They Have You by the Ovaries
Commodification of Reproductive Biology
Christa May is a designer and researcher based in New York.
It’s Sunday morning and my reproductive future has been hijacked.
Fumbling through half-consciousness, I paw at my phone, its glow searing through the haze of sleep. A jarring subject line awaits me: Payment Due Today—Action Required. I decipher a pixelated, oblique logo at the top of the email. This reeks of phishing. I already paid my yearly storage fee to Kindb()dy, the single-service oocyte cryopreservation studio that froze my eggs. Who is Embryo Options?
Oocyte cryopreservation, commonly known as egg freezing, was considered experimental until 2012, when a key technological advancement eliminated ice crystal formation by instantly turning eggs into a glass-like state. It’s one of many tools in the growing kit of assisted reproductive technology (ART)—a catchall term for any medical magic that helps people conceive by handling eggs, sperm, or embryos outside the body. Soon after, venture capital-backed boutique bioclinics emerged like mushrooms after a rain, touting mobile activations: food truck-style vans emblazoned with taglines like “Own Your Future” and “Fertility and Wellness Designed for You,” parked outside corporate offices to check the ovarian reserves of Q4 cuties who’d briefly escaped their enclosure to fetch a sad desk salad before returning to their cubicles.
Success: I emptied my savings and endured excruciating medical experiences to liberate myself from reproductive anxiety. I froze my eggs. Now I have a new, disembodied tension that’s completely out of my control. In the absence of robust social safety nets—paid parental leave, affordable childcare, universal healthcare—many have turned to egg freezing as a form of insurance.
In 2021, I was hot off a break up, feeling stagnant in my career, and still deep in the COVID pandemic. My 35th birthday loomed, a notorious date for women who want a biological family since egg quality and quantity begin to rapidly decline thereafter. I received an onslaught of targeted ads to freeze my eggs. Every time I opened social media I drowned in egg freezing ads that made a daunting medical procedure seem simple and transparent, with a clear pricing structure and monthly payment plans.
The facility looked like the living room of a rich friend with pedestrian taste. The spa-like banality felt safe. The venture-backed startup was founded by a woman and promised to democratize ART by offering egg freezing at a fraction of the cost of the medical institution I usually visit. I found solace in the fact that they focus on one procedure. I was aware their branding was pandering to my demographic and didn’t think I was susceptible to it, but if I’m honest with myself, it made me feel considered.
In October 2012, when the American Society for Reproductive Medicine lifted the experimental label from egg freezing, opening it to people without medical conditions like cancer, the term social egg freezing was adopted to explain the factors shaping family planning: the lack of suitable partners, the disruption of dating during a global pandemic, contradictory pressure to establish careers before having children while being warned about age-related decline. It’s a soft term for a hard reality: women are asked to solve structural precarity with their bodies.
The U.S. quietly relies on reproduction without paying for it. The 1996 Dickey-Wicker Amendment’s prohibition on federal funding for embryo research helps keep ART market-driven. Like most care work, this so-called public good is financed through private pain. What emerges is a form of reproductive enclosure, like watching someone bottle your own tap water and then charging you for the privilege of drinking it. The costs and access are borne by the very people the system fails to support. Women aren’t just patients; they’re the primary funders of an infrastructure that excludes them.
Rather than addressing the material conditions that make equitable parenthood untenable, the fertility industry, now valued at $35.2 billion and projected to reach $84 billion by 2028, markets egg freezing as a self care practice.1 In doing so, it reflects the broader neoliberal tendency to individualize risk and responsibility, asking women to solve political and economic failures with their own bodies and bank accounts.
Matrescence is privatized as a luxury consumer good.2
I spoke with a privacy, cybersecurity, and IP lawyer in San Francisco who froze her eggs: “Any societal problem gets reframed as an individual failing—like, you have mental health issues, so you need to fix yourself—without ever addressing the broader context that’s causing so much distress in the first place. I’m single because I’m overworked, and my employer’s solution? ‘We own your time—freeze your eggs.’”
