This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.thegallerycompanion.comShortlisted for the Independent Podcast Awards 2023. Subscribe to receive exclusive weekly content at www.thegallerycompanion.comIn this week's episode I discuss the highly profitable commercial world of human egg freezing, which has seen a dramatic rise in the UK and across the global north.There are many things about this new phenomenon that I find fascinating: what it says about the strong biological urge to reproduce; the expectations of and on women around career and family; and the industries targeting women with culturally-generated anxieties about their ageing bodies.But what I find most interesting about it is what doesn’t really get talked about much: who exactly is having these procedures and why. The common assumption is that most women who freeze their eggs are twenty-somethings who want to delay childbirth as they pursue their careers. But in her recent book Motherhood on Ice, the Yale anthropologist Marcia C. Inhorn has explored other factors that motivate women to freeze their eggs. What her research has found runs counter to this conventional wisdom about the who and why of egg freezing. Inhorn argues that there is, in her words, a ‘mating gap’ — a shortage of partners for university-educated women.I discuss all of this, plus the work of the contemporary Chinese-American artist Xin Liu, who explores the extension of women’s fertility through science and technology in her art, inspired by medical innovations in the field of cryogenics and egg freezing.If you’d like to access the full podcast you can subscribe to it on my Substack publication at thegallerycompanion.com. A subscription gets you a podcast and email from me every Sunday and access to a lovely community of artists and art lovers from around the world.The Gallery Companion is hosted by writer and historian Dr Victoria Powell. It's a thought-provoking dive into the interesting questions and messy stuff about our lives that art explores and represents.