By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2026-08-17 03:11:27 | Updated at 2026-08-17 06:15:52
3 hours ago
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s very public fertility journey is one of the saddest stories of our time.
The 36-year-old New York democratic socialist congresswoman has been filming herself in livestreams on Instagram all week, injecting her stomach with hormones and narrating her long-shot efforts to extend her fertility by freezing her eggs.
“Usually I keep my private life quite private,” she tells the audience of millions who have watched her videos, “but I have made the decision to start freezing my eggs.”
Good on AOC for acknowledging she wants to be a mother, even if it’s not at the top of her list of priorities.
But she is living out the feminist left’s antiquated mythology of “having it all” — updated with the false promise from the increasingly popular egg freezing industry that you can easily outwit Mother Nature.
“Maybe in life you can’t have everything,” she says. “But here’s the secret: You can have a hell of a lot.”
AOC is admirably trying to answer the primal maternal urge almost every woman feels, even if they are pressured to deny it.
But she also is single, with The New York Times reporting that she has split from her long-term fiancé and college sweetheart, Riley Roberts.
No guarantee
She also is being touted as a potential presidential candidate in 2028, a startling concept that she has half-jokingly refused to rule out in interviews.
Her dating status is another age-old story. Now she finds herself at 36, still beautiful, considered youthful by the standards of the day, but with ovaries that stubbornly remain in nature’s grip. From the age of 35 a woman’s fertility falls off a cliff.
AOC is trying to outsmart the process by using hormone injections to force her ovaries to emit six to 10 eggs at once which are then removed and frozen in the uncertain hope that they can be successfully thawed and fertilized when she’s ready to become a mother.
It’s the same intractably unfair imbalance between the sexes that generations of women have been forced to confront.
For half a century, women have been misled into believing fertility can be controlled. It can be denied, but there is no guarantee that motherhood can be postponed until you are ready.
In the same week that AOC was pumping hormones on Instagram, Karoline Leavitt announced she was leaving her job as White House press secretary to spend more time with her children.
It is the perfect juxtaposition of the increasingly divergent views of motherhood on the right and the left.
Leavitt, at 28, already has two children and has built an enormously successful career with multiple options available when she chooses to step back into the workforce full time.
She didn’t allow fear of missing out on career prospects daunt her motherhood goals, and that boldness is a mark primarily of conservative women that has led to what the Institute for Family Studies calls “ideological fertility divide.”
An IFS study in June of 7,000 Americans ages 18-54 found that, while birthrates have been declining precipitously throughout the United States since the Great Recession, a fertility “gap” has emerged between the American left and right.
Conservatives have more children than liberals do: an average of 1.40 compared to 1.09 children for liberals, the study found.
Of those respondents with no children, 51% are liberals compared to 40% for conservatives.
The divide may have to do with differing attitudes to parenting: whereas 36% of liberals view parenting as “very complicated, difficult, and stressful,” only 24% of conservatives do.
The willing self-sacrifice involved in the maternal impulse is viewed by leftists as some sort of patriarchal construct to enslave women, rather than a joy and the ultimate portal to adult fulfillment.
The leftist constantly bucks against nature, whether it’s denying sex differences or relying on technology to indefinitely postpone motherhood.
Mothers are recategorized as “chest feeder,” “birthing parent” or simply “bleeders.”
Abortion crazed
We have a Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who doesn’t know what a woman is.
Social media is awash with videos of men posing as women who pretend to have period pains or in the case of a transgender Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, Ashley Webb, claiming he experiences a monthly period from his anus.
The left’s acknowledgment of the reality of motherhood is abortion, abortion, abortion, with a smattering of “free” childcare promises sprinkled in.
Abortion for them is the neatest solution and they have managed to transition from the Clinton era’s “safe, legal and rare” to the ghoulish glee of Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey’s ceremony last week to celebrate her signing of a law that allows abortion up to the moment of birth.
The baby boom at the White House suggests conservative women have found an alternative. And it’s not the trad wife/Handmaid’s Tale dystopia the NYT was quick to sneeringly depict.
The Gray Lady noted that Leavitt, Second Lady Usha Vance and Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, were all pregnant at the same time and insinuated that their glowing public images were part of some neo-natalist plot by the White House.
The truth is that Donald Trump, a grandfather of 11, loves having babies around the White House.
When she announced her pregnancy, Leavitt thanked Trump and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles “for their support, and for fostering a pro-family environment in the White House.”
Wiles — the first female White House chief of staff and a grandmother — told me on Pod Force One that women can indeed have it all, just not all at once.
“When my children were little, I stayed home because I couldn’t go jetting off to Washington when we lived in Ponte Vedra, Florida,” said Wiles.
“And then when they were grown and out of the house . . . I thought it was time to leave home. . . . And now I’m back.”
She doesn’t gloss over the difficulties of her pioneering trajectory, which included a divorce.
“I did take 11 years pretty much out of this business . . . I didn’t know whether I could or whether this career had passed me by. And it hadn’t. But it’s not the easiest thing to do.”
Wiles goes out of her way to make the Trump White House family friendly
‘Not one size fits all’
“You can’t be your best at work if you’re worried about your children, worried about your daycare, worried about whether the nanny’s sick on a given day.
“So hopefully we make it as comfortable as the White House can be for young moms, young parents, young dads.”
Conservative women seem to understand better that in a long life, there are “seasons” to careers and child rearing, as independent Women’s Forum CEO Heather Higgins puts it.
“There will be seasons when you focus on one and seasons when you focus on another. But it’s not one size fits all because if you want that kind of society, we might as well have burkas,” Higgins told the PragerU podcast “Real Talk” earlier this month.
“Life is not perfect.”
No it’s not, but that doesn’t mean women should be fearful.
Good luck to AOC. May she find what she is looking for, preferably not the White House.
