Giving women a false hope

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is 36 years old, recently ended her long-term engagement, and has been eagerly publicizing her choice to freeze her eggs—an effort, she says, to preserve future pregnancy options. Last week, she posted a series of videos on Instagram, one showing her first self-injection of drugs to stimulate egg production. 

Only her dog—not her fiancé—appeared in the video as she poked at her exposed stomach, an oddly apt image for the future she’s creating. Should her frozen eggs become embryos, their father need not be present for their creation either.

One wonders why a congresswoman, whose job is to vote and represent the people of New York, would cosplay as an egg-freezing influencer—giving the public a social media play-by-play of her personal fertility journey. In 2026 America, the most obvious and applauded answer to that is, well, because she can. 

Saying the process has helped her “feel more in control of my life,” AOC—who is rumored to be prepping for a 2028 presidential run—also used the stunt (she’s a very media-strategic politician) to position herself as a feminist leader on the issue.

“We are not prepared for our own lives, whether that is in puberty, whether that is in pregnancy, whether that is in perimenopause, menopause,” she said, oddly lumping the stages of female biology into one sweeping group—as if documenting an elective fertility procedure somehow illuminates the entire female experience. 

Not enough information is available to women about egg freezing, she claimed. So, she, a woman who doesn’t need to freeze her eggs, is “helping” by spending thousands of dollars to put her body through unnecessary trauma that may or may not one day result in a child (if she decides she even wants one.)

CNN’s Dana Bash called the move “monumental for women serving in office,” saying she’s met women who chose to sacrifice motherhood for public service and later regretted it. Bash applauded egg freezing because it allows women to plan for motherhood independently of a man.

Interestingly, most women who freeze their eggs for non-medical reasons never end up using them. Only 10% of this group come back to retrieve their eggs. It seems that the longer one puts off motherhood for personal reasons, the less likely one is to choose it. Pew Research found that 38% of childless women ages 50 and over said they wanted children at one time.

If AOC wanted a child, she could have had one by now. She was, after all, engaged for four years, right until a few days ago. Women have babies in all stages of their careers today, including those in high-profile political positions. Former Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers famously had three children while serving in Congress, raising them even as she rose to GOP Conference chairwoman.  

As AOC pursues higher political ambition, the “right” opportunity to reproduce won’t emerge. Imagine if she were elected president and how inconvenient a time that would be. While I wouldn’t suggest that she have a child as a single woman, spending more than a decade in an unmarried relationship through her prime childbearing years was itself a choice—one that allowed career to take precedence over motherhood.

Egg freezing offers a technological workaround for the biological consequences of that choice, but the message this sends other women—that they, too, can postpone marriage and motherhood and simply preserve the option for later—is misleading. Biology makes no such promise.

There’s something troubling about treating fertility as an inconvenience to be managed around professional ambition. For women desperate to have children naturally, the assumption that motherhood can just fit neatly into a preferred timeline is arrogant. AOC takes her God-given, fertile body for granted, just assuming that all will work out when she’s ready. 

There’s nothing wrong with having children in your 40s if that’s what naturally occurs, but purposely postponing until then is a problem. It gives the illusion of a pregnancy vending machine—available to order at will. 

This way of thinking ultimately contributes to devaluing life in the womb. Once reproduction becomes a transaction involving enormous sums of money, it becomes easy to view the child less as an infinitely valuable and unique person and more as a product expected to arrive without defects. We saw the darker implications of this mindset in a recent case in which intended parents reportedly instructed their surrogate to abort after learning the baby had serious health problems. 

What if AOC chooses to attempt pregnancy with her frozen eggs at age 45, but the embryo she implants has Down syndrome or another health issue? Will her motherhood timeline be disrupted? Will waiting this long make it impossible to try for a second child if the first isn’t what she wanted? Or is this all just a political stunt on her way to the presidency—something she’s doing to appeal to female voters who instinctively don’t trust a woman without children? 

Despite the applause, AOC’s egg-freezing performance is a false hope, teaching women that putting off motherhood is good, possible, and easy. They follow her example at their own peril.