To celebrate the publication of Lucy van de Wiels's new book 'Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Ageing', RHEA will be hosting a book symposium with the author and comments from: Michiel De Proost (VUB) and Susan Dierickx (VUB).
Welcomed as liberation and dismissed as exploitation, egg freezing (oocyte cryopreservation) has rapidly become one of the most widely-discussed and influential new reproductive technologies of this century. In Freezing Fertility, Lucy van de Wiel takes us inside the world of fertility preservation-with its egg freezing parties, contested age limits, proactive anticipations and equity investments-and shows how the popularization of egg freezing has profound consequences for the way in which female fertility and reproductive aging are understood, commercialized and politicized. Beyond an individual reproductive choice for people who may want to have children later in life, Freezing Fertility explores how the rise of egg freezing also reveals broader cultural, political and economic negotiations about reproductive politics, gender inequities, age normativities and the financialization of healthcare. Van de Wiel investigates these issues by analyzing a wide range of sources-varying from sparkly online platforms to heart-breaking court cases and intimate autobiographical accounts-that are emblematic of each stage of the egg freezing procedure. By following the egg's journey, Freezing Fertility examines how contemporary egg freezing practices both reflect broader social, regulatory and economic power asymmetries and repoliticize fertility and aging in ways that affect the public at large. In doing so, the book explores how the possibility of egg freezing shifts our relation to the beginning and end of life.
Biography
Lucy van de Wiel is a Lecturer in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King's College London. In the past, she was a Research Associate in the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge and was also a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London. She received her PhD in 2015 at the University of Amsterdam.
The event will be held on Wednesday 20th April 10 am – 12 am (CET) at the Humanities, Sciences & Engineering Campus of the VUB and online.