Why Are Women Freezing Their Eggs? Look to the Men.
Story by Anna Louie (((Sussman))) • 4moThe struggling American man is one of the few objects of bipartisan concern. Both conservatives and liberals bemoan men’s underrepresentation in higher education, their greater likelihood to die a “death of despair,” and the growing share of them who are not working or looking for work. But the chorus of concern rarely touches on how male decline shapes the lives of the people most likely to date or marry them—that is to say, women.
In Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs, Marcia C. Inhorn, a medical anthropologist at Yale, tells this side of the story. Beginning in 2014, she conducted interviews with 150 American women who had frozen their eggs—most of them heterosexual women who wanted a partner they could have and raise children with. She concluded that, contrary to the commonly held notion that most professional women were freezing their eggs so they could lean into their jobs, “Egg freezing was not about their careers. It was about being single or in very unstable relationships with men who were unwilling to commit to them.”
Earlier in her career, Inhorn spent more than three decades researching assisted reproductive technologies and gender relations in the Middle East. She was struck by how many young Arab men valued and looked forward to fatherhood—a sharp contrast with what she heard from young American women, who shared story after story of men “who were simply unready or unwilling to commit.” Inhorn’s research reflected my own experience of freezing my eggs after struggling to find a partner, and after reaching out to her in 2018 to learn more about her work, I have gotten to know her, and learned of her plans to write this book early on.
As Inhorn notes, strands of this story are decades old. Her generation of women (Inhorn is in her 60s) were the first to enter higher-educational institutions en masse. She writes about how many women in her cohort of female doctoral students, faced with men intimidated by their achievements, remained single or “‘settled’ for suboptimal relationships that subsequently ended.” And the plight of educated women such as Inhorn and her interlocutors is one that has long been confronted by women in communities where economic challenges, such as the loss of factory jobs, led to widespread male unemployment—surely a factor in their hesitation to commit to a partner or start a family. But egg freezing adds a new twist, at least for those with the means to access it: Today, women can spend thousands of dollars to theoretically extend their reproductive life span while continuing to search for a person who would make shared parenthood possible.
[Read: The real reason South Koreans aren’t having babies]
Though egg freezing is still relatively uncommon, usage is ticking up rapidly—from 2020 to 2021, the number of procedures performed in the United States increased by 46 percent from about 16,700 to roughly 24,500, according to data reported by clinics to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. Egg freezing still does not reliably lead to successful live births. But if the technology advances to the point where it does, it holds radical potential: Women, like men, could more easily have biologically related children well past their 30s, though, of course, the health risks associated with pregnancy still increase with age.
Behind the rise of egg freezing is a larger story of what Inhorn calls “the mating gap.” As she notes, in 2012, the year that egg freezing had its “experimental” label lifted by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, female college graduates outnumbered male graduates by 34 percent; today, she estimates, nearly 3 million more women than men hold college degrees among Americans ages 22 to 39. Barring a dramatic reversal, this gap will only grow—in the past four years, estimated national undergraduate enrollment has included roughly 3 million more women than men. According to Inhorn, these numbers explain why, today, educated women who want a male partner to parent with are hard-pressed to find someone displaying the characteristics she calls “the three e’s—eligible, educated, and equal” (and, I would add, “eager” to commit) as they seek “the three p’s of partnership, pregnancy, and parenthood.” Egg freezing is, as Inhorn puts it, “women’s technological concession to a U.S. gender problem.”
Clearly, egg freezing is not a sustainable or scalable answer to the problem of structurally mismatched desires and expectations. But does it present a solution for the individual women who choose to undergo it? The stories in her book don’t provide a tidy “yes” or “no”; rather, they raise deeper questions about heterosexual relationships today, ones that have implications for overall fertility rates, the U.S. economy, and the future of the family. Most of all, her book captures the pain of women who struggle to fulfill the human desires for companionship and parenthood, pain that has been too long overlooked in the broader discussions about egg freezing.
The demand for egg freezing has not gone unnoticed by investors, who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into egg-freezing “studios” and clinics that aim to make the process more consumer-friendly. Although entrepreneurs seeking to make egg freezing more common have described it as “self-care,” it is not a process anyone undergoes lightly. It entails injecting high doses of hormones over a period of days or weeks to induce multiple oocytes to grow (in a typical ovulatory cycle, a single oocyte matures in preparation for fertilization), frequent in-clinic monitoring with blood draws and often transvaginal ultrasounds, and a retrieval under sedation. The eggs are then rapidly cooled, at which point they can be stored for years.
In the U.S., the procedure—which is starting to more commonly, though not predominantly, be covered by employer insurance plans—can cost anywhere from $7,500 to $18,000 per cycle, depending on the city and the clinic, plus annual storage fees of $500 to $1,000 a year. Some patients, especially older ones, undergo multiple cycles in order to bank the recommended 15 to 20 eggs that clinicians generally advise for a reasonable chance of a live birth. (I froze my eggs in Italy and Spain, where the cost is roughly half of what it is in the U.S.) The price tag and the concentration of fertility clinics in major cities mean that egg-freezing patients tend to share certain characteristics: They are overwhelmingly urban-dwelling, professional, and educated. Although fertility patients are often imagined to be wealthy white women, nearly one-third self-identified as nonwhite, most of them Asian American.
