Last weekend, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told her legions of Instagram followers that she’s decided to freeze her eggs at age 36. She filmed herself injecting fertility medication and joked, “Don’t be weird about this,” adding, “I know all of you will be.” She was correct. “If she got pregnant now, it would technically be a geriatric pregnancy,” the right-wing commentator Matt Walsh whined. Jeremy Wayne Tate, creator of the Classic Learning Test, compared Ocasio-Cortez unfavorably to a British queen. “By the time Queen Victoria was 37 she had nine children,” he posted on X. “Who is the badass?” (Queen Victoria famously hated pregnancy and childbirth, which made her feel like “a dog or a cow,” and was an ambivalent mother at best.) The podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey accused her of “glamorizing the lie that women can have it all: You can’t. Biology is real and how you order your life makes or breaks your future.”

A fourth-term member of Congress, Ocasio-Cortez has had a panoramic view of the backlash against women’s reproductive autonomy. Thirteen states have adopted near-total abortion bans, as of this year, and women across the country have been forced to carry out life-threatening pregnancies. In some cases, even women who experience miscarriages or stillbirths have faced criminal charges. When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled two years ago that frozen embryos counted as children under the state’s wrongful-death law, even the choice to become a mother came under attack. IVF, as critics see it, grants a woman too much authority — over her her life, her work, and her family. Egg freezing, similarly, allows a woman to exert some control over not only whether she becomes a mother, but when. No matter the target, the subtext is always the same: A woman’s self-determination threatens the right’s social order.

Ocasio-Cortez is not the first member of Congress to discuss her fertility decisions in public. Her Democratic colleague, Representative Sara Jacobs, also froze her eggs at 36, a decision she explained at length in a 2025 interview with the New York Times. Senator Tammy Duckworth is the first senator to give birth in office, with the help of IVF. All have chosen to........

© Daily Intelligencer