On a personal level, this is actually kind of sad. On a political level, it’s about as telling as anything I’ve seen all year.
Over the weekend, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a series of Instagram videos announcing that she’s freezing her eggs. She lays out the medication, explains that a friend gave her a pro tip — do the injection that stings first, let it sit while you prep the rest, maybe it burns a little less. She jokes about not doing it on a livestream because she’d rather not be distracted while sticking herself with a needle. Then she went on ABC’s This Week the next morning and did her shots in the green room, because, in her words, women can do anything.
Look, I don’t enjoy this. The reaction from a lot of people on my side has been ghoulish and I’m not joining it.
I want AOC to have kids. I’m serious. Having children is a conservatizing event — the single most reliable radicalizing agent in American life, and nobody markets it that way. When my wife and I found out we were pregnant with our first daughter, Charlie told me flatly, “that’ll radicalize you.” And boy, was he right. The abstractions burn off. A whole category of things you thought were extremely important quietly reveal themselves to be nonsense, and a smaller set of seemingly less glamorous, permanent things move to the front of the line and stay there. Not because motherhood makes you a conservative but because it reorders your priorities in a direction that’s inconvenient for the ideology AOC built a career on.
And I’m not talking about people with real fertility problems, and I won’t belittle anyone who’s been through that. But that’s not what’s on the table here. She’s 36. Nothing is standing in her way. She could just have a baby.
So why isn’t she?
She’s running for president. That’s the announcement. She worked out that she’d like kids someday and that being pregnant on a presidential campaign trail is impossible, so the kids get deferred and the eggs go in the freezer. I’m not reading tea leaves — she told Jonathan Karl on Sunday she hasn’t ruled out a run, and she called the whole thing a choice she’s making to feel more in control of her life. She’s controlling the calendar. She’s clearing 2028.
She also called it a political risk, which is telling. You don’t weigh the political costs of a private medical choice unless a campaign is already part of the equation.
The procedure is an expensive admission that the clock is real, cheered on by the same movement that spent twenty years calling the clock a patriarchal myth.
Personally, I find this sad. Politically, clarifying. She’s trading family-later, if ever, for ambition-now, out loud, on camera. Which is at least honest.
I’d have chosen kids.
Get more of Jobob’s perspective on today’s most important stories on Turning Point Tonight, which airs Monday through Friday evenings on Real America’s Voice.
