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“This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life,” said Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) about her decision to freeze her eggs, a process she recently chose to livestream on her Instagram account. She went so far as to post a video of herself injecting fertility medications in a green room before going on ABC News’ “This Week” and formally announcing her decision on the show.
The idea that egg freezing allows women to gain more control over their lives is popular, and it’s certainly a comfort to many women who feel they aren’t ready for motherhood but don’t want to forgo that potential. However, for many women that sense of control is at least in part an illusion.
The process for freezing eggs is invasive — involving not only the injections that AOC showed herself taking (which are also often taken by women who are trying to conceive naturally), but an additional surgery for the egg retrieval itself, which can cause severe side effects in extreme cases. Only around 11% of patients use their eggs within seven years, implying that most women who freeze their eggs either conceive naturally or choose not to have children at all. Of those who do use their frozen eggs, only around 29% report a live birth from egg freezing across all patients (although patients who are younger in age or have more frozen eggs have much higher success rates). That’s not even taking into consideration the financial cost of the procedure and the additional cost of the storage on top of that — usually around $15,000-20,000 upfront for the initial storage, and then $500-1000 annually after that so long as a woman chooses to keep her eggs frozen.
Is that physical and financial toll worth it for the cancer patient who wants to preserve her fertility? Or the woman who has lifelong medical issues that make natural conception difficult anyway? Without a doubt. But when it comes to the average, otherwise healthy woman who thinks this is a way to kick the can down the road indefinitely — maybe because she’s still waiting for the right man, maybe because she isn’t sure if she wants kids now but thinks she might at some point in the future — the calculus shifts: Egg freezing might still be the right individual decision for her (ultimately, only each individual woman can make that decision for herself), but it’s less of an obvious answer. That’s why it’s so important for those who have platforms to be honest about what egg freezing is — and what it isn’t.
This is what AOC claimed she was doing, telling ABC News, “In this political environment where this administration is denying reproductive care to women across the country, from abortion rights to the ability to carry out a healthy pregnancy, I think it’s important for us as leaders to have these conversations and share these processes, especially for working women across the country and normalize them.”
Well, maybe egg freezing is truly a political decision for her. That shouldn’t be surprising in her case: She’s one of the 535 most powerful people in the country, and even among them is one of the handful of congresspeople who’s a household name. Whether you love her or can’t stand her, you have to admit she’s great at social media and getting her name everywhere. There’s a good chance she might want to run for her party’s nomination in 2028, seeing that she is, for the first time, old enough to run, at 36 today and 39 by Inauguration Day 2029.
That is clearly a unique position to be in, and one that likely no other person in American political history has occupied: to be a woman who’s young enough to have children but old enough to be president, and politically accomplished enough that it wouldn’t be that out of the blue if she managed to pull off a win. Crazier things have happened.
Beyond that, she’s been in a relationship with her college sweetheart for around 15 years and engaged to him for over four years. It would be impolite to speculate as to why they haven’t gotten married yet or had children yet, but, hey, we can shrug and say: Elites, they’re not like the rest of us.
And yet that’s exactly the issue here. AOC claimed to be speaking to “working women” by posting her egg-freezing journey online, but she’s too far removed from their day-to-day concerns to grasp how unique her situation is, despite feigning “relatability.” The truth is, the average 36-year-old with a fiancé she’s dated for nearly half her life and been engaged to for four years is not a famous congresswoman eyeing a presidential bid, but is very likely a woman in a dead-end relationship who might be feeling more immediate desperation to start a family. Maybe she’d benefit from freezing her eggs, maybe not, but independent of that choice, the biggest question facing her is whether or not her fiancé will marry her and have kids with her now, or whether she’ll cut him loose and find someone who will.
In other words, AOC is pushing a luxury belief: the lifestyle she’s promoting of endless, timeless choice — even as pregnancy statistically becomes more and more difficult for the average woman with age, especially for those who are financially constrained and can only afford so many cycles of IVF — is not going to work for most normal women, whose preferences are necessarily shaped by the fact that they, unlike AOC, are not rich and famous and powerful.
Here’s one place where AOC could use her position in society to help ordinary women who are desperately seeking IVF: The Trump administration has championed IVF accessibility, with a particular focus on lowering costs of commonly prescribed fertility medications through TrumpRx. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services even estimate savings of up to $2,200 per cycle on medication, which is a huge amount in savings for hardworking couples trying to expand their families. Rather than pretending that the Trump administration has been uniquely against IVF and other fertility treatments, AOC could reach out across the aisle and help the women she claims to champion.
Let’s hope she puts aside partisan politics and gets to work instead of posting stories on Instagram so more Americans can have the babies they want. And let’s also hope things work out for her and she can have the babies she wants, too.
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Neeraja Deshpande is a policy analyst at Independent Women.
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