Put Your (Frozen) Eggs in the Bank: Welcome to the Bioeconomy
​Not human eggs. Image: ​Veronica Aguilar/Flickr

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Put Your (Frozen) Eggs in the Bank: Welcome to the Bioeconomy

Egg freezing raises new social and ethical issues in a market that often depends on inequality to meet supply and demand.

Emerging reproductive technologies are helping address medical issues that affect fertility and give us more choice when it comes to family planning. But they also risk presenting our bodies from a new perspective: as a commodity to be banked, bought, and sold.

These social and political implications are the subject of a comment​ary in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, by UC Davis bioethicist Lisa Ikemoto. She writes that "supply of the cells and bodies necessary for assisted reproductive technology use depends on market thinking and structural inequality." In other words, the market depends on a discrepancy between rich and poor: Those who can afford to buy, and those who are in enough financial need that they will sell their eggs and sperm.

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"The whole practice of egg donation, sperm donation, surrogacy, and I think in addition to that egg freezing not only for one's own self but as a way of expanding egg banking for others' use: All that relies on wealth inequality," Ikemoto told me in a phone interview.

Her piece focuses on egg freezing, which became something of a tech world trend at the end of last year after Apple and Facebook started offering ​to pay for the procedure for their staff. Too busy coding to pop out a baby when you're at your most fertile? Put that on ice for later.

The benefit of corporate egg freezing for female employees is questionable: It could be welcome support for women wishing to freeze their eggs anyway, but some worry it could also pressure women into choosing between their career and family (even more than they already have to). It also risks downplaying the risks and unknowns of egg freezing, which is an invasive procedure with not-that-brilliant succes​s rates.

But the impact of increased interest in egg freezing goes beyond tech employees who might want to extend their maternal potential. It expands a whole market; a "bioeconomy" of egg banks within a fertility industry that often relies on inequality to settle supply and demand. Ikemoto argues that when the American Society of Reproductive Medicine declared egg freezing as no longe​r experimental in 2012, "it opened the door to so-called social egg freezing, and launched a social, medical and legal experiment."

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She emphasised that egg freezing is a largely commercial sector. "A huge part of the fertility industry is non-medical," she said. "The public perception is that this is a medical therapy, but we have all these brokers and agencies who are not medical in nature; they are purely commercial entities."

She fears that the corporate egg freezing offered by Apple and Facebook is a "quick technological fix to what is really an underlying social and economic problem." But what she's particularly concerned with is the role of egg freezing in expanding fertility markets, and the inequalities that this industry depends on.

Her concerns in this area don't focus on freezing your own eggs to later use yourself, but donating/selling frozen eggs for another woman to use. Egg banks are already offering frozen donor eggs. Ikemoto puts it in business terms: They're using egg freezing to "expand inventory."

While career-oriented tech employees might have cushy benefits to cover them becoming a consumer of these various practices, they rely on men and women providing eggs, sperm, and in the case of surrogacy their own body, to fulfil the orders. And while they're called "donors," it's unlikely to be an entirely altruistic transaction; they will usually be at least partly financially motivated. Supply often depends on this financial need.

You're hedging against your own future, buying into an insurance plan

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Ikemoto said she wouldn't want to condemn the practice altogether—it's great we have technologies to combat infertility—"But I think we should think more carefully about the needs of people who are put in the position to sell their eggs, their sperm, their bodies for pregnancy."

Even for women who freeze eggs for their own use, the practice plays on free market terminology. You're hedging against your own future, buying into an insurance plan (Ikemoto notes that one egg bank is actually called "eggsurance.") This, she argues, risks alienating women from themselves. They are their own donor and recipient.

And some women may sell some of their frozen eggs to get some return on the cost of storing a personal cache, becoming a donor both to themselves and others.

John Robertson at the University of Texas makes the finance metaphor more explicit in a previous paper in the sa​me journal. "The women involved will sign a contract with the bank about their rights to remove their eggs at any time and how they should be disposed of in the case of death, failure to pay storage fees, or other contingencies," he writes. "Presumably they may write a 'check' on their egg account, designating themselves or another as payee."

This is not necessarily a bad thing; egg freezing, like other reproductive technologies, has a lot of potential to empower women to make their own decisions about their bodies. But what these researchers highlight is a need to consider the ethical, social, and regulatory aspects of the technology as it expands.

As it's so new, women are only just starting to make use of egg freezing. Ikemoto is already looking to the future, and pointed out that new issues may arise as the egg freezing cycle comes full circle. "Many of the women I think who may use egg freezing now with the idea that they might need it later will not end up using their eggs," she said. "We should pay attention to what happens then to those eggs."

xx is a column about occurrences in the world of tech, science, and the internet that have to do with women. It covers the good, the bad, and the otherwise interesting gender developments in the Motherboard world.