“I am not really emotionally ready for children, but this is on my mind on repeat: Biologically speaking, your eggs are collapsing, your eggs are collapsing.” I heard this from Dicle, a migrant lawyer in her late twenties, during our in-depth interview in central Frankfurt. I understood two years later what was puzzling me about her exact wording. What did it mean, exactly, for an egg to collapse? The way she expressed it in our native language, Turkish, was yumurtaların çöküyor. Collapsing eggs was the fitting translation, but it still seemed strange. The Turkish verb çökmek is rather literal. A building could collapse; a bridge could collapse. But how does an egg collapse?
This interview is part of my doctoral research on how Turkish migrant women living in Germany engage with egg freezing technology. My attempt to understand Dicle’s wording reveals the starting point of my research: how can we analyze the anxious attachment of migrant women to their diminishing reproductive material? And can we simply interpret their engagement with egg freezing technology as a quick techno-fix? I argue that frozen eggs figure as “precious material” in rebuilding migrant lives. Amid a tedious search for stability, frozen eggs patiently waiting in nitrogen tanks might relieve temporal anxieties in some respects, while producing novel spatial anxieties.
Dicle was not alone in her fear of losing eggs. I met Yağmur, a geneticist in her late twenties, in Munich. She moved from Turkey to Germany more than two years ago. She primarily wants to freeze her eggs before a planned medical treatment that will put her eggs at risk. She does not feel able to deal with the bureaucratic, financial, and language barriers going into this treatment in Germany. Yet, she does not fully trust that the cryopreservation technology will work smoothly in Turkey. She explains: “At work, we store our valuable material in freezers in the laboratory [in Germany]. In case of even a 1-degree temperature increase, all the alarms start to ring. We immediately have to fix the temperature so our valuable material won’t get damaged. [Let’s say] there is a power outage in Turkey and the ice [in nitrogen tanks] starts to melt. I doubt that there is a protective mechanism against this. How could I control that everything works out smoothly [with my frozen eggs]?”
This case illustrates how Yağmur is seeking to gain control over a smooth operation of cryopreservation, at a point in time that far precedes her egg freezing treatment. She might be only planning the treatment in the interview, but she is simultaneously concerned with the care work that goes into the egg freezing process, and everything working in tandem. This speaks to how technologies “do not work or fail in and of themselves”; “they depend on care work” instead (Mol et al., 2010). In this “complex, life-sustaining web of care” (Tronto, 1993, p. 103; Puig de la Bellaca, 2015), multiple actors are working together in caring for her frozen eggs, including laboratory staff, cryoprotectants, and electricity infrastructure. Yağmur’s concern also illustrates the extent of “pre-emptive actions in the present… in the name of an anticipated future danger” (Adams et al., 2009).
Empty medical vials float in space, symbolically capturing the reproductive material that is taken away from individual women’s bodies and transferred elsewhere. Image courtesy of Tara Winstead via the Pexels License, accessible at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-shot-of-test-tubes-7722962/
Similar to Yağmur, Hande is very concerned about the future of frozen eggs. Hande, a biologist in her mid-thirties, is afraid of age-related fertility loss and is considering freezing her eggs. She does not yet know where exactly, since problems of access to this treatment in Germany and the logistical challenges in Turkey are almost equally concerning. Yet, her anxiety goes beyond the conditions within the laboratory to the geological conditions where the laboratory stands in Turkey. What if her eggs are stored in a building that might collapse one day? She says:
“I am very scared of earthquakes. Where are those frozen eggs located at minus 80 degrees? When my friend was choosing the clinic [for egg freezing], I suggested to her: “Would you think about letting one clinic collect 5 eggs, another 5 eggs? So, you would not put all your eggs in one basket. And they would be distributed to different buildings and earthquake risk zones.”
Later in the interview, she comes back to this topic:
“And where do they keep those eggs in the public hospitals? I am really curious what will happen to those eggs during the [anticipated] Istanbul earthquake, which can happen in the next 6 years. I will be 40 years old then. If I don’t have any eggs left at that time, then I would choose a completely different option. Not having eggs is a better risk than losing them in an earthquake.”
Hande makes a connection between her natural loss of fertility and a natural disaster, which reveals the scale of the attempt to control reproductive futures. She says she can control the first consequence, fertility loss, by orienting towards other reproductive alternatives. Yet an approaching earthquake is something she cannot control. Yet, she is still looking for means and possibilities to exercise some level of control, such as distributing eggs to different clinics.
What strikes me in Hande’s story is how the anxiety is translated into a very elaborate form of anticipation. While egg freezing itself is already an action taken against “anticipated infertility” (Martin, 2010), the geographical region where the eggs will be frozen also finds its way to her anticipatory calculations.
In these three snippets, material infrastructures play a visible part in anticipation. Infrastructures figure in these instances not only as technical artifacts but also as “transient embodiments of social, technical, political, economic, and ethical choices that are building up incrementally over time” (Niewöhner, 2015). The storage locations for frozen eggs are situated within particular clinics, buildings, energy systems, and regulations. While egg freezing is promoted to extend individual temporalities, it simultaneously creates new spatial attachments. What makes an egg collapse, then, is not only the anxiety of having to reproduce within a fertile window, but also the very material conditions shaping the possible futures of frozen eggs.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Jackie Ashkin and reviewed by contributing editor Eva Steinberg.
References
Adams, V., Murphy, M., & Clarke, A. E. (2009). Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality. Subjectivity, 28(1), 246–265. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.18
Martin, L. J. (2010). Anticipating Infertility: Egg Freezing, Genetic Preservation, and Risk. Gender & Society, 24(4), 526–545. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243210377172
Mol, Annemarie, Moser, Ingunn and Pols, Jeannette. “Care: putting practice into theory”. Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms, edited by Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser and Jeannette Pols, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2015, pp. 7-26. https://doi.org/10.1515/transcript.9783839414477.7
Niewöhner, J. (2015). Infrastructures of Society, Anthropology of. In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (pp. 119–125). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12201-9
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
Tronto J. C. (1993). Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge.
