But nothing can freeze time, and even the prospect of simply freezing eggs turned out to be more complicated in practice than in theory, as North points out: “The process can fail at many points […] the ovaries may not produce enough eggs, the eggs may not survive the freezing process, they may not fertilize properly, or the fertilized embryos may not implant in the uterus.” As a result, some women saw their investments turn to nothing and found themselves scrambling for alternatives. Some missed the opportunity to ever have the families they dreamed of having.

The rise of egg-freezing in the 2000s and early 2010s splashed across the covers of magazines, inviting women to “imagine a world in which life isn’t dictated by a biological clock”. Tech companies added egg retrieval and storage to their employee benefits packages — a coveted “perk”. Young women spoke of being “freed” from the pressure of balancing dating, work, and their aspirations for a family.

But when it comes to these kinds of stories — entrants in what we might call the “wouldn’t it be great if…?” genre — the comedown is always quieter than the run-up. Instead of cover stories, the comedown from the egg-freezing craze involved a slow accumulation of discouraging studies buried in academic journals and a quiet procession of women with disappointed hopes. “It was really positive for me,” one of the women Vox interviewed said. “Until I tried to use them.” The covergirl of Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2014 story—“Later, Baby: Will freezing eggs free your career?”— ended up with 11 unfrozen eggs and no viable pregnancy. She ended up relying on an egg donor.

Looking back, the vogue for freezing eggs seems like yet another example of the ways we keep trying to escape the constraints of being human generally and being female specifically. If only women could be more like men, welcoming children late in life! The inconvenient realities of women’s bodies keep losing out to a way of thinking that still cannot reckon with sex difference — that sexual and reproductive “liberation” for women might look very different from sexual liberation for men.

As North puts it, egg-freezing has “done little […] to materially change women’s lives”. In fact, egg-freezing may be a glossy distraction from what women actually need to live out their reproductive hopes: suitable life partners, social support for those who decide to go it alone, and the ability to interrupt one’s career without killing it.

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Eliza Mondegreen is graduate and researcher.

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