About 20 percent of the women Inhorn interviewed froze their eggs for medical reasons, such as before beginning cancer treatment that could potentially harm their reproductive capacity. But much of the book is given over to women’s stories, by turns heartbreaking and infuriating, of dealing with unsatisfactory relationships. Their recountings naturally represent only their side of the story; why and how some people wind up partnered and others remain relentlessly single is an impossible question to answer with either data or anecdotes. Nevertheless, certain patterns emerge. Take Kayla, a professional with an Ivy League MBA, who had frozen her eggs at 38 while dating Matt, until she finally realized after a year and a half that he was “never going to commit.” Or Lily, a curator whose long-term partner Jack ran down her reproductive clock over nearly a decade, dangling the prospect of marriage and children but never following through, leading her to freeze her eggs at the late age of 43. Or Tiffany, a woman with engineering and MBA degrees living in Washington, D.C., who, after dating men from all educational backgrounds, still hadn’t found a partner and put two egg-freezing cycles on a zero-interest credit card.
Based on these patterns, Inhorn categorizes this army of the “unready or unwilling” into 10 archetypes the women claim are responsible for their dating misery, among them “feminist men” who “claim they are feminist but do not pitch in, pay, or help out, all in the name of gender equality”; “Peter Pans,” who are prolonging adolescence “sometimes well into their forties and beyond, with no immediate plans for marriage”; and “younger men” who “no longer believe in dating and don’t know how to do it.”
Understanding the origins of this behavior is far harder than describing or categorizing it. In sociological research, education level is strongly correlated with household income, and together these factors can be a proxy for whether a person is an “eligible” partner. In the real world, too, people generally date those with similar schooling levels to their own, especially when education has become predictive of political leanings in a more and more polarized country. As long as these patterns hold, the growing chasm between college-educated men and women is going to leave some women partnerless. But beyond these numerical facts, many egg freezers struggle to explain why, despite their best efforts at dating, they remain single. Are these fewer educated men realizing that the numbers are in their favor, and with a limitless supply of women served up on dating apps, they don’t feel the need to commit? Are the women in the book still single because they are stuck dating the “dregs” of the male species, as one woman put it to Inhorn, until a wave of divorces will “release some decent men so [she] can have a turn”? Is part of the problem that “decent” is often code for “college-educated,” when, of course, genuine decency and a tertiary education are hardly correlated? Is the problem that women are—stop me if you’ve been hearing this one since at least the 1980s—too “picky”?
Or is it that finding love and connection has always been hard, and is even harder today for straight women because something is amiss with a not-insignificant share of American men? Between the quantitative gap in college attendance and the qualitative gap in dating experiences between men and women lies dicey causal terrain. Mapping that terrain with any degree of precision may be beyond Inhorn’s (or anyone’s) capacity.
Focusing on the men who delay or avoid commitment leaves out the men who do marry and start families in their 20s and 30s. And to be sure, many men show up as heroes in Inhorn’s book. Dads offer to pay for egg freezing, brothers drive their sisters to the fertility clinic, best friends and colleagues offer emotional and practical support, and current and former partners play a role. When Lily went to use her 16 frozen eggs, her ex-boyfriend Jack agreed to donate sperm, but she was unable to get pregnant. And amid some awful outcomes—a health-care policy wonk named Leanne got 25 eggs from three cycles, but none yielded a pregnancy—are a few happy endings. Hannah, a former international management consultant, said freezing her eggs precipitated a “psychological shift,” bringing her “peace of mind.” She met her firefighter husband on a bike trip; now the parents of a daughter conceived naturally, they anticipate using her frozen eggs for subsequent children.
We know from clinics’ data that the majority of women keep their “motherhood on ice,” commonly leaving their frozen eggs in storage for years. Whether that is because they have met a partner and gotten pregnant the old-fashioned way, or have forgone motherhood altogether, is unclear because patients are not tracked in any systematic way. Presumably at least some are like Kayla, who followed up with Inhorn five years after their interview. “I’m still in the camp of ‘where is my partner?!’” she wrote. “I’m incredibly grateful that I froze my eggs but I’m also so sad that I’m turning 45 this year and still do not have a partner and family.”
And although women like Kayla may be lucky that they have the resources to freeze their eggs, the mating gap they face has long been shared by women in other demographic cohorts. Nearly three decades ago, the sociologist William Julius Wilson cited male joblessness as the reason behind the decline in marriage in some predominantly Black communities, and the pool of available men has shrunk since the late 1970s and 1980s because of Black men’s disproportionately high rates of incarceration and mortality. More recently, economists have documented falling marriage rates in pockets of the U.S. where men have lost manufacturing jobs, notably in sectors facing competition from cheap Chinese imports. Unlike the egg freezers, women in these communities typically do not defer childbearing until their late 30s, but instead have children at earlier ages and raise them on their own.
This may grow to be the path forward for egg freezers too. If they can’t have the “three p’s” of partnership, pregnancy, and parenthood, would they settle for just the latter two, the ones that are within their control? Tiffany, the Washington, D.C.–based patient, chose this route. If more professional women like her, with their resources and political clout, become single mothers en masse, how would family life in the U.S. need to change? It would require new support systems and communities, more expansive models of family-making, and better accommodations for working moms. This wouldn’t bridge the mating gap, but for some women, it might at least offer an alternative to what can feel like an endless and fruitless search.
