The ambiguities of ‘social’ egg freezing and the challenges of informed consent

Abstract

Fertility clinics (and some employers) in the UK and other high-income countries have recently started to offer egg freezing to women concerned about their age-related fertility decline. Because the use of egg freezing for this purpose is new, there is no reliable evidence of its usefulness, or otherwise. There are no guarantees that egg freezing will work, and for many and perhaps most women, their frozen eggs will never be used. It is also unclear whether egg freezing is a positive development for women in general. It offers an additional choice, and it may enable some women to have genetically-related children more easily in the future. At the same time, it could be argued that egg freezing individualises and medicalises the social problem of a mismatch between female fertility and when women and men feel ready to have children. This article suggests that egg freezing is an ambiguous technology, whose benefits are as yet speculative, and that women therefore need as much clear and frank information as possible in order to navigate this new and by no means straightforward choice.

The marketing of elective egg freezing: A content, cost and quality analysis of UK fertility clinic websites

“…In fact, they identified the provision of clear and detailed information as a key component of their 11 specific dimensions constituting ‘best practice’ in ‘patient-centred elective egg freezing’. Egg freezing is an ‘ambiguous’ technology ( Jackson, 2018 ) at the best of times, fraught with uncertainties about the present and about the future, and legal scholar Emily Jackson (2018) has clearly outlined ‘the challenges of obtaining informed consent when so little is known about the long term utility of egg freezing’. She has argued for the importance of including as much accurate data as possible, as well as a discussion of remaining uncertainties as part of informed consent processes, writing, ‘Perhaps most important of all, potential egg freezers need to understand that even if eggs survive the thawing process, there are no guarantees that a future IVF cycle will be successful’.…”

“…She has argued for the importance of including as much accurate data as possible, as well as a discussion of remaining uncertainties as part of informed consent processes, writing, ‘Perhaps most important of all, potential egg freezers need to understand that even if eggs survive the thawing process, there are no guarantees that a future IVF cycle will be successful’. Currently, there is very little information about egg freezing on UK fertility clinic websites that would fulfil either the patient-centred criteria explained by Inhorn et al (2019) , or the legal and ethical requirements outlined by Jackson (2018) .…”

Prenatal Imaging: Egg Freezing, Embryo Selection and the Visual Politics of Reproductive Time

“…In the last decade, egg freezing has become an increasingly popular reproductive technology for women who would like to have the possibility of having genetically-related children later on in life. Particularly the use of egg freezing to circumvent age-related infertility has received widespread attention both within the fertility sector and in wider public discourses (Inhorn, 2017;Jackson, 2017). As what is effectively an IVF procedure with a period of cryostorage between egg extraction and fertilization, egg freezing introduces an alternative temporal organization of the reproductive process.…”

“…Egg freezing has become a widely influential reproductive technology in the last decade. An increasing number of fertility clinics offer the procedure and the possibility of freezing eggs has been widely covered in public debates, popular culture and academic literature (Carroll & Kroløkke, 2018;Jackson, 2017;Van de Wiel, 2014a). Now that frozen eggs may continue to exist for extended periods of time outside the body, cellular photography of ova becomes a means for relating to them while they remain in the freezer.…”

The speculative turn in IVF: egg freezing and the financialization of fertility

“…Carroll and Krolokke analyze egg freezing as an enactment of "responsible" reproductive citizenship that "anticipates coupledom" and genetic relatedness (2018). Rottenberg likewise reads egg freezing as symptomatic of a middle-class neoliberal governmentality based on smart self-investments for enhanced returns in the future, while Emily Jackson highlights the possibility of blame and retrospective regret as the flipside of this responsibilization of one's future fertility (Rottenberg 2016;Jackson 2017).…”