Hope and Happy Futurity in the Cryotank: Biomedical Imaginaries of Ovarian Tissue Freezing

ABSTRACT

In Denmark, female patients who undergo chemo- and radiation therapy are, prior to treatment, increasingly offered fertility preservation in the form of ovarian tissue freezing. In the cryotank, the frozen ovarian tissue awaits the recovery of the patient, after which it can be thawed and implanted into the remaining ovary or the abdominal wall. Here it potentially restores the ovarian function and enables women to become pregnant and experience genetic motherhood. Promising reproductive futures, the biomedical imaginary of ovarian tissue preservation is entangled with visions of possibilities and risk management as well as gendered understandings of reproduction and the ‘good life.’ From the get-go, ovarian tissue freezing has been informed by an optimistic imaginary of scientific progress. Not only were freezing programs established before clinical evidence testified to the success of the technique in humans; the envisioning of improvements and new applications also anticipates future scientific breakthroughs, such as in vitro maturation of eggs. In the imaginary of hopefulness and reproductive futurity, frozen ovarian tissue becomes an object of vitality which (re)installs the cancer patient as a reproductive citizen. Moreover, ovarian tissue is imagined as a bountiful material with different potentiality than egg freezing. In Denmark, the biomedical imaginary romanticizes the restoration of ‘natural’ fertility and spontaneous pregnancies. Thus, the potentiality of ovarian tissue freezing is imagined within a normative framework privileging ‘natural’ conception, yet simultaneously destabilizing the very notion of the age-span of ‘natural fertility.’

KEYWORDS:

• Sociotechnical imaginary
• cryopreservation
• fertility preservation
• biopreparedness
• hope technology
• feminist perspectives

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleagues Stine Willum Adrian and Michael Nebeling Petersen for commenting on the early draft of this article. We further wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers as well as the editors for all their comments and suggestions to improve the paper which have helped strengthen the analytical points significantly. Finally, we wish to express our gratitude to medical student Sofie Gjellert Elise Gjellert for sharing her list of medical articles on ovarian tissue autotransplantation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Anna Sofie Bach holds a PhD in Sociology from The University of Copenhagen and is postdoc in the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research interests span across studies of families and intimate life, reproduction, feminist STS, and gender.

Charlotte Kroløkke holds a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Minnesota and is a Professor in the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark with special responsibilities in cultural analysis of reproductive medicine. She publishes within the field of feminist communication and science studies.

Notes

1 The archive is based on a reference list provided in November 2017 by medical student Sofie Elise Gjellert who in relation to research done at the Laboratory for Reproductive Biology in Copenhagen conducted a search in PubMed for all article on autotransplantation of cryopreserved human ovarian tissue.

2 The exact number of children born after this technique is unknown as not all births are reported and no international registration is taking place at the moment (c.f. Jensen et al., 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Independent Research Fund Denmark, Humanities (2017-2020), Grant # 7013-00042B.