Back in May of 2025, I (Sam) wrote an article for the women’s magazine Evie that blew up. I shared my experience as a young college student almost falling for all the ads from big fertility companies about selling or freezing my eggs. When I see what is going on now, I understand the pitch because I was the target audience for it.
“Eight thousand dollars was a lot of money for a college student like me, barely making rent each month. And all I had to do was donate some eggs.”
I didn’t do it. But I understood exactly why someone would say yes. That’s what makes U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC)’s recent announcement that she was beginning the process of freezing her eggs worth talking about now.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez revealed her decision via a video on Instagram. It went viral on the major social media platforms with her narration: “Don’t make this weird,” she said as she injected herself with hormones. She said she felt “empowered” to start that process now.
“This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life.”
Her statement reveals the illusion Big Fertility sells women like AOC: “control” and “empowerment”. But control over what, exactly? Not her fertility.
Her fertility is still on the clock. What she’s really buying is the feeling that she has bought herself time, and that feeling is the product.
The fertility industry can’t promise her a baby.
She wanted to help inform other women about their options and normalize those discussions, but she doesn’t fully understand the reality of those options, and she doesn’t realize how those options harm women and children. Normalizing a conversation is not the same as being honest about what’s inside it. In fact, our current society has a bad habit of normalizing things that are inherently bad for both women and children, for families, and for society as a whole.
A general rule of thumb is that if something needs to be “normalized”, it probably isn’t healthy or normal.
She explained her reasoning this way: “Men run for office, or frankly, they interview for jobs, and people don’t think in the back of their mind, ‘Okay, this guy is running for office. How old is he? Oh, well, is he going to want to start a family?’” she said.
She’s right that men don’t get asked that question. She’s wrong about what to do with that fact. Stop trying to be like men. We aren’t men, and we never will be, and pretending otherwise is not the same thing as equality.
Katy Faust said it plainly: Ladies, your career should not look like a man’s career.
A woman’s body is primed for children in her 20s and early 30s. Not your 40s. Not whenever you make partner, or the Presidential aspirations don’t come to pass. Waiting for the “right time” according to a career timeline built for men means waiting past your body’s own timeline.
You don’t need to artificially suspend your fertility when young, nor cryogenically bank it, with questionable success rates, when you’re aging. Both of those choices treat your body and fertility as the obstacle rather than an asset.
Your career should be more flexible, creative, and peak later than your husband’s. Reorienting our family and career goals to better match our biological reality isn’t a second-rate choice; it’s just a truer picture of how a woman’s life actually works, if we let it.
Real equality is recognizing how your body is different from a man’s and working with it rather than against it. If you’re tamping down your fertility for decades so you can add to the tax base working for “the man,” and then paying thousands to ingest or inject hormones to get the life you want, that’s not female empowerment. We’d argue that’s a better picture of what “misogyny” (a hatred or hostility to women) actually is.
The “empowerment” framing only works if you don’t look too closely at what’s actually being sold.
Naomi Whittaker took to X to share a warning with AOC and anyone willing to listen. The agency that cleared this procedure was protecting the eggs, not her.
She is an expert in this field. We invited her onto the Them Before Us podcast for our IVF | FYI series (link to full series) a while back.
And even setting aside the health risk, the procedure rarely delivers on its own promise. A UCLA study found that only 5.7 percent of women who freeze their eggs eventually return to use them. Ninety-four percent of the time, the “insurance policy” AOC is describing just sits in a freezer.
Check out this longer thread about the risks and realities of egg freezing.
It’s also worth remembering that AOC hasn’t always framed children as something to plan for. Seven years ago, she said it wasn’t ethical to have kids because of climate change. She has moved from telling women having children was irresponsible to modeling how to delay having them. Neither position was about what’s actually good for a child.
Them Before Us exists to put children’s rights back at the center of every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. Your monthly gift makes that work possible, in courtrooms, statehouses, and living rooms around the world.
Once she decides to try having children, here’s what actually happens through IVF, the process she is currently on track to need.
An embryo is created in a lab using eggs retrieved from the biological mother and sperm from the biological father. From a biological perspective, a distinct human life is formed at fertilization when the sperm and egg combine to create a zygote, a genetically distinct individual. Cell division follows, and one-directional growth continues until the child’s birth. That child, in other words, already exists as soon as the lab creates the embryo.