It turned out that Kindb()dy quietly outsourced their billing to a third-party company, Embryo Options, which made the error that left patients scrambling to understand if their eggs were still safe. Behind a rose quartz veil of branding and experience design, I witnessed another jarring reality when the company nearly doubled storage rates after one year alone—perhaps the most expensive rent per millimeter in Manhattan. Egg freezing is branded as an empowering act of defiance against biology’s constraints, but beneath the goopified facade of venture-funded single-service fertility studios is a process that is physically grueling, emotionally isolating, and financially extractive.
“This is where it starts to become problematic: they don’t warn you about the higher costs later,” explains Sinem Kilic, who teaches bioethics at Bard in Berlin. “A typical subscription, say your phone plan, has some transparency about possible rate fluctuations.” Positioned as autonomy, egg freezing often reinforces market and policy control over women’s bodies. It profits from uncertainty while offering the illusion of choice. Kilic adds, “The pricing structure is opaque, and once you start the process, you’re likely committed. That’s the whole point and companies know this. They take advantage of it. I don’t think that’s ethical at all.”3
“Shortly after I turned 30, I moved to Chicago for a job and had this female empowerment moment,” Allie Donahoo, now 33, tells me. “My new friends were also single women in their 30s and had all gone through the process of freezing their eggs.” Donahoo froze her eggs with Ova, another single-service studio with velvet pepto pink sofas and a large gold metal sign proclaiming #OVA on the windowsill beside the skyline view—an altar for the selfie.
“I’ve never felt more like I was in a movie or music video. I’d be on the train going over the Chicago River and see the high-rise where I froze my eggs. It was very much main-character energy, yes!” Donahoo beams. The contrived aesthetic choreography of companies like Ova and Kindbody creates a hyperreal atmosphere that recasts a lonely, disorienting medical process as a romantic, self-actualizing ceremony. Donahoo is grateful she froze her eggs, but was blindsided by what came next. The reproductive endocrinologist at Ova didn’t warn her the process could aggravate her Hashimoto’s, a preexisting endocrine condition. What followed was a long and painful unraveling of her health that took years to rebuild.4
The egg freezing process is more involved and visceral than the flippant branding portrays. For two weeks leading up to the egg retrieval, patients must self-administer hormone injections. Each time was equally intense: I navigated around my swollen, tender, bruised abdomen for new terrain. My hand trembled, heart thumping loud in my chest. I jab the needle in, seppuku style, and the hormones burn. Blood draws and transvaginal ultrasounds every other day. Findings logged into a mobile app, where patients watch their hormone levels soar and their eggs increase in number and size—like being your very own tamagotchi. When follicles reach size, the final boss injection triggers release and the retrieval must happen within a narrow window.
I arrived for my second egg retrieval clean and made up, in a pristine white sweatsuit to remind them that this vessel is loved. A quiet plea to not butcher my grade “A” beef. But sixteen hours later, I was in a different reality. “In my 20-year-career, nothing like this has happened to me,” said the reproductive endocrinologist. (This didn’t happen to her, it happened to me!) During the extraction, the doctor punctured something other than a follicle, causing severe internal bleeding. I was also overmedicated with hormones, triggering Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome. Both were life-threatening complications, buried in dense waiver language designed to protect the clinic, not inform the patient.
Kindb()dy’s palette is constituted by luminous “Kind Yellow,” cozy “Cream,” and millennial “Rose.” There is a sardonic subtext in their primary color choice. It recalls The Yellow Wallpaper where a woman confined by a physician husband, meant to be soothed, instead slowly suffocated. Kindb()dy’s color story conjures clarity, but the yellow reveals a story of control disguised as care.
Yellow appears again in Bumble, another cruelly optimistic brand that promises connection but statistically delivers isolation. Dating apps sell connection but profit from loneliness, and fertility platforms sell agency but profit from delay. Egg freezing only has about a 6.4% success rate per egg. Together these social and medical technologies atomize systemic failure and make users responsible for structural breakdowns in intimacy and care.
Algorithm-approved infantilizing pastels—rose quartz, robin’s egg blue—repeat across the single-service fertility studios. Ashleigh Coren, former Director of Education at the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, notes: “It’s a very prescriptive and binary idea of what comfort looks like…design for spatial justice is about simple nice materials that address how people use the space. Care should be structurally embedded, not performative.”
