AOC’s Illogical Case for Egg Freezing

This is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s week. Amid the backlash over her cavalier dismissal of “Woke 1″—the era of far-left activism and rhetoric that peaked in 2020—speculation about a 2028 presidential run, new reports that her engagement had ended two years earlier without public notice, and the video of her injecting hormone stimulation drugs ahead of an egg retrieval, the congresswoman has dominated the news for days. 

The video of her egg-freezing journey has drawn the most attention. Some praised her for demystifying the procedure, especially for women pursuing high-intensity careers. Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, conceded that feminism had done its damage but argued that delayed motherhood is better than none at all. Others faulted AOC for glamorizing a procedure that most women cannot afford and that, for many who can, will not work.

What struck me was not the video itself but the reason she gave for making it public—and therefore, as Albert Mohler observed, political. Women, she said, “are not taught about our bodies, we are not prepared for our own lives,” whether in puberty, pregnancy, perimenopause, or menopause. 

I agree. Women enter adulthood illiterate about their own fertility, especially in a career-first culture. But promoting egg freezing doesn’t combat ignorance or encourage women to pursue a family-first path earlier on. It profits from that ignorance, selling women a workaround that costs $15,000 per egg-retrieval cycle, commits them to later IVF, and succeeds less than 8 percent of the time per frozen egg. 

What AOC is describing, whether she knows it or not, is the case for body literacy: the ability to read your own cycle, to know what each phase indicates, to recognize when symptoms are abnormal, and to understand your own fertility well enough to work with it. Her comments underscore the need for a shift toward family life planning, which treats a woman’s hopes for marriage and children as something to plan for alongside her career, not after it. Instead, we have told a generation of women they can delay childbearing until they are established in their careers and rely on reproductive technology to make up for lost time.

In an ABC interview, AOC said it was important to “normalize” egg freezing in a “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.” That sits awkwardly against everything the Trump administration has been doing to promote holistic fertility care throughout a woman’s life.

Since 2025, this administration has done more for female body literacy than the previous four combined. In November, the FDA began stripping the black-box warnings that had steered a generation of women away from restorative hormone replacement therapy in menopause. This spring, the Office of Population Affairs released its funding notice for fiscal year 2027 Title X service grants, expanding the program’s priorities well past contraceptive access and pregnancy prevention toward reducing overmedicalization, promoting health and body literacy, advancing reproductive goals counseling, and supporting family formation. In July, the new teen pregnancy prevention grants went further still, requiring instruction on the phases of the female cycle, treating ovulation as the primary indicator of hormonal health and fertility, and weighing ovarian suppression against approaches that address root causes.

That approach prioritizes equipping women with proactive tools to govern their fertility, whereas egg freezing initiates a much longer, more uncertain road. On average, women need to undergo multiple egg-retrieval cycles at $10,000 to $15,000 each, then pay annual storage fees until they are ready to use them. 

Once the eggs are retrieved, the losses compound at every stage. Roughly a fifth of thawed eggs do not survive warming, and nearly 40 percent of women run out of viable embryos before a transfer is ever attempted. About 70 percent of the eggs that survive will fertilize, with overall IVF success rates sitting around 30–35 percent per cycle. From beginning to end, the egg freezing industry’s own figure is roughly six to eight live births per one hundred eggs thawed. 

And while egg freezing does not bear the same moral weight as IVF, it is important to keep in mind that the decision to freeze one’s eggs involves a later decision to use IVF, where human embryos are routinely made in surplus, ranked, screened, stored, and discarded. 

Beyond these concerns of undermining real body literacy, promoting a cost-prohibitive option with low success rates, and harming human embryos, it’s important to remember that delayed fertility does not only mean children later in life. It also means less time with your children, and still less time, if any, with grandchildren and great-grandchildren. 

When we promote egg freezing as an answer to career ambition or poor body literacy, we trade a long-term loss for a short-term gain. That trade is rarely presented to the women making it.

Image by nrkbeta via Creative Commons. Image cropped.