“Fertility. Freedom. Finally.”: Cultivating Hope in the Face of Uncertain Futures among Egg-Freezing Women

Abstract

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, stories began appearing in the American press that identified a “crisis of childlessness” among single, professional, American women.¹ The women described in these reports had pursued careers early in life and planned to have families later, once these careers were established, but they were finding that they were becoming infertile due to normal processes of aging before they had a chance to “settle down.” Headlines and lead stories in print and television, as well as books, warned of “infertility wars” and insisted on the incessant ticking of a “biological clock” (Hewlett 2002; Walsh 2002). What these authors described and, in a sense, produced, was a predicament about single, professional women being unable one day to “have it all” because their fertility was waning before the project of starting a family could even begin (see, for instance, Cummins 2002; Hewlett 2002; Kalb, et al. 2001; Walsh 2002). While some of this coverage probed issues of whether women can or should have both careers and families, more than anything, these articles and books highlighted an anxiety about temporality. The crisis centered around time and there not being enough of it as women tried to fit into the often incongruous temporal structures of the American, professional workplace and the American family.