By sharing her fertility-preservation attempts, AOC invites us to consider how to really support families.

Here’s the start of my essay in the Nation this past week :

Since she was elected to Congress in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has had her every move scrutinized. In a 2021 interview, Vice President JD Vance condemned Democrats as “childless cat ladies” who “don’t really have a direct stake in [our country],” citing AOC’s lack of children as a matter of public concern. Now the 36-year-old New York representative has embraced the attention in order to change that narrative, posting a series of Instagram reels documenting her egg-freezing journey and demystifying this fast-growing type of reproductive care. Her chatty, informative reels offer a calm counterpoint to the fevered lectures we’ve heard from Vance and others in the “retrosexual” crowd (pro-natalist, masculinist, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-DEI) about departures from old-school patterns of women’s work and fertility….

– to read the rest you have to go to the site:

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/aoc-egg-freezing-fertility/

Elizabeth Gregory is the author of The Real Domestic Product: How Birth Control Built Equality (and Why the Future of the Economy and the Planet Depends on It) (MIT Press 2026).