AOC Announced She Is Freezing Her Eggs. Of Course Everyone Got Weird.

Politics Isn’t this what feminists have long wanted for women? Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Over the weekend, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a video of herself doing a hormone injection as part of the process of freezing her eggs. “Don’t be weird about this,” she says, “even though I know all of you will be.” And, yes, everyone got super weird about it. AOC is 36, which led much of the right-wing internet (and some of the left-wing internet) to jump on her choice. Why doesn’t she just have a baby with the guy she’s with? Egg freezing at 36 is pointless! Egg freezing doesn’t guarantee you a baby! Having children after 40 is selfish! “She’s glamorizing the lie that women can have it all!” Most of these comments are coming from the same people who disparage childless women, and who disparage single mothers, judge working mothers, and want to pull benefits from mothers who are poor and have children they can’t afford to feed. In the conservative universe, there is only one correct way to be a mother, and that’s to be married at a young age to a breadwinner man upon whom you are wholly dependent, to not work for pay, and to have as many children as possible—but if your husband doesn’t make enough money to support you all, or if he turns out to be a jerk, or if he dies, well, you’re an idiot and a bad mother for being poor/choosing the wrong man/not having a better life plan. The response on the left was largely to leave AOC alone, because her freezing her eggs is none of our business. But she’s a congresswoman who posted about it online—she made it the public’s business. There’s something very powerful there: She’s demystifying a process that can still be shrouded in unnecessary secrecy, and making a choice many women have at least considered. She’s also opening up a broader conversation about the choices and trade-offs adults have to make when it comes to love, life, work, and family. And we can have that conversation without being super weird about it, or about AOC herself. I don’t know why AOC has chosen to freeze her eggs. But I know why many women whom I know have chosen to freeze their eggs. For the most part, they did so because they were not yet in a position where they wanted to have a child but wanted to preserve the possibility in the future. Most of them were not partnered and weren’t sure they wanted to be single mothers. Many weren’t sure they wanted children at all but wanted to leave the possibility open—with the full knowledge that egg freezing is far from any sort of guarantee. AOC has been engaged to her long-term partner since 2022. Perhaps they are still together and one or both are just not ready for children, or unsure if they want them at all. Perhaps they aren’t together, and she is doing the math on additional years of dating plus waning fertility and deciding to hedge her bets on what is currently the most reliable if vastly imperfect way to extend one’s fertility. Maybe she wants to run for president and understandably doesn’t want to be pregnant while doing so. We don’t know. What we do know is that AOC is an intelligent woman who can surely read the research on fertility outcomes for women as we age, as well as the literature on what egg freezing can and cannot promise. We can do what feminists encourage, which is to assume that women are the best judges of their own reproductive lives, and in the best position to make decisions about those lives—even if they make choices we think are unwise; even if they make choices they may later regret. The conservative right seems to operate from the assumption that all women must have children, should have them early and often, and should have them only within the context of marriage to a gainfully employed man—and that there are scores of great men around who are eager for marriage and fatherhood in their 20s. In reality, finding a person to spend the rest of your life with can be hard—and, frankly, it should be hard. And it can and should take a while for many of us to reach a point in our lives when we feel ready for marriage. Women’s and men’s expectations for a life partner have both increased as marriage has become more optional and as women have realized more opportunities to support themselves. Conservatives may not like that, but “Make marriage compulsory, unhappy, and about economic survival instead of love again” is not exactly a popular position. Many couples may wish they had met earlier in life, and some people marry their high school sweethearts, but I don’t know all that many single adults who wish they had married the person they dated at 17. I do, however, know a great many people who spent their 20s building meaningful careers, forging important friendships, dating enough to learn what did and did not work for them romantically, and generally enjoying themselves—and becoming the kinds of people who might feel ready for a lifelong financial and romantic commitment, which is no small thing. A great many women make use of today’s incredible reproductive technologies not because they’re stereotypical Career Women casting men aside in pursuit of the corner office, but because they want pretty simple things that haven’t materialized yet: a loving relationship with someone who would also make a good husband and father; a life that feels stable enough to bring children into it. No woman can snap her fingers and make the right man and a stable life materialize (and many women, at many times in our lives, don’t want the right man to materialize). But if she has the resources, she can freeze her eggs and perhaps buy herself a little time. AOC is one of the most prominent politicians in the United States. She has been in Congress for the past seven years, and has made a name for herself as one of its most diligent, intelligent, and effective members. She has helped draw an entire generation of progressives into politics, and totally changed the game for young people, young women, and democratic socialists. If she wants a baby, I hope she has one. But her life has also been pretty meaningful as is—and she’s been able to accomplish what she has precisely because she’s been able to make her own choices about whether to have children. Her egg-freezing decision is a part of that continuum. The critics are right that egg freezing doesn’t guarantee you a baby. But I suspect that women know as much. It’s also true that the egg-freezing industry has an incentive to overpromise and oversell. But there is also just simply much we don’t know about a technology that can have a 10- or 20-year horizon—that is, if a woman freezes her eggs at 20, researchers need to wait a few decades before they can answer the question of whether she’ll ever thaw them, and what will happen next. The data on egg freezing remains mixed. One meta-analysis found that of more than 13,500 patients who went through egg-freezing cycles, only about 10 percent returned to use those frozen eggs. The rest ostensibly had children some other way, or chose not to have children at all. Of the 10 percent who retrieved their frozen eggs, 34 percent became pregnant, and 29 percent had a live birth. That means that most women who froze their eggs did not wind up with a baby from those eggs (which, to be clear, is not the same as them not winding up with a baby at all). This information is useful for women to have, and the fertility industry should be required to be transparent with patients. But it’s also not the same as saying that egg freezing is pointless or doesn’t work, which seems to be the narrative adopted by many on the political right. The analysis also found that “the most widely reported reason for fertility preservation is single relationship status or the lack of a partner, particularly one who is willing or committed to having children”—which suggests that many women who froze their eggs eventually did find a willing and committed partner and went on to have children naturally; a small minority went on to have children using their thawed eggs either with a partner or on their own; and others likely did not find a willing and committed partner and decided not to have children at all. Any of these outcomes are possible for AOC and any other woman who freezes her eggs. I would imagine she knows that no single outcome is guaranteed and there is no way to live a life totally insulated from regret or misstep. But in being the person in charge of this decision, she is at least making the best decision for her given the information she has and the desires that she feels, even if she can’t guarantee where it will lead. This is, in essence, what feminists have long wanted for women: not perfect or frictionless lives; not the false promises of fairy tales; just the very real adult work of having to consider what you want and make choices given what you have. Get the best of news and politics Sign up for Slate's evening newsletter. Children Family Health Women