I feel like I need Charlton Heston yelling, “It’s People.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just announced that she broke up with her boyfriend so she’s freezing her eggs. This, of course, inspired a rash of articles and news pieces about the glory of IVF and freezing eggs. And I do mean a “rash” because it’s both contagious and irritating.
For most women, egg freezing is the kind of expensive that makes your bank account file a restraining order. Thousands of dollars vanish into the waiting arms of fertility clinics like a magician’s assistant into a box.
But hold on…now there’s…Cofertility, a company that looked at that price tag and said, “What if we just… didn’t charge money?” Their CEO, a former Uber employee named Lauren Makler, has a mantra that sounds like it was written by a motivational poster that also does tax fraud: “The best time to freeze your eggs is when you can least afford it.”
So they offer to freeze your eggs for free.
With a catch. It’s a pretty big catch.
Unfortunately, there is still no free lunch. Or free eggs. Or free anything that involves extracting biological material from a human being.
Instead of paying $18,000, you pay with half your eggs. Cofertility takes 50% of whatever they harvest and sells those eggs to people who want a baby that looks kinda’ like you.
It’s the fertility version of those “buy one get one free” deals where the free one is actually just half of your own stuff given to a stranger.
A lot of women will still sign up. If you’re already cool with the whole IVF industrial complex, the part where we create a bunch of tiny humans and then either throw most of them away or leave them in freezers until the heat death of the universe, then handing half your eggs to randos is probably not going to keep you up at night.
Cofertility tries very hard to make this sound noble but the company’s offerings are exactly as creepy as you’d expect:
A program called “Split” for women aged 21-33 who “check the right biological boxes.”
Two tracks, “Fresh” and “Frozen,” which somehow manage to make both words sound like they belong in a horror movie.
Marketing that shows smiling young women hiking, swimming, and “manifesting” career goals while casually injecting themselves with hormones.
Prospective parents scrolling donor profiles the same way people scroll dating apps, except instead of looking for someone to ghost they’re looking for someone whose genes they can buy.
Ads with headlines like “How to Find an Ivy League Egg Donor,” which is the most dystopian sentence that has ever been written by a marketing team that still goes home and sleeps at night.
One woman, Sue, a classical musician, was told by an employee to play the piano for her video because it would help move her DNA. Can’t have that stuff sitting on the shelf. A little Mozart and those suckers move, huh? Sue later eventually decided to see how she was being sold. She created a fake prospective parent account named Yang and waited.
A day after her second retrieval (27 eggs this time), she got an email describing herself: Chinese heritage on both sides, professional musician, studying international relations, training with ROTC. “We believe she’ll match very quickly,” the email said. “I’d recommend placing a hold on her profile.”
That’s the part where the whole enterprise stops being “empowering choice” and starts being a human vending machine with better branding.
If you just threw up in your mouth that’s an appropriate reaction. End stage godlessness right here, folks.
HT Notthebee.com