Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has frozen her eggs. But let's not pretend this is empowerment

So, this is not a woman without influence. Which is precisely why we should pay attention to the message she is sending. By publicly documenting her decision to freeze her eggs, she has the power to corrupt and mislead an entire generation of young women (and confuse the men who want to do the right thing by the women in their lives).

She revealed her decision to undergo fertility treatment in a series of Instagram stories this weekend. “This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a shocking admission about her inherent lack of agency. This woman is considered a potential presidential candidate. Do American voters want a president to control their country when she admits to feeling that even her own biology is beyond her grasp?

“As women in general, we are not taught about our bodies,” she went on. "We are not prepared for our own lives, whether that is in puberty, whether that is in pregnancy, whether that is in perimenopause, menopause, whether that is in so many different aspects of our lives."

Speak for yourself love! This is an extraordinary admission of weakness. But given socialists like AOC increasingly demonstrate an emotional need to be ‘looked after’ and outsource every element of their lives to the state, perhaps it is not unsurprising in the age of the internet she still needs someone else to "teach her" about her body.

She claims to want to educate women and normalise fertility preservation. But in my view, she is normalising a twisted, anti-human tech solution to the very basic driver of evolution. It isn’t just stupid; it is dangerous.

Because there is an insipid lie being sold to young women in the West: that biology is something we can simply put on ice until our careers are established, our political ambitions fulfilled, our mortgages paid and the perfect knight rides into our lives on an app.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has begun documenting her journey to freeze her eggs

GETTY/INSTAGRAM

This is false. There are women desperate for children who haven't met the right man. There are women whose relationships have broken down. There are women who have spent years building careers and suddenly discovered that the biological clock they were told not to worry about was, inconveniently, real. None of this is their fault. But these are the normal vicissitudes of life that have always beset women – the difference now is we assume, in an age of instant gratification and reward without effort, motherhood can be ordered like a takeaway. It is evolutionarily and spiritually banal.

We can still feel compassion for those women without pretending that technology has magically abolished fertility challenges.

The UK's own fertility regulator, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, is remarkably clear about this. Egg freezing is becoming more successful, but it is not a guarantee of having a baby. The HFEA says age at the time the eggs are frozen is critical and warns the likelihood of a future pregnancy is very slim when women freeze their own eggs over 40. Plus, the numbers around IVF are sobering.

In 2023, the average UK live-birth rate following a fresh IVF embryo transfer was around 35 per cent for women aged 18 to 34 but just 5 per cent for women aged 43 to 44 using their own eggs.

Egg freezing itself is even harder to quantify because the numbers are still relatively small. The HFEA says it cannot provide reliable age-specific success rates for frozen eggs because of the way the data is collected.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine similarly says the younger a woman is when her eggs are frozen, the better the prospects, but there is still insufficient evidence to tell women exactly how many eggs they need to freeze to give them a reasonable probability of a live birth.

In other words, freezing your eggs may buy you a long-shot option. But it does not buy you a baby.

And yet women like AOC are creating a culture in which increasing numbers of young women are being encouraged to think of motherhood as something they can schedule for later, as though the human body were another piece of software that can simply be upgraded when convenient.

This is happening at precisely the moment when the West desperately needs to have a conversation about having more children, more urgently.

The United Nations says the global fertility rate has fallen from 3.31 children per woman in 1990 to around 2.25 today. More than half the world's countries are now below the replacement rate of 2.1. Nearly one in five has what the United Nations describes as “ultra-low” fertility, below 1.4 children per woman. This is a Western demographic crisis.

And yet AOC is frivolously answering this with a trite message: Don't worry. Freeze your eggs!

This fashionable language of empowerment is, in fact, the polar opposite. Like pornstar Lily Philips claiming unfathomable promiscuity is "empowering", AOC’s action requires a detachment from the uniquely special biology of the female body. Injecting herself with synthetic hormones on camera prior to a live interview on news channel ABC, AOC is swapping intimacy for exhibitionism and privacy for publicity.

There is nothing inherently empowering about persuading women the inconvenient parts of female biology are problems to be technologically overcome.

There is something deeply strange and sad about a generation being taught to regard the very biological impulses that have driven human beings towards love, pair-bonding, sex, pregnancy and family for thousands of years as little more than internal messaging that needs to be ignored while we get on with our “real” lives.

I find it particularly revealing when young people regularly tell me they are “not looking for a relationship right now”. Not looking!

They talk as though a relationship is an Uber that can be summoned when the need arises.

I remember viewing the need for family life very differently. I wasn't obsessively hunting for a husband, but I was absolutely conscious I wanted to find the man who would eventually become the father of my children. That didn't make me less ambitious or interesting or independent.

It simply meant I understood that having children was not some unfortunate interruption to the story of my life – it would be a vital chapter.

However, all hope is not lost, and it is fascinatingly delineated along political lines. Having spent the last year watching the White House closely, I have witnessed two radically different cultural attitudes towards family. Around the Trump administration, there has been something approaching a baby boom.

Vice President JD Vance and his wife Usha have just welcomed their fourth child. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, one of the most visible young women in American politics, has just had her second baby. Katie Miller, the wife of senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller, has just had her fourth child.

Three babies, born within months, to women operating at the highest levels of American public life.

And what has struck me about spending time around the White House is this: these women aren't hiding their motherhood. They aren’t apologising for it. They aren't presenting children as something they will get around to once the important work is finished.

They are doing the important work with babies and children in their lives. It is not easy – but it is a trial that they accept willingly.

Leavitt is just 28. She has two children and returned to the White House press briefing room after maternity leave. She is, quite literally, demonstrating motherhood and extraordinary professional ambition do not have to be mutually exclusive.

None of this means every woman should have four children. It certainly doesn't mean women who struggle to conceive should feel guilty, and it doesn't mean every woman will find the right partner at 25 or 30.

However, the cultural difference is striking.

On one side, a hugely influential young woman is publicly telling millions of followers she is freezing her eggs so she can feel more in control of her life.

On the other, I am watching young, ambitious Republican women in Washington simply have the babies and remain in control of their lives…

So perhaps we should stop pretending the only progressive position is to tell women that postponing motherhood is liberation.

Maybe we need to make motherhood aspirational again.

AOC's announcement is not objectionable because she has frozen her eggs. She has every right to make that choice. But she risks telling millions of women that this expensive and risky choice is a cultural ideal.

And it certainly cannot manufacture the love, companionship and family that so many people eventually discover they wanted all along.

There is almost never the perfectly right time to have a child. There will always be compromises. But the child is not the inconvenience – the child is the point.

But if you want children too, don't let anyone tell you that biology will simply wait patiently in the freezer.

I wish AOC well in the plight to "control" her own life. But she is peddling an illusion.