The Big Freeze is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright © 2024 by Natalie Lampert

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Ballantine Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Hardback ISBN 9781524799380

Ebook ISBN 9781524799397

randomhousebooks.com

Book design by Jessica Shatan Heslin/Studio Shatan, Inc., adapted for ebook

Cover design: Rachel Ake

ep_prh_7.0_147498688_c0_r0

Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Abbreviations

Author’s Note

Introduction

Part I: The Consultation

1. Young, Fertile, and Fabulous

2. An Intimate Geography

3. Egg Freezing’s Rise

Part II: The Orientation

4. Hacking Our Hormones

5. Why Women Freeze

6. Optimizing Fertility

7. Not Our Bodies, Not Ourselves

Part III: The Stimulation

8. Ready, Set, Trigger Shot

9. The Femtech Revolution

10. Ovaries in Overdrive

Part IV: The Retrieval

11. Scar Tissue

12. Fertility-Industrial Complex

13. Great Eggspectations

Part V: The Freeze

14. Unviable

15. Reproduction Reimagined

16. A Journalist and Her Ovary

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

_147498688_

For all the people with ovaries

confronting uncertainty and the

consequential questions

I used to think, as a young woman, that life was something I was controlling and directing. Now I only think: What a mess we all are, with so many contradictory impulses, so many things about ourselves we’ll never entirely understand.