Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. She’s engaged to the same man who’s stood by her side for over a decade, and, with Forbes estimating her net worth as of a year ago at $125,000, she’s wealthier than at least two-thirds of her peers. So when the socialist superstar teased a major personal update on her Instagram, suffice it to say that many of us were surprised that Ocasio-Cortez announced not that she was pregnant, but that she was planning to be, maybe, someday in the future.
“Usually, I keep my private life quite private, but I have made the decision to start freezing my eggs, and I want to share that with anyone who is — and I want to share this because I was weighing it for a very long time, and I think that, you know, I was saving for it for a very long time, and there just isn’t a ton out there, I feel, and sometimes it can feel very daunting,” said the 36 year-old. “I think we need to show more depictions of women having full lives in every context and every choice.”
Now, I am not a trad, a Catholic, or in any way morally opposed to egg freezing itself. Egg freezing, while not the surefire insurance policy fertility specialists once promised it would be, is a useful pronatalist tool for the women still searching for Mr. Right.
But beyond the statistical uncertainty of egg freezing, the procedure is wildly expensive and physically taxing. Egg freezing requires the prospective mother to inject herself multiple times a day for a fortnight, spiking her hormones overnight to the levels as high as they climb by mid-pregnancy, culminating in a surgery that usually involves IV sedation or general anesthesia and a transvaginal ultrasound-guided needle that passes through the vaginal wall into the ovarian follicles.
I’m graphically describing the difference not to shame Ocasio-Cortez or anyone who chooses egg retrieval for their own family planning, but rather to challenge the weirdly regressive trap that the otherwise progressive feminist seems to have fallen into: in Ocasio-Cortez’s own illustration, women “having full lives” doesn’t mean having a baby and a career, but undergoing weeks of medical treatments and a surgery to accommodate, as she described it, the “political tax” imposed by dumb bigots who think a mother cannot possibly occupy a role of a political prestige.
Perhaps this one is a little personal to me because I had my first baby three months ago, and in the one month I’ve been back at work, I don’t know if my life has ever felt fuller, more productive, or more passionate than it does now.
And contrary to the loads of negativity and fearmongering that were lobbed my way throughout my pregnancy, having my baby didn’t blow up my life, my career, my sleep, my fitness, my body, or my marriage. Instead, it’s ruthlessly optimized it.
If you are as Type A and neurotic as I am, early motherhood can really be a minimally disruptive series of systems engineering, figuring out how to schedule feeds to get the baby to sleep through the night, scheduling gym time to coincide with childcare, and having a go-bag packed and ready for a moment’s notice.
I had a close-to-worst-case-scenario labor and delivery, complete with an unplanned cesarean section and three weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit, and by six weeks, I was back at the gym, and by eight (two weeks after baby’s vaccines went into effect), my baby was coming with me. I’m probably 10 pounds heavier than I was a year ago and I usually have a baby strapped to my chest when I’m not at my desk or on a TV set, but otherwise, the rhythm of my life is largely the same as it was before, only now I get to have a whole, wonderful person with me, grocery shopping, taking the bus, going to dinner, watching the World Cup at an (outdoor) happy hour, all with a cute little peanut breathing on my chest.
This is all my personal experience and does not discount anyone else with more colicky babies or less supportive social networks, but if you do have the executive function and supportive partner, motherhood does not need to be professionally or personally catastrophic the way that social media sometimes likes to make it seem.
By contrast, my life feels fuller than I ever knew it could be.
So while I abhor Ocasio-Cortez’s politics, she seems like a decent enough person that I would never encourage her to make her life less full on the basis of a lie. Because the fact is that not only do women such as Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett (mother of seven children) and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt (mother of two) occupy the highest echelons of Washington power while raising children, but the modal American woman is a mother who works.
At least for now, more than 4 in 5 American women are mothers by the time they finish their childbearing years, and the overwhelming majority of mothers have full-time jobs. Nearly 60% of mothers with a baby younger than 1 are employed, a fact that a strident subset of Ocasio-Cortez’s haters like to forget. And while most of those working mothers probably aren’t running for president, nearly every woman to shatter a glass ceiling in political leadership has been a mother. Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Vigdis Finnbogadottir, and Sirimavo Bandaranaike — the first female leaders of Israel, the United Kingdom, Iceland, and Sri Lanka, respectively — were all mothers. In recent memory, Sanna Marin became the prime minister of Finland just one year after having a daughter, and Jacinda Ardern had her daughter while serving as New Zealand’s prime minister.
Because Ocasio-Cortez herself publicized her personal life and expressly framed it in political terms, it is fair game for the commentariat to dissect, but that doesn’t mean that all the critiques have been politically smart. Matt Walsh gloated that even “if she got pregnant now, it would technically be a geriatric pregnancy.” This is objectively true and medically meaningless. In fact, it undermines the exact point pronatalists should be making.
The odds of egg freezing at Ocasio-Cortez’s age are literally a coin flip; whereas the average 35-year-old who freezes 10 of her eggs (a standard amount of eggs that can be collected in one cycle) has about a 70% chance of one of those eggs resulting in a live birth, the odds drop to 60% by age 36, and by age 40, they’re down to 30%. By contrast, a 36-year-old has a 75% chance of conceiving the old-fashioned way within one year of removing the goalie, so to speak.
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Furthermore, Walsh, a father of six married to a stay-at-home wife, is speaking to an audience of conservatives who largely harbor more traditional priorities: while conservative women still work, we tend to have more children and earlier in life. But Ocasio-Cortez’s audience includes a lot of college-educated, career-oriented women who are, statistically speaking, on the fence about motherhood. It’s wonderful to tout having huge families or stay-at-home parents for the families who choose to do so, but pronatalism has to include appeals to women who are debating whether they even have one child. That includes pointing out that egg freezing is at least a modestly taxing procedure that accommodates the convenience of men and the supposed “political tax” imposed by sexists, whereas naturally conceiving, if possible, is actually the self-serving choice for women.
I am also a college-educated, career-oriented woman living in a city, probably closer to the modal Ocasio-Cortez stan than Walsh or the other men opining on her egg freezing. So while I cannot speak to having two, three, four, five, or six children, homesteading, homeschooling, or being a stay-at-home mother, I can tell Ocasio-Cortez that given a well-paying, steady job capable for paying for at least part-time childcare (not to mention that Congress itself has the sort of on-site daycare that most parents would consider ideal) plus a supportive spouse makes motherhood not just possible but plausible. And I suspect that if she does have a child, she will fall in love all over again, finding her life isn’t over but rather fuller than she ever previously imagined it could be.