Social Freezing

The subproject >Social Freezing< investigates technologies aimed at the future fulfillment of childbearing wishes by means of oocyte cryopreservation. Enabled by >flash freezing< in liquid nitrogen, this technique has been increasingly used routinely in reproductive medicine contexts since the mid/late 2000s. The quite controversial adjective >social< indicates in this context that this fertility-protective measure is not only used for medical indications in the narrower sense, such as cancer.

Rather, this technology is intended to allow social synchronization problems to be solved by enabling women to temporally shift their biological fertility limit. The technology thus promises its users time relief, for example, in career and family planning or in the search for a partner.

At the same time, the controversial debate that followed the announcement by Apple and Facebook in 2014 that they would offer to pay for >Social Egg Freezing< for female employees in the future showed that this form of fertility protection is a highly controversial topic in society. Criticisms range from fears of a future requirement for women to take fertility-protective measures in the service of their careers to positions that reject - for instance on religious grounds - any technical intervention in human reproduction.

In view of this, the focus of this subproject is on questions concerning both the social relations of nature in the context of human reproduction and the economic relations in which this technology becomes established. Empirical comparisons are made between innovation processes in the U.S. and in the German context. With the help of discourse-analytical and ethnographic methods as well as interviews with experts, it will be investigated whether and how the innovators succeed in dealing with this problematic horizon of social expectations - how exactly do they succeed in creating social acceptance and demand for >Social Egg Freezing< as a technique of fertility protection?

The subproject is led by Philipp Zeltner.