When Egg Freezing Is a Form of Protest

When Egg Freezing Is a Form of Protest

By

Sarah Jones,

senior writer for Intelligencer who covers politics and labor

Last weekend, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told her legions of Instagram followers that she’s decided to freeze her eggs at age 36. She filmed herself injecting fertility medication and joked, “Don’t be weird about this,” adding, “I know all of you will be.” She was correct. “If she got pregnant now, it would technically be a geriatric pregnancy,” the right-wing commentator Matt Walsh whined. Jeremy Wayne Tate, creator of the Classic Learning Test, compared Ocasio-Cortez unfavorably to a British queen. “By the time Queen Victoria was 37 she had nine children,” he posted on X. “Who is the badass?” (Queen Victoria famously hated pregnancy and childbirth, which made her feel like “a dog or a cow,” and was an ambivalent mother at best.) The podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey accused her of “glamorizing the lie that women can have it all: You can’t. Biology is real and how you order your life makes or breaks your future.”