The Instagram post, precision-guided by sex and age, had zeroed in on its target. Yuchen Tu is a conservatory-trained viola player from Chongqing, China, a lover of science fiction, and an aspiring member of the US Army Reserve Officer Training Corps. She’s exacting and intense, with sky-high standards. And late last spring, just after her 24th birthday, she realized she might be the perfect candidate to freeze her eggs—for free.
Tu goes by Sue, a name she likes because it reminds her of the 2024 body horror film The Substance, whose protagonist tortures herself in pursuit of youth and beauty. To prequalify for free egg freezing, all Sue had to do was take a two-minute quiz. “Not everyone can pass this exam,” she remembers thinking. “Oh, it seems like a competition.”
Sue passed, as have thousands of young women allured by the promise of a company called Cofertility. “The best time to freeze your eggs is when you can least afford it,” goes the company’s mantra, uttered on repeat by its public face and CEO, onetime Uber employee Lauren Makler. Thus was born Cofertility’s mission: to help women like Sue, who had just received her master’s degree in classical music and was preparing to embark on a second bachelor’s, preserve their future fertility for zero dollars.
But in the United States, there’s no such thing as free health care. Instead of paying to freeze and store her eggs with money—the going rate in New York City, where Sue lives, is about $18,000—she would use a currency she already had in abundance: the eggs themselves. Cofertility’s clients must, in the company’s words, “donate half of the eggs retrieved to intended parents that need the help of an egg donor to have a baby.” It’s a model called egg sharing, and it hadn’t been commercialized widely in the US until Cofertility came along. The Los Angeles–based company launched in 2022, dubbing itself “a new kind of human-centered fertility ecosystem.”
Sue perused Cofertility’s website, clicking through text boxes of deep, soothing teal, optimistic light green, a steady purple, and an urgent orange. She was invited to a meeting almost immediately after passing the test, and within days she was video chatting with an employee who gushed that Sue would be doing the responsible thing for her own future while fulfilling the dreams of a desirous family. In the background of Sue’s Zoom, the Cofertility employee spied a piano and asked if she could record Sue playing. It’d be enticing to prospective parents who might want the eggs of a piano prodigy.
Sue found the proposal preposterous. Her instrument is the viola, not the piano, as anyone who read her file would know. Sue declined, and recalls the saleswoman’s disappointment. The tone of the interaction was “weird,” Sue thought—a combination of overeager and saccharine. But she was curious about the company, and she wanted to find out more about the booming business of fertility care that a 24-year-old might not need for years, if ever. On July 29, 2025, Sue signed a contract with Cofertility.
The age-old pressure to reproduce has morphed into a biohacking imperative with a feminist sheen. Career-oriented young women who have no imminent plans to become mothers and no substantiated reason to doubt their abilities to procreate have succumbed to the messaging that, if they don’t want to miss out on this primal rite, the time to take charge of future baby-making opportunities is now. “Three in five Gen Z women are concerned about their fertility,” Makler said on a podcast last year, citing a survey by a network of California fertility clinics. The oldest members of that generation are about to turn 30.