New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a possible contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, is freezing her eggs in hopes of being a mother one day, she announced in a video on Instagram.
“Normally, I keep my private life quite private. But I have made the decision to freeze my eggs. And I want to share this because I was weighing it for a very long time, and there isn’t a ton out there, and it can feel very daunting,” she said, adding that she knows there is political risk in making the decision public.
Ocasio-Cortez, often referred to as AOC, is 36 years old and has been engaged since 2022 to Riley Roberts, an Arizona native she met when both were students at Boston College.
In the video, she first displays the syringe she will use to inject herself with hormones that will induce her body to produce multiple eggs, but says she won’t do it live until she gets comfortable with it. “Maybe I should start an ASMR egg freezing channel,” she says.
She later pulls back her shirt to expose part of her stomach and injects her belly, seemingly nervous, before saying, “That wasn’t so bad.”
Egg freezing has been increasingly popular among young women who want to delay or preserve the ability to start a family. In 2022, the actress Mindy Kaling, best known for “The Office,” said in an interview, “I wish every 19-year-old girl would come home from college and that the gift — instead of buying them jewelry or a vacation or whatever — is that their parents would take them to freeze their eggs. … They could do that once and have all these eggs for them, for their futures.”
Research reported by UCLA Health last year found “the number of planned elective egg freezing cycles nearly quadrupled between 2014 and 2021, increasing from 4,153 to 16,436.”
The average age at which women freeze their eggs also declined in that same time period, from 36 years in 2014 to 34.9 years in 2021, the report said. The success rate of pregnancy using IVF and frozen eggs is affected by the age of the woman at the time of freezing and the number of eggs that are frozen, research has shown.
In a video, Ocasio-Cortez said that she had been saving money for years for the procedure, and that it would cost $8,000-9,000, none of which is covered by her insurance.
“This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life. ... If people want to make assumptions about my decision, let them make those assumptions. I feel empowered to make this choice,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram posts provoked not only discussion about assisted reproductive technology, which was involved with the birth of more than 100,000 babies in the U.S. in 2024, but about why she was choosing to delay marriage and motherhood when she is already engaged.
Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire questioned why Ocasio-Cortez would choose to delay motherhood when she is already at the age when her pregnancy would be considered “geriatric.” (The preferred term these days for pregnancy in women 35 and older is “advanced maternal age.”)
But at National Review, Kathryn Jean Lopez warned, “Think twice before you comment on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her eggs.”
Wrote Lopez: “I suspect the immediate response from the right is exactly what she might have been hoping for. There is the obvious (and logical) question: You’re 36 and have been engaged for years. What are you waiting for? And: Haven’t you suggested not having babies because of climate change? And: Why are you recklessly encouraging more later pregnancies?”
Lopez sees Ocasio-Cortez’s announcement as potentially “politically brilliant, even if intensely cynical,” given the large number of young American women who want to be mothers but aren’t yet for a variety of reasons.
“If Ocasio-Cortez does want to be a mother and isn’t yet because the man she has spent the better part of her adult life attached to isn’t ready to be a father — and we have no way of knowing if that’s the case — that’s a miserable place to be at 36. And that is known to be a bipartisan experience in modern-day America.”
Appearing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Ocasio-Cortez was asked about her future by host Jonathan Karl, and the conversation first went to politics before turning personal.
Karl asked if she planned to run for president, and Ocasio-Cortez replied she hadn’t ruled that out, and also hadn’t ruled out running instead for the Senate.
He then asked about the Instagram posts, to which Ocasio-Cortez replied, “In this political environment where this administration is denying reproductive care to women across the country, from abortion rights to the ability to carry out a healthy pregnancy, I think it’s important for us as leaders to have these conversations and share these processes, especially for working women across the country and normalize them.”