The IVF industry routinely grades embryos based on their characteristics and “fitness.” Some embryos will be discarded at this stage due to a perceived lower chance of successful implantation. An embryo’s grade may not be a direct indicator of its genetic health. Many embryos that appear to be of lower quality may still be genetically normal and capable of developing into healthy babies. A grading system built to predict implantation odds is, in practice, a system for deciding which of these small humans get a chance and which don’t.
Embryos are frequently screened for chromosomal abnormalities or genetic disorders, with over 75 percent of clinics engaging in this practice. 73 percent of IVF clinics allow for sex selection, and concerns have been raised about the industry allowing the selection of traits such as hair and eye color.
Once one or more embryos have been selected for implantation, “surplus” embryos are usually frozen, allowing for additional attempts at pregnancy without undergoing another cycle of egg retrieval. Roughly 1.5 million embryos are currently frozen in liquid nitrogen freezers. A million and a half children, in suspended animation, while the adults who created them decide what comes next.
IVF routinely violates children’s right to life. IVF’s success rate is only 23 percent. For women over 40, the odds drop to a less than 10 percent chance of success. However, that only counts the embryos that are implanted. Although the U.S. does not track how many IVF embryos are transferred to the womb and given a chance at life, research from the U.K. found that significantly more embryos were destroyed or left in storage than transferred. Based on CDC reporting of the number of IVF cycles in the U.S., it is estimated that only 2.3 percent of IVF embryos result in a live birth. For the few babies born alive, there is significant evidence that being born via IVF increases the risks of cognitive, developmental, and physical disabilities. (IVF Fast Facts)
None of that made it into AOC’s vlog; she might not even know most of that. IVF clinics certainly aren’t sharing most of that in clear conversation; they’re hiding it in the fine print.
None of this happens by accident. Convince a girl that her future depends on separating from her fertility, then sell her back pieces of it later. That’s the business model, and it only works in that order.
Girls are being raised to believe that marriage and motherhood are life bonuses, if you have time. College degrees, student loan debt, and corporate jobs became the standard. Anything else was considered a risk to their independence. The anti-child cultural and institutional messaging worked. For the first time, young men express a stronger desire for children than young women. The message aimed at girls succeeded so completely that it flipped a gap that used to run the other way.
The IVF and abortion industries don’t care about the right to family plan, as they claim. They care about money. They make a large profit off of women delaying marriage and motherhood. The longer we wait, the more we need their services. Egg freezing, IVF, abortions: all billion-dollar markets, and all of them depend on women arriving later and more desperate than they needed to be.
They start young. They follow girls from middle school to college. When we’re finally on our own, vulnerable and fertile, they move in. This marketing and sales funnel has been active for years before most of us noticed we were in it. AOC is advertising an idea even though she is only at the beginning and has no idea how it will turn out. She doesn’t know what her life will look like in 5 years or 10 years. She has no idea if the fertility industry’s promises will come through. In fact, the stats are not in her favor.
Politics aside, we feel bad for her. Wanting children is good and healthy. She didn’t feel that way a few years ago. She was saying the opposite. Watching her arrive at a desire this natural, this late, and by this expensive a route, is not a win for women. She’s masking that loss by celebrating and calling it empowering.
When I wrote my Evie article, it was for women just like AOC. Women who were sold a lie, women who bought it and shaped their life around it. I wasn’t writing about a stranger’s mistake. I was writing about the mistake I almost made myself and a mistake we want as many women as possible saved from.
If she wants to use her frozen eggs later down the road, she will require IVF or surrogacy to have a baby, which will always come with ethical and health risks that the baby is forced to bear. It is rare, even via egg freezing and IVF, that a woman can get pregnant for the first time after 40 years old. Most of the embryos (her children) she creates will never see the light of day.
Purposely deferring motherhood into her 40s means limiting the possibility of her kids knowing their grandparents, and probably removing the possibility of her grandkids knowing her. That is selfish. She’s joined in glamorizing the lie that women can have it all at whatever time they see fit.
You can’t.
Biology is real, and how you order your life can make or break your future.
Jenn and Sam discuss this in their latest Here for the Comments episode:
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Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs. Have a friend who would enjoy getting the resources TBU offers?
We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.
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