Whose Eggs? Controlling the Movement and Autonomy of Human Eggs in the Scandinavian Countries

• In Event: The New Bioeconomy in Eggs: Innovations, Interruptions and Regenerations in the Management of Human Oocytes

Abstract

Egg freezing promises to grant women more reproductive choices. Not only can women now, with the assistance of the birth control pill, control if they want to be pregnant, the development of cryo-technologies have, in this medical (and frequently also clinical) imaginary, afforded (some) women the chance to decide when they want to mother. This presentation discusses the ways that the cryopreservation of human eggs, in the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) is regulated to fit within normative gendered understandings of childbearing. This includes ways that human eggs entangle with different imaginaries related to reproductive autonomy as well as a temporal and cultural logic. Positioning egg freezing within the notion of chronobiopolitics, the paper directs attention to how women’s reproductive lives become “properly temporalized” (Freeman 2010: 4). While elective egg freezing can be seen as a deliberate disruption of reproductive time, in the Scandinavian scientific, ethical, legal, and clinical accounts, freezing also becomes an attempt to synchronize one’s life and body with capitalist temporalities (Zaretsky, 1986) along with normative reproductive (Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2005) temporalities. Hence, the legislative ‘hurdling’ that takes place in Denmark and Norway, can be understood as an political attempt to restabilize and reinstall reproductive timeliness within a gendered framework of “the natural time for childbearing.”

Author

• Charlotte H. Kroløkke, University of Southern Denmark