“All of these men often times who are saying, ‘oh if you haven’t had a kid by 30 like you’re done,’ it’s just not supported,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in a video uploaded to her Instagram Story on Sunday night. The 36-year-old congresswoman has announced to her audience of 9.6 million followers that she, like a growing number of American women, has decided to freeze her eggs. She continued, “Don’t trust the people writing abortion laws, that don’t even understand the first thing about a woman’s body, to tell you about how many eggs you have at what age.”
Despite our myriad technological advancements and medical breakthroughs, biology is stubborn
Since then, she has shared videos of traveling to work with a lunchbox full of medications, spoken candidly about her “belly” having entered its “pufferella era” (read: her stomach is bloated from her medication), and even shown herself administering hormone injections in the green room before a T.V. appearance. In her quintessential manner, AOC has been open and authentic about her journey so far.
The question that arises is: will she be honest about her actual experience and the costs involved. Elective egg freezing has long been touted as a progressive and indeed cosmopolitan antidote to the constraints of natural fertility, which – rather inconveniently for most modern women – peaks in the late teens and early twenties and declines, to varying degrees of rapidity, thereafter. Whereas previous societies sought to organize their lives around these biological constraints – by marrying young and having multiple children – modern society believes these constraints can be overcome through human ingenuity.
