AOC is freezing her eggs. I didn’t — and I don’t regret it.

By Marcela García

When I was in my mid-30s, I had a brilliant scientist friend at the Broad Institute. Over dinner one night, I asked him to explain, yet again, what genomics was and how DNA sequencing actually worked. At some point he recommended a book I certainly never read. Then, somehow, the conversation turned to fertility.

He explained that the genetic quality and viability of a woman’s eggs decline sharply as she approaches her late 30s. It might well have been the first time anyone had told me that. Sperm ages, too, but not on the same unforgiving timeline, he said. My friend knew I was single, so he gave me some unsolicited but ultimately prescient advice: You should freeze your eggs.

I remember being puzzled. Egg freezing, he said, was still relatively new and very costly — at least $20,000. I was barely making rent at the time, so the procedure wasn’t a medical choice available to someone like me.

All these years later, I still can’t explain genomics in layman’s terms. But the egg-freezing part of the conversation stayed with me.

It’s the conversation US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 36, forced into the open last weekend, when she announced on Instagram that she’s freezing her eggs “to feel more in control” of her life. She said she’d saved for years for a procedure her government health insurance “does not cover one penny” of. She said it’s costing her roughly $8,000–$9,000, all out of pocket.

Her decision to go public with such an intimate process drew wide praise, along with predictable and mostly unfounded criticism. But what made me pause was one word in her explanation: “control.”

Because when it comes to fertility, control is precisely what women are lacking. I know what it’s like to discover, too late, how little control reproductive technology can actually confer.

I married my husband in my late 30s. By the time we were ready to try for a child, I was 42, and the diminishing number and quality of my eggs made a successful pregnancy unlikely, however it was attempted. So we turned to in vitro fertilization.

Anyone who has gone through IVF knows how deceptive that little acronym can be. It doesn’t capture all the daily injections, appointments, blood draws, ultrasounds, waiting — the bizarre experience of having your biggest, most private hope boiled down to follicle counts and probabilities. We went through three rounds and none resulted in a pregnancy. Oh, and like AOC in her egg-freezing journey, I did it all while holding down a full-time job.

All throughout, I kept thinking of my friend’s advice. If only I had listened to him, if only I had had the money, if only I had frozen my eggs when they were younger.

But hindsight — reproductive hindsight, in particular — has a way of distorting odds, of making the illogical seem rational. In 2011, egg freezing was still officially experimental. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine didn’t lift that label until fall of 2012, and only for medical indications. And even if I had had the money, I can’t say that I would have done it as a single woman who did not yet know whether, when, or with whom I might want to have a child. I was never someone who desperately wanted to be a mom, nor was I convinced then that I didn’t want to be one.

Egg freezing is far more established and accessible now than when my friend first mentioned it. An increasing number of large companies offer it as a benefit to their employees. Preserving younger eggs genuinely expands a woman’s later possibilities. That is real and it matters.

But an egg is not an embryo and an embryo is not a pregnancy and a pregnancy is not a baby. At every stage, biology, nature, luck or karma, your God (depending on your beliefs) — they all have a say. Egg freezing can create options but it’s not a guarantee.

The attacks on Ocasio-Cortez show how quickly a medical decision becomes a referendum on whether a woman has organized her life correctly. She should have married earlier, she waited too long, she’s trying to have it all. These judgments rest on the same illusion of control, which is a standard no woman can reliably satisfy. The “approved” reproductive timeline always materializes after a woman has failed to follow it.

AOC’s very public experience has helped me realize that I no longer believe my younger self made the wrong choice. Women deserve to learn about their fertility while there is still time to act on that knowledge and deserve access to technologies that might expand their choices. But no procedure can guarantee the future, and no woman should be blamed for failing to control what was never entirely hers to control.

This article originally appeared on BostonGlobe.com on August 14, 2026.