“Maybe We Can't Actually Have it All?” Egg Freezing, Solo Motherhood by Donor Conception and Intimate Desires and Normativity in a Late Modern Nordic Welfare State

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article I discuss the accounts of middle-class women in their 30s living in Norway, who face choices between egg freezing or solo motherhood by donor conception. I show that the women sought Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) as a way of actively managing their intimate and reproductive biography, at a time when their window of fertility was perceived to be closing, and they struggled to establish and maintain a satisfactory heterosexual relationship which could also serve as basis for a nuclear family (“the family package”). Both the ARTs in question, although potentially producing quite different outcomes, could be and were employed to avoid suboptimal relationships solely or mainly for the sake of reproduction. I argue that the women’s engagement with ARTs reveals an inherent tension between late modern heterosexual coupling and the nuclear family as the ideal reproductive formation. “The family package” that the women desired appears to be more a compilation of two different–and somewhat conflicting–functions: individual self-realisation through romance, and reproduction through heterosexual coupledom. Moreover, I suggest that interest in and use of these ARTs both make visible, and contribute to, an emergent symbolic and social dismantling of the nuclear family as a reproductive norm.