“The thing that will always stay with me,” former California Rep. Katie Porter said of her harrowing experience hiding with then-colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during the January 6 attack on the Capitol. “I was saying: ‘Well, don’t worry, I’m a mom, I’m calm, I’ve got everything here we need. We could live for like a month in this office.’ And [Ocasio-Cortez] said, ‘I just hope I get to be a mom. I hope I don’t die today.'”
At the time, the remarks reflected the fear felt by two female lawmakers, as rabid men on the hunt for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi roamed the halls of Congress screaming, “Where is she? Where is she?” But when I first heard about this exchange, nearly one month after the Capitol attack, I recall being struck by how much Ocasio-Cortez’s comment echoed my own thoughts as a woman of a similar demographic: mid-30s, working, and hopeful for motherhood but unsure how it would unfold. Would it ever happen? If so, when? Have my choices hurt or helped that one outsized desire? Such questions tend to hum anxiously in the background for a woman of a certain age, in both mundane and extraordinary moments, as the one Ocasio-Cortez shared with Porter.
I thought of this anecdote again this weekend after the New York congresswoman posted a series of videos announcing that she was freezing her eggs. “This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life,” Ocasio-Cortez said in one Instagram video. In another, the 36-year-old progressive filmed herself injecting the procedure’s hormone medications into her abdomen. “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 told ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday.
It was in the same interview that the progressive lawmaker made her strongest public comments yet that she was considering higher office. “I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” Ocasio-Cortez responded when asked if she would ever consider a presidential run. What about minority leader Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) seat? “Anything is possible at this juncture,” she replied.
When it comes to her reproductive choices, Ocasio-Cortez does not owe the public any explanations—full stop. Still, the timing of her fertility journey, specifically the way it dovetails with her intimations that she might seek higher office, has predictably inspired some petty criticisms, particularly from those on the right who disparage the disclosure of her personal decision as a calculating play for political virality. Others, like the conservative commentator Matt Walsh, appeared to assume the role of reproductive physician, arguing that at 36, she was already too old to consider having kids. “Totally backwards and ridiculous,” he wrote on social media. Then there were arguments, nearly all from men, that she should try to have kids naturally and soon—a wild claim that assumes so much of Ocasio-Cortez’s personal life.
But the most interesting responses came from the video’s unlikely supporters and defenders. “The same people who call themselves pro-family think a woman’s uterus has an expiration date they get to police,” said Newsmax political analyst Mehek Cooke, citing her own experience of having children later in life because her “body did not cooperate with her schedule.”
“If one woman wants to preserve her right to have children, which means more than having none—we should celebrate that,” Katie Miller, the right-wing podcaster and wife of Stephen Miller, wrote on X. “If she inspires other women to have babies, we should celebrate that.”
It would be shortsighted, if not downright asinine, to view Miller’s post as a kind of political evolution; she and her husband appear singularly obsessed with declining birth rates, a preoccupation that is by turns racist and hyperbolic, often blaming those rates on birth control and feminism. But in applauding Ocasio-Cortez, Miller and her ilk still revealed something significant: That at least with the issue of fertility, many are not in lockstep with staunch conservatives who see reproductive procedures like egg freezing as immoral. Indeed, they even appear to welcome more options for people struggling to have children.
Options. Aren’t they what Ocasio-Cortez may be exercising as she embarks on her fertility journey? By freezing her eggs, the congresswoman isn’t ruling out the possibility of having kids, much in the same way Ocasio-Cortez isn’t not thinking about the White House in this very moment either. In fact, it seems that for Ocasio-Cortez, the two potential futures—kids and higher office—braid together, because of course they do. That is not surprising for so many of us in the face of aging, careers, and prohibitively expensive fertility procedures. (For me, now the mother of one kid, the questions surrounding the next still loom profoundly.) Any anger from men on the right underscores how deeply ignorant they are about the acute challenges many people of reproductive age face in considering fertility and climbing professional ladders. And yes, that includes all the way up to the White House.