Funding organisation: Swiss National Science Foundation, doc.CH programme
Timeline: December 2023-November 2025
Budget: CHF 156'831
Keywords: egg freezing, assisted reproductive technologies, biomedicine, kinship, tradition and modernity, gender and technology, reproduction, biopolitics, life course, demographic anxieties

Summary

Egg freezing, medically referred to as oocyte cryopreservation, allows female reproductive cells to be extracted and preserved in anticipation of future infertility, given that the quantity and quality of female eggs decrease as they age. Egg freezing was initially used exclusively for medical, disease-related reasons; however, since 2012, it has been used for social, age-related reasons such as ensuring career advancement and finding a partner, coupled with a growing fertility industry. Whereas egg freezing is often marketed as offering women more reproductive choices, the technology is lately framed as a tool to tackle low fertility in some contexts. For example, since September 2023, the Tokyo metropolitan government has started partially covering egg freezing with public funding in the name of addressing the low fertility rate in Tokyo.

Situating the study in the Japanese context of demographic anxieties, which concern delayed motherhood, low fertility and ageing population, this research project brings together scholarly engagement with assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), reproductive politics, and critiques of modernisation theory. This research project aims to produce ethnographic accounts of how the egg freezing is mobilised in relation to competing desires among different actors, and how it contributes to the shift in gender dynamics and people’s reproductive behaviours. In discussing the gap between the publicly assumed role of egg freezing and how its users define and actually benefit from it, this research aims to highlight underexplored aspects of the contemporary egg freezing experience and offer better understandings of social challenges and issues that women are facing today in negotiating their life course. 

In looking at how cultural values in family practices are reflected in regulations on ARTs, this case study also aims to demonstrate ‘plurality’ of biomedicine and complicate medical anthropological understandings of human interaction with biomedicine by critically investigating how the technology destablises or reconfigures the idea of traditions and ideal motherhood and family in relation to local norms, concerns and practices. In this way, my research project challenges the modernist assumption of ARTs as a solution for the global problem of infertility.

Key themes

1. Medicalised low fertility
   Using the concept of medicalisation, medical anthropologists theorise that ARTs created the concept of infertility by medicalising the state of childlessness, and similarly, egg freezing medicalises anticipated infertility. My research departs from this notion of medicalisation and asks how low fertility is now medicalised with the availability and marketisation of egg freezing, using what kind of discourses.
2. Gender and structural challenges
   By looking at egg freezing, my research delves into the discussions of gender and kinship studies and explores what social and structural factors motivate women to pursue egg freezing. This allows me to understand how women are trying to overcome the social obstacles by using the technology. 
3. Reimagined reproductive traditions
   Anthropological work has shown how technological development challenges people’s imagined ideas of traditions. Adding onto it, this research asks how cultural values of motherhood and reproduction are constantly challenged and reimagined in engaging with egg freezing.

Methodology

Using qualitative approach, this ethnographic research project involves semi-structured interviews, participant observation, media analysis, and autoethnography. The ethnography is multi-sited in the sense that it covers multiple terrains in which reproductive politics around egg freezing can be observed, ranging from egg freezing women, clinics to the media. To collect data, the fieldwork has been conducted mainly in, but not limited to, Tokyo in which most of the egg freezing cases are observed.

With support from the Swiss National Science Foundation.