On Sunday, the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez uploaded a video to her Instagram stories. She’s seated on a beige sofa, in jeans and a cardigan, with her French bulldog, Deco, by her side. The vibe is intimate, with the jittery undercurrent of an unboxing video. On a coffee table in front of her, a series of small vials and swabs are laid out. “All right, everyone,” she says. “Day One of freezing my eggs. I’m diving into the process.” She sweeps her hair back and takes a deep breath. Then she pulls up her shirt and injects herself in the stomach. “Don’t be weird about this,” she says. “Even though I know all of you will be.”

Spoiler: people were weird about it. Ocasio-Cortez’s choice to share her egg-freezing publicly has kicked off furious debate and confused hand-wringing among conservatives. Posting on X, the right-wing commentator Matt Walsh called Ocasio-Cortez’s decision “totally backwards and ridiculous.” “She’ll turn thirty-seven in a couple months. If she got pregnant now, it would technically be a geriatric pregnancy. Instead, she’s freezing her eggs,” he wrote. “This desire to have children late in life is completely baffling to me.” He went on to say, “I’ll have kids in [their] twenties by the time I turn fifty. AOC apparently wants to have a toddler at that age.”

Meanwhile, the conservative podcaster Katie Miller, who is married to Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, wrote on X, “We have historically low birthrates worldwide. If one woman wants to preserve her right to have children, which means more than having none—we should celebrate that.” But Miller’s praise was barbed. “More women should get married and have babies younger,” she wrote, “but too many women buy into the feminist lie and spend their childbearing years climbing the career ladder.” She continued with a perplexing solution to the birth-rate conundrum: “When society has more babies and more young women and men are exposed to more babies, there will be more babies.” Solved!

In the days after Ocasio-Cortez began documenting her egg-freezing, rumors swirled around her relationship status. Was she still engaged to her college boyfriend, the red-headed web developer Riley Roberts? What did he think about her decision? Commentators noted that she had not been wearing her engagement ring lately, and that Roberts had not been photographed by her side. On Wednesday, the Times reported that the relationship had “quietly ended some time ago.” (Ocasio-Cortez has not confirmed the split.) This fuelled further speculation about her chances as a young, single woman in an upcoming Presidential run—a possibility that she has not ruled out. The “looksmaxxing” influencer Clavicular took the opportunity to declare, on his live stream, “I’ll marry her, dude, come on.”

This past Saturday, Ocasio-Cortez had posted several chatty videos explaining why she was pursuing egg-freezing, and why she wanted to do so publicly. Most of her reasons will be familiar to millennial women of a certain demographic. (Some of the circumstances, such as the fact that she is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, and had to “grow up in the public eye,” will not.) “Usually, I keep my private life quite private, but I have made the decision to start freezing my eggs,” she says in one video, speaking to the camera. “And I want to share this because I was weighing it for a very long time, and I was saving for it for a very long time, and there just isn’t a ton out there, I feel. And sometimes it can feel very daunting.” She continues, “As women, in general, we are not taught about our bodies. We are not prepared for our own lives,” from puberty to menopause. Whether or not you want children, she says, “I think we need to show more depictions of women having full lives in every context and every choice.” She frames her own decision as empowering: “This is a choice that I’m making to feel more in control of my life.”

The congresswoman is not the only one to feel that way. The number of U.S. women freezing their eggs for nonmedical reasons has soared in the past decade. In 2014, around four thousand Americans chose to freeze their eggs, according to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. By 2024, that number had jumped to nearly forty thousand. Many factors are at play here. In 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine removed the label “experimental” from egg-freezing. (Previously, egg-freezing was used mostly to preserve fertility in medical emergencies, such as cancer treatments.) Companies have also played a role: Apple and Facebook have long covered elective egg-freezing and storage for their employees. But success is not assured. Age still matters. Women in their twenties have healthier eggs, in greater quantities, than women in their thirties. (So it goes.) The more eggs, the better the chance of creating a viable embryo. This has led some parents in Silicon Valley to pay for their daughter’s egg-freezing as a graduation gift.

One of Ocasio-Cortez’s great skills is her ability to come across as a normal person, even when what she’s doing is manifestly extraordinary. In one video, she tells viewers that she’ll be going on the ABC talk show “This Morning,” “as part of my job.” “Because of the timing of it, I’m going to have to take my shots in the greenroom before my interview. And I want you all to see that, because women can do anything,” she says. “And I think it’s badass that I’m going to be, you know, giving myself shots in the greenroom, get my glam on, roll out, talk about international events, domestic policy, elections, pop out, live my life, do my thing.”

The follow-up videos, which show her in a dark blazer, prepping her medications in the greenroom, make for powerful images. She’s there, getting her hair and makeup done, injecting herself with hormones, and then speaking coherently on live television. All of that is undeniably impressive, and yet the word “badass” stuck in my head like an off note. So often, egg-freezing is framed as an empowering choice, but the costs attached to it are not negligible. There’s the financial burden—most insurance policies, including Ocasio-Cortez’s, don’t cover egg-freezing or storage—and the physical toll on a woman’s body. (Interestingly, a recent study from U.C.L.A. found that only about six per cent of women who freeze their eggs later return to use them.)

Watching the congresswoman, I kept wishing for an alternative route, one where the options for an ambitious working woman didn’t come down to either having children very young, as conservatives might wish, or delaying through costly and uncomfortable procedures. It’s an inconvenient truth that the years in which many women feel ready to start a family—their mid- to late thirties—are also the peak years for career advancement. The stakes are higher for Ocasio-Cortez. (Not many of us are contemplating a run for President.) But the themes are similar. Alongside promotions and deadlines, many young women are also privately bargaining with time and their bodies. How much longer can I wait? What am I willing to give up? Instead of building a society that accommodates these concerns, we have built one that treats them as superfluous—private affairs that women must navigate like a secret second job.

Part of Ocasio-Cortez’s savvy is in making these difficult calculations visible. Perhaps she should go further. In one of her videos, she seems to hint at the imbalance, as if testing the waters. “This is just not something that men deal with,” she says. “Men run for office, or frankly they interview for jobs, and people don’t think in the back of their mind, O.K., this guy is running for office, how old is he? Is he going to want to start a family? If he does, or he doesn’t, has he made a choice of it?” She goes on, “And I’m not here to, like, talk about what’s fair or unfair in this context. This is just the world we live in today.” ♦