Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Why AOC Made Her Egg Freezing Public

By sharing her fertility-preservation attempts, AOC invites us to consider how to really support families.

Since she was elected to Congress in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has had her every move scrutinized. In a 2021 interview, Vice President JD Vance condemned Democrats as “childless cat ladies” who “don’t really have a direct stake in [our country],” citing AOC’s lack of children as a matter of public concern. Now the 36-year-old New York representative has embraced the attention in order to change that narrative, posting a series of Instagram reels documenting her egg-freezing journey and demystifying this fast-growing type of reproductive care. Her chatty, informative reels offer a calm counterpoint to the fevered lectures we’ve heard from Vance and others in the “retrosexual” crowd (pro-natalist, masculinist, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-DEI) about departures from old-school patterns of women’s work and fertility.

Vance and company ignore the underlying issue: The government wants people to have children but provides few resources for families. Before birth control was widely available, that approach “worked” to maintain a high birthrate, while forcing many parents into low-wage jobs to feed unplanned children (their desperation ensuring their bosses’ profits).

But people now have a choice, and many delay having kids until they feel ready to provide for them, a point that arrives for some but not all as the affordability crisis worsens. Others choose not to become parents at all. As a result, the country’s fertility rate has declined 23 percent since 2007—most notably among women ages 15 to 19 (down 72 percent) and 20 to 24 (down 51 percent).

As a highly visible working woman sharing her own biological-clock story, AOC is addressing the concerns of........

© The Nation