The Instagram publish, 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 is likely to be the right candidate to freeze her eggs—without spending a dime.
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 wonder. To prequalify without spending a dime egg freezing, all Sue needed to do was take a two-minute quiz. “Not everybody can move this examination,” she remembers considering. “Oh, it looks as if a contest.”
Sue handed, as have 1000’s of younger girls allured by the promise of an organization known as Cofertility. “One of the best time to freeze your eggs is when you may 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 girls like Sue, who had simply obtained her grasp’s diploma in classical music and was making ready to embark on a second bachelor’s, protect their future fertility for zero {dollars}.
However in america, 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 fee 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 shoppers should, within the firm’s phrases, “donate half of the eggs retrieved to meant dad and mom that want the assistance of an egg donor to have a child.” It’s a mannequin known as egg sharing, and it hadn’t been commercialized broadly within the US till Cofertility got here alongside. The Los Angeles–based mostly firm launched in 2022, dubbing itself “a brand new form of human-centered fertility ecosystem.”
Sue perused Cofertility’s web site, clicking by way of textual content bins 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 could be doing the accountable factor for her personal future whereas fulfilling the goals of a desirous household. Within the background of Sue’s Zoom, the Cofertility worker spied a piano and requested if she may file Sue taking part in. It’d be engaging 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 remembers the saleswoman’s disappointment. The tone of the interplay was “bizarre,” Sue thought—a mixture of overeager and saccharine. However she was curious in regards to the firm, and she or he wished to seek out out extra in regards to the booming enterprise of fertility care {that a} 24-year-old may not want for years, if ever. On July 29, 2025, Sue signed a contract with Cofertility.
The age-old strain to breed has morphed right into a biohacking crucial with a feminist sheen. Profession-oriented younger girls who haven’t any imminent plans to grow to be moms and no substantiated motive to doubt their skills 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 girls are involved about their fertility,” Makler stated 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.