Lori Brown—architect, professor, and one of the founders of Feminist Spatial Practices—noted to me that the nonprofit model may be the best we can do in politically tumultuous times: “I’m not always a fan of public-private partnerships, but given the instability of our government, they can provide continuity when the public sector falters. Ideally, these responsibilities return to government control when stability is restored.”5
Karla Pippa, a 43-year-old doula in Brooklyn, approached her own fertility experience with the same critical lens she uses to support birthing individuals. Even with her knowledge, she encountered a clinic more invested in increasing revenue than personalizing care.
Pippa and her partner rented a tank of liquid nitrogen and took their one viable embryo from that clinic to a large hospital-based fertility facility in Manhattan. She texts me two photos: one of them holding the liquid nitrogen tank between them, and another a year later, in the same pose holding their son Avi. They unsubscribed from predatory practices.6
“Pregnancy is treated like a disease,” says Certified Nurse-Midwife Melissa Parish. Midwifery sees pregnancy holistically as a natural life process, yet midwives are used for marketing but don’t hold much power in the medical model. Parish says the most important thing she can do is fortify patients with information and provide real informed consent.7
Midwifery has a long history of criminalization. Midwives were persecuted as witches, their knowledge and autonomy stripped away as Europe shifted from feudalism to capitalism, when control over reproduction became more important to those in power. The witch hunts were a form of reproductive enclosure: women’s traditional knowledge about birth and healing violently removed from their hands and placed under the authority of church, state, and emerging medical institutions so they could control the creation of future workers and profit from their labor.8
And now, enclosure arrives with a softer touch: branding, portals, subscriptions, terms of service.
In the Middle Ages, feudalism was a system where most people worked land they didn’t own. They owed labor and harvest to lords who controlled access. Techno-feudalism looks different but works in similar ways. Instead of farmland, tech platforms and private equity now control access to vital resources like healthcare, housing, education, and now reproduction. We don’t own these essentials; we rent, subscribe, or borrow them indefinitely. Social media takes our labor for free, sells it to advertisers, and leaves us nothing we truly own—not even our attention.9 Fertility clinics sell an escape from the ticking clock, then fetter people to subscription plans for our own eggs.
When Europe shifted from feudalism to capitalism, women were hunted, tortured, and killed. Their knowledge and autonomy stripped away to serve new economic orders. As capitalism mutates into techno-feudalism, I wonder: what new enclosures are being built around women’s bodies, and how is reproductive control once again becoming a tool for profit and power?
Cultural theorist Elaine Scarry posits that the purpose of design is to mitigate pain.10 Here, design is tasked with soothing the temporal anxiety surrounding reproductive decline. The design aesthetic reconfigures the anxiety. It translates structural precarity into a set of personal choices, frames risk as empowerment, and packages privatized uncertainty as aspirational self-care.
The service-design experience of these boutique bioclinics lends a cinematic, ceremonial feeling to something that is ultimately invasive and alienating. What started out feeling like a romantic comedy now unfolds more like a horror film. Constantly paused in a liminal non-space, waiting for the right conditions to wake up in a different future. Even so, I’m grateful I had a choice. And that I froze my eggs.
Jackie Davalos, “Embryo Errors, Flooded Clinics: Kindbody and IVF’s Risky Business,” Bloomberg, October 13, 2023, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-13/kindbody-fertility-clinic-embryo-errors-spotlight-ivf-business-risks.
Matrescence is the biological, psychological, and social process of becoming a mother. Women undergo transitions in matrescence and menopause as profound as puberty, but with less coming-of-age media to help make meaning of change.
Kilic, Sinem, Interview by Christa May, January 27, 2025.
Allie Donahoo, interview by Christa May, March 14, 2025.
Lori Brown, interview by Christa May, April 11, 2025.
Karla Pippa, interview by Christa May, February 14, 2025.
Melissa Parrish, interview by Christa May, February 1, 2025.
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004).
Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (New York: Melville House, 2023).
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford University Press, 1985), 281.
Im very much in the target group of this industry and have been doing my best to ignore that it exists, so I really appreciate the perspectives and thoughts presented in this well written text.