Last month, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez published a series of Instagram posts documenting the process of freezing her eggs. In the last video, on the economics and politics of women’s healthcare in the United States, she asked why fertility preservation is so prohibitively expensive, costing thousands of dollars and not covered by insurance.
AOC is now 36 – old enough to run for president – and has served in the House of Representatives for nearly eight years. Critics on the pronatalist right have called her decision to freeze her eggs ‘totally backwards and ridiculous’, suggesting she should have had children already if she wanted them.
According to some in the conservative mom-o-sphere, AOC had left it too late even by the time she was first elected to Congress at the age of 28 (younger than any woman before her). The tradwife influencer Hannah Neeleman, whose Ballerina Farm was an inspiration for Caro Claire Burke’s novel Yesteryear, was 21 when she gave birth to her first son in 2012. Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s former press secretary who has stepped down from her post after giving birth to her second child, is 28.
AOC is at the upper end of the recommended age range for fertility preservation. The older you are, the fewer eggs you’re likely to produce for every round of ovarian stimulation, and a lower percentage of those eggs can be expected to be viable, so the less likely it is that egg freezing will enable you to have a baby down the line. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine says:
Everyone is different and it’s not possible to precisely predict how long someone will be fertile over time. For example, some people in their early forties do not suffer from infertility. However, most experts agree that planned egg freezing is most likely to be successful when the eggs are frozen before the age of 38.
The UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority is more blunt: ‘In cases over the age of 35 … there is a steep decline in fertility’ and they ‘would caution against’ freezing as a ‘sensible option’ for women in their forties.
AOC’s video series resonated with me in part because of the visibility and acceptance that she gave to the isolating, uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing experience that I went through more than a decade ago. My second son was born via IVF. Though I didn’t freeze my eggs, I did go through the same egg stimulation and retrieval cycle that AOC documented. My egg retrieval took place the day before my 37th birthday.
The right-wing attacks on AOC personally and on egg freezing more generally reveal the incoherence of the right’s ideologically motivated approach to reproduction. American women should have more children, they say, but only in a conventional, allegedly ‘natural’ framework that conforms to traditional patriarchal expectations. Katie Miller, the podcaster married to Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller, posted on X on Mother’s Day: ‘A reminder that peak feminism is having babies. The most radical thing a woman can do is embrace her biological destiny.’
‘We are going to have to put up a fight to make fertility care and reproductive care covered for every American,’ AOC said last month.
We hear over and over and over again about how families are so important and about how mothers are so important, and about how there’s a fertility crisis in America, but no one wants to do anything about it.
Miller wrote in qualified support of AOC’s decision to freeze her eggs: ‘If one woman wants to preserve her right to have children, which means more than having none – we should celebrate that. If she inspires other women to have babies, we should celebrate that.’ Though she went on: ‘More women should get married and have babies younger, but too many women buy into the feminist lie and spend their childbearing years climbing the career ladder.’
The controversy over AOC’s very public fertility journey gets to the heart of the question of what it means for a society to support childbirth and motherhood. If the Millers, the Heritage Foundation and others were serious about their pronatalism, they would support public policies that help working (and non-working) parents to raise their children, and technologies such as egg freezing that allow women to become mothers later in life.
AOC pointed out that ‘in France’s public health system, egg freezing is free for women between 29 and 37, and the storage fees are minimal.’ The French government sees egg freezing (which in practice remains underfunded and plagued by long waiting lists) as one prong of a campaign to reverse a two-decade decline in birth rates: this year the country recorded more deaths than births for the first time since the Second World War. In Britain and the United States, by contrast, egg freezing is almost entirely a for-profit enterprise, except in certain cases such as cancer patients freezing their eggs before chemotherapy.
The predatory tactics of fertility clinic advertising were recently the subject of a UK parliamentary inquiry. But the growth of egg freezing around the globe can’t be attributed only to the profit-hungry fertility industry. It’s also a sign that women like AOC are exercising their right to choose not only whether but when to have children.
