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Purpose – Using elective egg and sperm freezing as a case to compare representations of men and women as agents of biological reproduction, this chapter aims to understand how gender and risk are co-produced in the context of new reproductive technologies (NRTs).

Methodology – Through a content analysis of newspaper articles published between 1980 and 2016 about egg and sperm freezing, the author traces how fertility risks facing men and women are portrayed in the media.

Findings – Candidates for egg freezing were portrayed in one of the three ways: as cancer patients, career women, or single and waiting for a partner. The ideal users of sperm freezing are depicted in primarily two ways: as cancer patients and as employees in professions with hazardous working conditions. Threats to future fertility for women pursuing careers uninterrupted by pregnancy and child-rearing and women seeking romantic partners are largely portrayed as the result of internal risks. However, threats to future fertility for men working in dangerous professions are largely portrayed as external to them.

Research Limitations – Race and class did not emerge as dominant themes in these data; given the lack of accessibility to NRTs by class and race, this silence must be interrogated by further research.

Value – By comparing the constructions of at-risk groups, the author argues the medicalization of reproduction is gendered as fertility risks portrayed in the media take on a different character between men and women. This research shows how the gendered construction of infertility risk reinforces normative expectations around child-rearing and perpetuates gender inequity in parenting norms.

Although research on reproductive technologies such as IVF and egg freezing has traditionally been rather separated from the work on contraceptives and abortion, analysing reproductive and nonreproductive technologies together, as this volume proposes, can provide the basis for a broader contemporary politics of reproductive control. This chapter analyses this politics of integrating reproductive and nonreproductive technologies by focusing specifically on IVF-based fertility (preservation) treatments and (medical) abortion. More specifically, it explores both technologies' interrelated research trajectories and the financial and platformised dimensions of their clinical implementation. With a dual focus on egg freezing and medical abortion, this project seeks to explore how processes of platformisation and financialisation shape the clinical and commercial infrastructures that govern twenty-first-century reproduction. The chapter's broadened analytic scope that incorporates both reproductive and nonreproductive technologies highlights how a contemporary biopolitics of reproductive control may be expressed through these technologies' interrelated regulatory practices, shared politicised reference points (e.g. the embryo), opposite investment practices and mutually reinforcing social effects.