AOC’s public egg-freezing shouldn’t feel radical. But in today’s US, it does | Moira Donegan

The congresswoman’s decision is an assertion of women’s freedom and dignity at a time when our status is rapidly eroding

“D on’t be weird about this,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive star and rumored 2028 presidential contender, said on her live video broadcast as she raised her shirt to angle the syringe into her abdomen. Then, with resignation, “even though I know all of you will be.”

The New York Democrat is 36 years old, and this week she revealed that she is beginning the process of freezing her eggs during Congress’s August recess. In the video, Ocasio-Cortez said that she was seeking to destigmatize the realities of women’s lives as they navigate the conflicting demands of professional aspiration and family building; she explained to viewers the process of the hormonal injections she was administering to herself, showing them the drugs and injector she was using arrayed on a paper towel, beside a disinfecting towelette. The procedure, Ocasio-Cortez explained, was not covered by her insurance, and she would be paying “100% out of pocket”. She had been saving to afford it for some time. “This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life,” she said, going on to assert her hope that transparency about such questions will destigmatize women’s reproductive lives and promote their dignity.

It’s a bold move from a likely presidential contender. The decision to go public with her egg-freezing distinguishes Ocasio-Cortez as the rare Democrat willing to articulate an alternative vision of gender politics in an era when the Trump administration and its allies have rapidly eroded women’s civil rights protections, reproductive rights and workforce access, but when many mainstream Democrats have eschewed a robust defense of women’s 20th-century gains in favor of coveting white male votes and making overtures to the manosphere. Still, more than a political statement of values, the move may also serve as an early confrontation with what may be among the future-candidate AOC’s thorniest electoral vulnerabilities: her sex.

By now, it is hardly controversial to say that the status of women has rapidly eroded over the past decade. The culture has turned against women’s freedom and dignity. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected just weeks after the nation heard him proudly declare that he grabbed women “by the pussy”, defeating the first electorally viable female presidential candidate in a huge symbolic defeat for women’s advancement that has still not been reckoned with. In 2022, the national right to an abortion was killed off by the supreme court in the Dobbs case, decimating women’s dignity still further and materially harming their health and economic prosperity.