Marcia C. Inhorn, PhD, MPH, is the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs in the Department of Anthropology and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, where she serves as Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies. A specialist on Middle Eastern gender, religion, and health, Inhorn has conducted research on the social impact of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Arab America over the past 35 years. She is the author of six books on the subject, editor or co-editor of thirteen volumes, founding editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS), and co-editor of the Berghahn Book series on “Fertility, Reproduction, and Sexuality.” Inhorn has received more than a dozen awards for her books and scholarship, and along with her colleague Sarah Franklin of Cambridge University, is the recipient of a major Wellcome Trust Foundation grant for a global project on “Changing (In)Fertilities.”

Inhorn’s newest book, Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs (NYU Press, 2023) draws upon interviews with more than 150 American women to explore their use of egg freezing as a fertility preservation technology. Their stories show that, contrary to popular belief, egg freezing is rarely about women postponing fertility for the sake of their careers. Rather, the most-educated women are increasingly forced to delay childbearing because they face a mating gap—a lack of eligible, educated, equal partners ready for marriage and parenthood. For these women, egg freezing is a reproductive backstop, a technological attempt to bridge the gap while waiting for the right partner. But it is not an easy choice for most. Their stories reveal why egg freezing is logistically complicated, physically taxing, financially demanding, emotionally draining, and uncertain in its effects. Yet, for many “thirty-something” women, egg freezing offers the future hope of partnership, pregnancy, and parenthood.

She has served as president of the Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA), and director of Middle East centers at both Yale University and University of Michigan.  Inhorn is also the recipient of a National Science Foundation grant for her project on oocyte cryopreservation (egg freezing) for both medical and elective fertility preservation. This is the topic of her next book, as well as a series of scholarly and media articles.

Announcements

Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs

NYU Press, May 1, 2023

 

“Extremely rich in nuanced analysis, Motherhood on Ice vividly portrays the experiences of women—of various racial and religious backgrounds—at every stage of this oftentimes fraught process. Inhorn addresses a critical societal issue with conviction and grace.” Chantal Collard, Concordia University

“Passionate, empathic, and rigorously researched, this book will be popular amongst audiences ranging from single, well-heeled thirty-something professional women considering egg freezing to public health, medical anthropology, and gender studies academic audiences.” Rayna Rapp, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, New York University

“Simply outstanding. This book will surely garner attention and cultivate widespread appeal.” Rosanna Hertz, author of Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings and the Creation of New Kin

Why are women freezing their eggs in record numbers? Motherhood on Ice explores this question by drawing on the stories of more than 150 women who pursued fertility preservation technology. Moving between narratives of pain and empowerment, these nuanced personal stories reveal the complexity of women’s lives as they struggle to preserve and extend their fertility.

Contrary to popular belief, egg freezing is rarely about women postponing fertility for the sake of their careers. Rather, the most-educated women are increasingly forced to delay childbearing because they face a mating gap—a lack of eligible, educated, equal partners ready for marriage and parenthood. For these women, egg freezing is a reproductive backstop, a technological attempt to bridge the gap while waiting for the right partner. But it is not an easy choice for most. Their stories reveal the extent to which it is logistically complicated, physically taxing, financially demanding, emotionally draining, and uncertain in its effects.

In this powerful book, women share their reflections on their clinical encounters, as well as the immense hopes and investments they place in this high-tech fertility preservation strategy. Race, religion, and the role of men in the lives of single women pursuing this technology are thoroughly explored. A distinctly human portrait of an understudied and rapidly growing population, Motherhood on Ice examines what is at stake for women who take comfort in their frozen eggs while embarking on their quests for partnership, pregnancy, and parenting. 

Marcia C. Inhorn is the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Yale University and author of Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai.

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
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It’s not about career planning. As a medical anthropologist, I can tell you that women are freezing their eggs because of partnership problems.

As a medical anthropologist and gender scholar, I have been privileged to gather egg freezing stories from 150 American women across the country. As my study clearly reveals, these women are part of a particular US demographic of highly educated professional women who are now turning to egg freezing by the thousands.

