The Moral Difficulties And Legal Structure Of Social Egg Freezing

Egg freezing refers to the use of medical technology to take out the healthy eggs of women and freeze them,with the purpose of preserving the choice of future births using their own genes.From the perspective of clinical use in China,egg freezing is mainly for medical reason.Egg freezing for medical reason has won the support of the state and society.With the development of technology,women who want to prevent the decline of fertility due to age have brought hope.In 2019,China’s first single female egg freezing case,the defendant,Beijing Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital affiliated to Capital Medical University refused to provide egg freezing technology on the grounds that Xu Zaozao was single.Therefore,the plaintiff Xu Zaozao took the hospital to court.Whether the law should grant single women the right to implement assisted reproductive technology,release restrictions on egg freezing,and allow single women to perform "social egg freezing" has sparked heated discussions.In China,there are mainly two viewpoints,support and opposition to the legal issues of freezing eggs for single women.Scholars who hold the opposing viewpoints have from the perspectives of technology,social influence,and family ethics;Scholars who agree with the viewpoints justify social eggs freezing from the perspective of reproductive rights,equal rights,and the rights of self-determination of marriage.Some scholars have achieved the result of demonstrating whether single women can use artificial assisted reproductive technology by demonstrating whether single women have reproductive rights.In countries such as Israel and the United States that have liberalized egg freezing for single women,scholars have discovered a new enthics problem——autonomy,and have put forward different views on social egg freezing.Based on the perspective of female autonomy,they proposed a new approach to examine whether single women have autonomy in freezing eggs,and analyze two different forms of autonomy: The other is to assess the autonomy of individual decision-making;the other is to resort to autonomy.The relationship path is based on a wide range of social environments to find the motivation of single women who are impressed by social freezing of eggs.To understand social egg freezing from the above two theoretical approaches will lead to different conclusions.This article argues that "relationship autonomy" is not enough to support the oppositional views that paternalistically prohibit social egg freezing.People’s reproduction decision will not be made in a vacuum state of social relations,but must be in a social environment composed of traditional culture and social relations,and social pressure should not be offset by limiting the range of options available.Finally,after providing a theoretical basis for the legitimacy of social egg freezing,this article bases on the dilemma of single women’s egg freezing,which caused by current laws and regulations,and makes a preliminary conception of the relevant institutional norms of social egg freezing.All in all,through a comprehensive analysis of the issue of egg freezing,it provides a theoretical basis for the legal,moral and ethical legitimacy of social egg freezing.This article shows that the egg freezing technology,as a technical means for women to realize reproductive rights,belongs to the female autonomy,that is,women have the autonomy to choose social egg freezing.