional roles in response to the rise of social and structural infertility. By foregrounding the intersecting interests of policymakers, medical professionals, and fertility industries, I argue that egg freezing functions not merely as a biomedical technology of fertility preservation, but as a biopolitical instrument to renegotiate health norms and reproductive practices while simultaneously reinforcing idealised forms of kinship and citizenship.

Author

• Sachiyo Yagi, The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies