The Importance of A.O.C’s Public Family Planning

This past Saturday, Ocasio-Cortez had posted several chatty videos explaining why she was pursuing egg-freezing, and why she wanted to do so publicly. Most of her reasons will be familiar to millennial women of a certain demographic. (Some of the circumstances, such as the fact that she is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, and had to “grow up in the public eye,” will not.) “Usually, I keep my private life quite private, but I have made the decision to start freezing my eggs,” she says in one video, speaking to the camera. “And I want to share this because I was weighing it for a very long time, and I was saving for it for a very long time, and there just isn’t a ton out there, I feel. And sometimes it can feel very daunting.” She continues, “As women, in general, we are not taught about our bodies. We are not prepared for our own lives,” from puberty to menopause. Whether or not you want children, she says, “I think we need to show more depictions of women having full lives in every context and every choice.” She frames her own decision as empowering: “This is a choice that I’m making to feel more in control of my life.”

The congresswoman is not the only one to feel that way. The number of U.S. women freezing their eggs for nonmedical reasons has soared in the past decade. In 2014, around four thousand Americans chose to freeze their eggs, according to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. By 2024, that number had jumped to nearly forty thousand. Many factors are at play here. In 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine removed the label “experimental” from egg-freezing. (Previously, egg-freezing was used mostly to preserve fertility in medical emergencies, such as cancer treatments.) Companies have also played a role: Apple and Facebook have long covered elective egg-freezing and storage for their employees. But success is not assured. Age still matters. Women in their twenties have healthier eggs, in greater quantities, than women in their thirties. (So it goes.) The more eggs, the better the chance of creating a viable embryo. This has led some parents in Silicon Valley to pay for their daughter’s egg-freezing as a graduation gift.

One of Ocasio-Cortez’s great skills is her ability to come across as a normal person, even when what she’s doing is manifestly extraordinary. In one video, she tells viewers that she’ll be going on the ABC talk show “This Morning,” “as part of my job.” “Because of the timing of it, I’m going to have to take my shots in the greenroom before my interview. And I want you all to see that, because women can do anything,” she says. “And I think it’s badass that I’m going to be, you know, giving myself shots in the greenroom, get my glam on, roll out, talk about international events, domestic policy, elections, pop out, live my life, do my thing.”

The follow-up videos, which show her in a dark blazer, prepping her medications in the greenroom, make for powerful images. She’s there, getting her hair and makeup done, injecting herself with hormones, and then speaking coherently on live television. All of that is undeniably impressive, and yet the word “badass” stuck in my head like an off note. So often, egg-freezing is framed as an empowering choice, but the costs attached to it are not negligible. There’s the financial burden—most insurance policies, including Ocasio-Cortez’s, don’t cover egg-freezing or storage—and the physical toll on a woman’s body. (Interestingly, a recent study from U.C.L.A. found that only about six per cent of women who freeze their eggs later return to use them.)

Watching the congresswoman, I kept wishing for an alternative route, one where the options for an ambitious working woman didn’t come down to either having children very young, as conservatives might wish, or delaying through costly and uncomfortable procedures. It’s an inconvenient truth that the years in which many women feel ready to start a family—their mid- to late thirties—are also the peak years for career advancement. The stakes are higher for Ocasio-Cortez. (Not many of us are contemplating a run for President.) But the themes are similar. Alongside promotions and deadlines, many young women are also privately bargaining with time and their bodies. How much longer can I wait? What am I willing to give up? Instead of building a society that accommodates these concerns, we have built one that treats them as superfluous—private affairs that women must navigate like a secret second job.