For most of my adult life, I never heard the ticking clock. The question of whether I would have children one day was something I held loosely. I always believed that if having children was meant to be part of my story, it would be. If not, I trusted there was a purpose in that too.
But sometime during the pandemic, the whispers about egg freezing started getting louder.
At first, it was easy to ignore. Another ad, another social media post, another celebrity talking about taking control of her future. But the message that science had given women more time was everywhere. The biological clock finally had a “snooze button.”
Then it entered my own friend group. Someone I knew started considering the procedure and visited a Toronto fertility clinic. Suddenly, something I had never worried about began to feel like something I was irresponsible for ignoring. So, I started asking questions. How much does this actually cost? What are the chances these frozen eggs become a baby? What happens after thousands of women put their hopes, and thousands of dollars, into this technology?
The answers were much harder to find than I expected. And when I did find them, they challenged almost everything I thought I understood about egg freezing.
The procedure I had absorbed through advertising was one wrapped in words like “freedom,” “empowerment,” and “choice.” But the reality was far more complicated. Success was not guaranteed. Costs could climb into the tens of thousands. And many women were making deeply personal decisions in an industry where experts warned that transparency and oversight had not kept pace with the technology. I made my own decision about egg freezing quite quickly. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the women who would come after me.
That curiosity became Fertility Inc.
What began as an investigation into marketing claims soon revealed a broader story about a rapidly expanding fertility industry in which medicine, business and the deeply personal hope of building a family intersect.
Not long into what became an eight-month investigation, I was joined by Postmedia’s inaugural investigative fellow Lori Culbert, a veteran Vancouver Sun journalist whose decades of experience and West Coast perspective proved invaluable. We also teamed up with early-career IJB fellow Myrialine Catule from Quebec, who, among many other contributions, dove into the painstaking task of examining the backgrounds of more than 250 fertility physicians across Canada. Together, we were three women, hailing from three provinces and spanning different stages of life, investigating an industry built around one of the most universal human desires: the hope of creating a family.
What started as one story became five. Every question seemed to uncover another. Every answer revealed another gap. We found women spending thousands of dollars for a chance at a future family, but finding evidence-based information hard to find. We found an industry projected to soon be worth more than a billion dollars, but a regulatory landscape that experts say has failed to keep up.
The desire to have children is among the most fundamental parts of the human story. It has shaped families, societies and generations. But today, that desire is also a business.
That’s why the name Fertility Inc. feels so fitting. Because when hope becomes an industry, people deserve to know exactly what they’re buying.
Clarke recently appeared on CTV’s Your Morning to discuss Fertility Inc.
