“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.
There’s only one problem. Despite our myriad technological advancements and medical breakthroughs, biology is stubborn. Egg freezing, and IVF more broadly, is often marketed as a guarantee; an insurance policy of sorts. But these treatments simply do not guarantee long-term fertility. Even for the youngest women who undergo egg freezing, it only guarantees success about 50 percent of the time. The empirical evidence related to women closer to the end of their fertile years is even more disheartening.
Online forums and social media are awash with the personal stories of women who are heartbroken by their lack of success. “I was made to believe success was a guarantee,” reads one of many posts on the IVF subreddit. The responses are damning. “We were led to believe the same,” reads one. “It’s a sales pitch,” reads another.
The narrative of guaranteed success is, in part, the result of an increasingly commercialized fertility industry. The number of clinics owned by private equity has quadrupled since 2013. Clinics are using increasingly sophisticated – and aggressive – marketing tactics, including “success guarantee” programs which promise refunds in the absence of a live birth, but can come with higher upfront costs and additional eligibility requirements.
The reality of elective egg freezing puts AOC in a somewhat difficult position ideologically. It’s clear that she wants her experience to be representative of her politics: progressive, rebellious, “badass;” an alternative to the oppressive messaging pushed by people – “oftentimes men,” as she says in the video – who want women to make choices about motherhood out of fear. That is, the fear of being too old to have children.
However, egg freezing doesn’t free women from the biological clock and their fear of running out of time; rather the practice is governed by the biological clock, even as it attempts to push it back.
Still, it cannot be denied that egg freezing – beyond its biological, financial, emotional, and moral considerations – provides women, like AOC, with choice, which is indeed a central tenet of liberalism.
But there’s perhaps a more important choice AOC has now to contend with. And that is the choice to either liberate women by giving them the full truth about egg freezing, or to perpetuate the misconceptions that keep them out of sync with their bodies, their choices, and their lives. Namely, that you can buy your way out of biological constraints.
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