The Instagram put up, precision-guided by intercourse and age, had zeroed in on its goal. Yuchen Tu is a conservatory-trained viola participant from Chongqing, China, a lover of science fiction, and an aspiring member of the US Military Reserve Officer Coaching Corps. She’s exacting and intense, with sky-high requirements. And late final spring, simply after her twenty fourth birthday, she realized she may be the proper candidate to freeze her eggs—at no cost.
Tu goes by Sue, a reputation she likes as a result of it reminds her of the 2024 physique horror movie The Substance, whose protagonist tortures herself in pursuit of youth and sweetness. To prequalify at no cost egg freezing, all Sue needed to do was take a two-minute quiz. “Not everybody can cross this examination,” she remembers pondering. “Oh, it looks like a contest.”
Sue handed, as have hundreds of younger ladies allured by the promise of an organization referred to as Cofertility. “One of the best time to freeze your eggs is when you possibly can least afford it,” goes the corporate’s mantra, uttered on repeat by its public face and CEO, onetime Uber worker Lauren Makler. Thus was born Cofertility’s mission: to assist ladies like Sue, who had simply obtained her grasp’s diploma in classical music and was getting ready to embark on a second bachelor’s, protect their future fertility for zero {dollars}.
However in the USA, there’s no such factor as free well being care. As a substitute of paying to freeze and retailer her eggs with cash—the going price in New York Metropolis, the place Sue lives, is about $18,000—she would use a foreign money she already had in abundance: the eggs themselves. Cofertility’s purchasers should, within the firm’s phrases, “donate half of the eggs retrieved to supposed dad and mom that want the assistance of an egg donor to have a child.” It’s a mannequin referred to as egg sharing, and it hadn’t been commercialized extensively within the US till Cofertility got here alongside. The Los Angeles–based mostly firm launched in 2022, dubbing itself “a brand new sort of human-centered fertility ecosystem.”
Sue perused Cofertility’s web site, clicking by way of textual content containers of deep, soothing teal, optimistic mild inexperienced, a gradual purple, and an pressing orange. She was invited to a gathering nearly instantly after passing the take a look at, and inside days she was video chatting with an worker who gushed that Sue can be doing the accountable factor for her personal future whereas fulfilling the desires of a desirous household. Within the background of Sue’s Zoom, the Cofertility worker spied a piano and requested if she may document Sue enjoying. It’d be attractive to potential dad and mom who would possibly need the eggs of a piano prodigy.
Sue discovered the proposal preposterous. Her instrument is the viola, not the piano, as anybody who learn her file would know. Sue declined, and recollects the saleswoman’s disappointment. The tone of the interplay was “bizarre,” Sue thought—a mixture of overeager and saccharine. However she was curious concerning the firm, and he or she wished to search out out extra concerning the booming enterprise of fertility care {that a} 24-year-old won’t want for years, if ever. On July 29, 2025, Sue signed a contract with Cofertility.
The age-old stress to breed has morphed right into a biohacking crucial with a feminist sheen. Profession-oriented younger ladies who don’t have any imminent plans to turn out to be moms and no substantiated purpose to doubt their talents to procreate have succumbed to the messaging that, in the event that they don’t need to miss out on this primal ceremony, the time to take cost of future baby-making alternatives is now. “Three in 5 Gen Z ladies are involved about their fertility,” Makler mentioned on a podcast final 12 months, citing a survey by a community of California fertility clinics. The oldest members of that era are about to show 30.
