After an initial backlash, the congresswoman's fertility videos have been applauded by women on both sides of the aisle
By Kara Voght
"Don't be weird about this, even though I know all of you will be."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sitting on a couch, facing the camera as she jammed a needle into a fleshy section of her belly. It was her first round of injections to freeze her eggs, which the New York congresswoman had just announced she'd be livestreaming over the course of her treatment.
Each video was the work of a woman with an algorithm well-tuned to mid-30s anxiety. She unboxed her medications with maximum sound effect, the snap of peeling plastic and crack of opening vials as she prepared her first shot. "Maybe I should start an ASMR egg-freezing channel," she joked. She laid her needles neatly on her coffee table and explained the order in which she'd inject them. She even included a brief aside to show off her dead lifts, the final workout allowed on her regimen. Ocasio-Cortez, 36, looked every part the lifestyle influencer.
But she is not an influencer. She's a politician, albeit one with a preternatural talent for attracting attention and a savvy for wielding it for utmost impact. With it has come scrutiny, at times so intense that Ocasio-Cortez has called it dehumanizing.
So, of course, it did get weird -- in part because the response didn't fall on strictly partisan lines.
There was, of course, the predictable weirdness. The Daily Wire's Matt Walsh called her decision " totally backwards and ridiculous." Turning Point USA's Andrew Kolvet said she was a " cautionary tale" as to why "fertility rates are cratering." Conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey said there was " no reason she couldn't have kids yet" because Ocasio-Cortez has "been with the same guy for years."
That wasn't true, it turns out: The New York congresswoman's relationship with Riley Roberts, the college sweetheart to whom she got engaged in 2022, had quietly ended two years ago, Puck and the New York Times reported. This revelation kicked off yet another news cycle about what it means for a single woman to be considering the presidency, which Ocasio-Cortez has not ruled out. Neither the congresswoman nor her chief of staff responded to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Katie Miller, wife of senior Trump aide Stephen Miller, was unusually supportive of the woman she once called "sad," "petty" and "childless": "If one woman wants to preserve her right to have children, which means more than having none -- we should celebrate that," she wrote on social media.
In the mere century that women have served in Congress, just 15 women lawmakers have given birth while in office. Only one has publicly disclosed the use of medical intervention: Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.), who long struggled with infertility following her injuries suffered while serving in Iraq. Most elected officials fall into two categories: married with children or married to the job. To be childless and female as a politician invites a special kind of scrutiny. Perhaps it's why Kamala Harris underscored her stepparenthood during her presidential run.
Amanda Litman, the co-founder of Run For Something, an organization that recruits first-time Democratic candidates, said voters have reservations about women who aren't mothers. The childless candidates she's worked with field questions about whether they plan to have babies and, once they do, who will take care of them so they can do their jobs.
"There is no right way to be a woman running for office or serving in office," Litman said. "There are only a multitude of wrong ways."
Rep. Sara Jacobs (D., Calif.) felt this acutely during the two egg-freezing cycles she's undergone while serving in Congress, sneaking out of bill markups to go to her office to do her injections. She and Ocasio-Cortez had talked about the process -- "how physically tough it is, the scheduling of it, how to balance job responsibilities," Jacobs, 37, said. There were the physical reactions (bloating, sore breasts) and political ones ("People said I couldn't find a man or that I shouldn't reproduce," she said).
"As young women in politics, we are pretty accustomed to comments about our bodies and hairs and clothes," Jacobs said, "but it's definitely amplified when we talk about something like this."
This, despite the fact that this journey is nearly ubiquitous in Washington, a city where professional women her age darkly joke that fertility clinics are networking hot spots. It's also familiar to me, another soon-to-be 37-year-old who has been open (if not AOC-level open) about my own fertility efforts. My husband and I have been trying for the better part of 18 months, and are now seriously considering in vitro fertilization, which will require an egg retrieval not unlike Ocasio-Cortez's.
When I tell people this in D.C., I get a range of responses -- many knowing nods, but also some pity, often from well-meaning Republicans who see in me a poster child for the careerism they warn women against. Earlier this summer, at a Fourth of July gala, I mentioned this in the presence of Kari Lake, Trump's former head of Voice of America. She decided to lead a group of Trump officials in a prayer circle on my behalf, holding hands as I stood there, bashful in my gown. (It hasn't helped yet, maybe because she kept calling me "Sarah," a mistake for which she later apologized.)
To be clear, I am not the only woman in her prayers. "Motherhood is the greatest joy in life, and I hope she -- and every woman -- has the chance to experience that profound joy," Lake wrote in a text message of Ocasio-Cortez, a lawmaker she invoked as an insult during her runs for governor and U.S. Senate in Arizona.
The familiarity of the young congresswomen's trials -- and my own -- is why some young conservative women bristled at the outrage from some of their fellow Republicans. "Conservative men dunking on AOC for freezing her eggs is not a winning message with women voters," Alexa Henning, a former Trump administration spokeswoman, wrote on social media. The response from her GOP peers, Henning, 35, told me later, was overwhelmingly positive because they, too, are at a personal and professional crossroads.
"If I were an undecided voter and saw AOC's Instagram stories, I'd probably be like, 'That's awesome,'" she said.
Henning, like Ocasio-Cortez, took special issue with comments suggesting the New York congresswoman was "glamorizing the lie that women can have it all," as Stuckey had put it. "What? Of course we can have it all," Henning said. She pointed to the working mothers serving in the Trump administration as proof (though White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who took brief maternity leaves after having her two children, just announced that she would be stepping down from her role to focus on her family).
Some conservative women also applaud Ocasio-Cortez for showing interest in having children at all. The falling birthrate has become a rallying point for Republicans, who prefer someone becoming a mother -- even if's later in life, through medical intervention -- to opting out entirely. "I'm very encouraged and happy to see people across the entirety of the ideological spectrum talk about the desire to have children and make sure that that is a priority in their life," said the Daily Wire's Isabel Brown.
Brown takes issue, however, with any messaging that suggests egg freezing allows women to put off childbearing in favor of a career. Miller, for her part, couched her praise for Ocasio-Cortez with warnings to this effect, noting "too many women buy into the feminist lie and spend their childbearing years climbing the career ladder."
It was almost as if Ocasio-Cortez anticipated this criticism. "The media will run up and ask a question like, 'Are you going to run for this or are you going to run for that?'" she said in one of her Instagram videos, calling that framing a "two-dimensional, craven understanding" of power.
"I think a lot of us actually approach these considerations or these decisions through the larger context of our lives as whole human beings, and what is happening in our lives as whole human beings," she continued.
For most women, the decision to pursue parenthood isn't as simple as weighing it against the next career move. Anyone who suggests as much forgets that few outcomes -- most especially finding a loving partner, having a healthy baby, winning a congressional seat and maybe, one day, the presidency -- can bend to one's will. "This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life," Ocasio-Cortez continued. And who can't relate to that?