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“Don’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’ 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 a 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 massive 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. The rise of the manosphere has initiated adolescent boys and grown men alike into a vulgar, domineering style of public misogynist contempt; a rash of so-called “wellness” influencers have encouraged women to abandon their reliable hormonal birth control in deference to scientifically dubious superstitions; tradwives have told girls and women to abandon workforce participation, education, ambition, financial independence, and basic self-respect in favor of a gauzy, aproned life of baking a lot and thinking very little. Meanwhile, the rise of AI and deepfake technology means that now any woman or girl whose face appears in public must subject herself to the possibility, and frequently the reality, of being humiliated and degraded with digital pornography of her likeness, as a punishment for being female.
Policy, too, has turned against women’s historic gains. The Trump administration’s dismantling of the Department of Education means that there is now very little in the way of enforcement of Title IX, the law that was supposed to secure women’s equal right to education. The administration has weaponized the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in an effort to combat fictitious discrimination against white men, turning the organization away from its mission of fighting the kind of discrimination that keeps women out of the workforce. Officials have threatened to cut educational funding for students in women-dominated fields, and they have decimated Title X, turning the program meant to help low-income women meet their reproductive health and family planning needs into one that encourages childbearing instead. Programs meant to combat teen pregnancy – a wildly successful investment in young girls’ gifts and potential – have been cut. Birth control has been burned. There has been dispiritingly little pushback: shockingly few prominent political figures seem willing to mount a meaningful defense of the rights and dignity of women and girls.
In this context, AOC’s earnest willingness to draw attention to the status of women, and to argue for herself – and, implicitly, for others – as valuable for their intellects and gifts, and not merely for their reproductive capacities, is notable in itself. In her video, Ocasio-Cortez noted that she would be undergoing the treatment while continuing to work, including before an appearance on ABC’s This Week this past Sunday. “I want you all to see that,” she said. “And because women can do anything, and I think it’s badass that I’m going to be giving myself shots in the green room [as I] get my glam on.” On the show, she was blunt about the political moment motivating her disclosure. “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,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Radical feminism this is not. Ocasio-Cortez’s assertions of women’s worthiness and capacity for public life, and her celebration of her own reproductive choices and pledge to help make such freedom possible for others, would have been considered tepid, even banal, a decade ago, during the “girlboss” era, when women’s reproductive freedom and workplace access was more culturally accepted and less directly threatened by policy. Back then, I would have rolled my eyes at such a display; now, I could weep with gratitude. The principle that women can and should pursue ambitions other than marriage and motherhood turns out to be much more endangered than I thought it was then; the example of a prominent woman doing so turns out to be more precious.
But AOC’s egg-freezing saga, coming as 2028 speculation mounts, raises another question: how voters will respond to a female candidate of childbearing age. Historically, female politicians of AOC’s national profile and political ambition have largely been post-menopausal, and already mothers. Ocasio-Cortez’s youth and beauty have at times been a political asset – it’s hard to imagine any female politician achieving her level of national prominence while looking like, say, JD Vance – but it has also presented her with unique obstacles and humiliations, and prompted contempt for her on the part of her opponents that at times is so virulent and obsessive that it seems downright Freudian. As the first in her cohort of millennial progressives, and an early innovator in vertical video engagement with her constituents, AOC has long been willing to buck conventional wisdom about what a successful candidate should do or say in public. As she mulls a presidential run, she now has to contend with something else that no other candidate has ever done successfully before: running as a woman.
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Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