Eighty-two percent of all the women in the study were single, with no partner in sight. All but three of these single women were heterosexual, and even the three bisexual women declared an interest in partnering and parenting with men. Yet the lack of a partner was a shared feature of women’s lives, as it has been in every single egg freezing study ever conducted.

Relationship problems are causing egg freezing

Single women in this study were of two types: the never married and currently unpartnered, and the previously partnered but broken up. Half of all women fell into the first category. Some of these women had had one or more serious relationships in the distant past, but those relationships had ended some time ago. Some women had never been in a serious relationship for reasons they could not quite understand. Many of these single women expressed regret and puzzlement over how they had “ended up” this way. But without a partner, these single women had turned to egg freezing to “buy time” while continuing to search for a partner with the hope of future marriage and motherhood.

The second group of single women, nearly one-third of the total, were turning to egg freezing in the aftermath of relationship break-ups. These included both divorces and breakups from long-term relationships and engagements. Although these women’s stories will be told in greater detail, suffice it to say here that these relationship traumas were often painful, leaving women quite bereft. In such cases, egg freezing provided a path to healing, as women attempted to repair their disrupted life courses.

Between the never-married singles and the women whose relationships had ended, four-fifths of women in this study were single. Being single — or what other studies describe as “lack of a partner”— was the main reason these women had frozen their eggs.

But even women with partners faced ongoing partnership problems. In this study, about one-fifth of the women had a partner at the time of egg freezing, but half of these relationships were unstable. Several women had met “new boyfriends” around the time of egg freezing. But in these cases, it was very difficult for them to ascertain whether the relationship was going to last. In other cases, women found themselves in very unstable relationships with partners who were immature, unsupportive, unready to have children, or unfaithful. In these cases, it was very unclear whether the relationships would survive. In both cases, egg freezing was being undertaken as a kind of backup plan, to see whether a relationship would develop or fall apart.

Among the nearly 10% of women who were in stable relationships, women were undertaking egg freezing while waiting for their partners to be “ready” to have children. Men who were “unready” cited various reasons for their delay, for example, completion of advanced degrees or professional training, significant career moves, or in some cases, because they were significantly younger than their female partners. In other cases, men simply did not feel prepared to become fathers and were asking their female partners to wait.

In summary, 91% of women in this study were either single or in a tenuous relationship — the relationship problems that underlie the egg freezing phenomenon. To wit, highly educated American professional women are often trying their hardest to find compatible male partners, with whom they can build families. But these stories exemplify women’s three major partnership challenges:

  • Men who are reluctant to partner with high-achieving women, leaving these women single for many years.
  • Men who are unready for marriage and children, often leading to relationship demise.
  • Men who exhibit bad behavior, including infidelity and ageism, which often leads to relationship instability and rupture.

Men as partners are the problem

Because of these heterosexual relationship problems, otherwise-accomplished American women are pursuing a stopgap measure — namely, egg freezing — in an effort to preserve a path to motherhood.

Although this may seem like an obvious point, reproduction is inherently relational. It requires both men and women, or at least their sperm and their eggs, to come together in procreation. Ideally, it also involves men’s and women’s emotional investments in one another and in their children. But what happens when these reproductive relations and investments are untethered and go missing? In international reproductive health circles, this issue has been called the “men as partners” problem: Men in the Global South have been heavily criticized, sometimes fairly, sometimes not, for their negative influences on women’s reproductive lives and well-being, including the abandonment of their female partners and offspring. 

I argue that educated American women have a specific “men as partners” problem as well, one that needs to be recognized, called out, and confronted. In the women’s stories told in “Motherhood on Ice,” the lack of stable reproductive relationships is the bane of women’s existence, with significant deleterious consequences for women’s reproductive lives.

Although this is a “First World professional women’s problem,” as one woman put it, it is nonetheless forcing them into a demoralizing state of reproductive suspension. Only by listening carefully to what educated American women have to say about this can we understand the magnitude of this American mating gap and why American women are turning to egg freezing as a reproductive suspension bridge.