Egg-Freezing Parties Aren't Going Away Any Time Soon

When reports from the first egg-freezing parties emerged earlier this fall, it was easy to dismiss them as aberrant. Hundreds of elite New Yorkers, most of them women, gathered at trendy hotels in SoHo and NoMad for champagne, appetizers, and pitches on oocyte cryopreservation—a process deemed "experimental" by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine as recently as 2012. Tanya Selvaratnam, an expert on reproductive politics, likened the "Let's Chill!" party she attended to the plastic-surgery industry in an interview with Slate. "It was kind of disturbing how they were plying women with alcohol and trying to sell them what was basically a product," she said.

What's egg-freezing got to do with most women or families? Maybe a lot. Janelle Luk, a reproductive endocrinologist at a fertility clinic associated with EggBanxx, the organization that has thrown New York's egg-freezing parties, framed the technology as an everyday convenience: "part of technology that exists to help us all, just like the iPad, just like Skype."