“You feel like you’re fairly disadvantaged with an advert over your head saying ‘in final years of reproduction’”: social egg freezing, dating and the (unequal) politics of reproductive ageing.

AbstractRecent decades have seen an increasing gap occurring between the ‘desired’ and ‘actual’ family size of middle-class and professional women. This situation of ‘unrealised fertility’ and ‘incomplete families’ carries implications at a population, but also couple and individual level. This paper explores how middle-class professional women make decisions about partnering and parenthood and how these are shaped by a contemporary neoliberal feminist discourse which articulates the possibility of ‘having it all’ through engagement in careful life planning, appropriate self-investment, and by drawing on new technologies of reproductive biomedicine. Informed by semi-structured interviews with UK and US women conducted at two different points in time, it explores how they approach and experience the process of relationship formation in the face of age-related fertility decline. It also examines how the use of social egg freezing shape their romantic and family building expectations but also their interactions with (potential) partners. In doing so, it explores how gendered cultural dating scripts and unequal gender power relations shape the formation and progression of intimate relationships in a manner which can disempower women as they age. It therefore questions whether egg freezing may be the ‘great equaliser’ that some have hoped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]