Side effects of AOC's fertility journey may include right-wing rage
Call your doctor if spiraling worsens
One thing about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? She knows exactly what she’s doing.
She is detail-oriented to an extreme. I’d attribute that to a Boston University education, but seeing as I did not absorb that in my four years there, it’s safe to assume she was born with it. This attention to detail, covering of bases, doing of homework is why she’s hard to fuck with in a building of perfunctory politicians, only hustling to catch the next flight home.
Consideration is her currency. She’s not one to endorse without intention, comment without care, or post without purpose. Back in mid-May, I mentioned “an ongoing situation I’m monitoring — AOC, herself, doesn’t post a ton of content.” When she does, it’s mostly reserved … for Instagram Stories — a sign of great respect in millennial culture. That’s why “Egg Freezing” has joined the exclusive ranks of highlights saved on her profile.
“I want to talk to you all in a way that I often can’t talk to the media.” Expertly wielding social media to create a sense of intimacy around a topic that most would consider touchy and women are discouraged from talking about. I asked Rep. Sara Jacobs, who pioneered this approach last year in her vlogs about the egg freezing process, why this content is so resonant:
“We’re documenting exactly what they’re trying to stop: women making their own reproductive health decisions. … And it’s going viral because people desperately want this kind of authenticity and realness from people in power.”
In one story, AOC brings up the quiet luxury men experience running for office or interviewing for a job, their (potentially inconvenient) family planning is not really part of the calculus. The congresswoman is well aware her decision will change people’s perception of her career and abilities. But she’s decided she “can live with that.”
It’s clear to me that this is a major motivating factor (and risk) in her publicizing this process. If AOC can provide visible evidence of her continued competence — unshaken by added hormones — she comes one step closer to dispelling the idea that her career has to suffer if she prioritizes fertility and family planning alongside it.
In her own words, after taking her dose of medication on Sunday and immediately going on national television for an interview: “That’s on people saying women are too emotional to lead.” She’s anticipating the assignment voters and the media will give her, and working to complete it long before it’s due.
It’s journalism school 101: showing us, not telling us, that she can deliver in real time, in all ways. Can AOC do it all? That’s a question only time will tell and only she can answer. It’s this other question — should she do it all? — that’s eating up the timeline.
How this broke the right, which MAHA insider is proposing a fix, what forces Kylie Cheung sees behind all this, and why I think we need to get schooled … all below!
SHE SAID DON’T BE WEIRD
We know from the heroic work of Luann de Lesseps that asking people to be cool … almost always leads people to being uncool. And for AOC, in the video administering her first dose of fertility medication, that was clearly the point. I would bet she said “don’t be weird about this” with a certain reliably outraged demographic in mind, knowing they often can’t resist.
The pipeline: They get weird. She gets views. An audience who wouldn’t otherwise see this content (young right-leaning women) gets exposed to potentially new, enlightening information.
Different categories of reactions
Publicity stunt: Tons of chatter that this is a publicity stunt to set her up in some way for 2028. I didn’t not say that above, btw.
Laura Loomer: “She wants a sob story about infertility when she does decide to run for President.”
Link Lauren: “The only reason she is doing this is because she’s probably seen the polls and focus groups that Americans will not vote for a woman without a child. She does not actually want a child.”
Anna Khachiyan: “She’s just doing this as a social media stunt to ragebait people into a viral discourse with some electoral outcome in mind.”
Dangers of delay: You can actually feel the anxious energy emanating from this cohort, who are angry that she is delaying pregnancy more by taking this action.
Allie Beth Stuckey: “But *purposely* deferring motherhood to your late 30s and 40s — especially via egg freezing, IVF, and surrogacy — is indeed selfish and irresponsible” (for the reasons listed here)
Lauren Chen: “Why on earth … is she not having a baby now?”
Peachy Keenan: “Freezing your eggs at 36 is like opening a 401k at 64”
Isabel Brown: “what are we waiting for????”
Cathy Talk: “Why is there no pregnancy?”
Kangmin Lee: “What eggs is she freezing?”
Jeremy Tate: “By the time Queen Victoria was 37 she had nine children” (truly love this one)
Miscellaneous:
She said climate change would end the world in 12 years and now she’s freezing her eggs, must not be true
“If you’re ingesting or injecting hormones to get the life you want, that’s not empowerment. That’s internalized misogyny.”
AI video made by Benny Johnson of AOC putting a carton of eggs in the refrigerator
Chatter about her weight, positively and negatively
Matt Walsh had perhaps the most viral reply to it all, saying: “This desire to start having children late in life is completely baffling to me. … Totally backwards and ridiculous.” “Baffling” to Matt and other creators on the right has seldom led to restraint in commentary, as we’ve seen with the WNBA saga that has spiraled totally out of control.
EXCEPTION TO A RULE
In reality, there are many conditions — societal, personal, economic, etc. — that push young people to start families later. The more influencers and leaders hyperfixate on attacking individual choices instead of finding societal solutions, the bigger the problem gets. Incentivizing young people to build a family requires a lot more than a lecture on values.
I saw a post on Instagram two weeks ago from The Conservateur, a new-era lifestyle outlet for young conservative women. I read pretty much everything they publish at this point, and this was no exception. It asked this question:
The “Young American Family Act,” dreamed up by founder Jayme Leagh Franklin and her husband, lobbies for a federal income tax exemption for married couples under 35 with at least one child. I gave Jayme a call to ask her about it in light of all the talk about family planning this week. Her idea started with the understanding that “shaming young people in particular for … feeling disillusioned with America” is not an answer.
Writing policy solutions isn’t necessarily in the couple’s wheelhouse, but it doesn’t seem to be in Congress’ wheelhouse either these days, so why the hell not try. “Incentivizing people to create families and to create their own American dream” is Jayme’s antidote to the threat of “cancerous” leftist ideology.
“I think the message of keeping your own hard-earned money in your pockets and being able to invest that back into your family. I just can’t think of a better message that’s more pro-America than that … I just think if we don’t do something, you’re going to see the rise of democratic socialism with our generation.”
While she didn’t shop the policy to the president during her Oval Office visit this week, the plan is to get it in front of members of Congress. In the meantime, I asked how this uproar over AOC’s family planning aligns with her own pro-family agenda. Jayme is “never for shaming people for not having kids” and doesn’t “believe in getting involved in people’s personal lives.” But what’s her read on this pre-mommy vlogging?
“I don’t think we are entitled to know anything about her family planning … [but] I think it would have been beneficial for her to provide more context because I think it was very confusing to a lot of people. … There are biological realities that exist that I don’t think a lot of women are actually very educated or informed on. I think we need to have more education for women that [IVF] should be a last resort … waiting around isn’t going to be beneficial for your health or for your wallet.”
The lack of women’s health education is something I’ll get to below. But I heard stroke after stroke on the biological clock over the past few days of discourse — the idea that feminism has created a system that lies to women about the longevity of their fertility. And I learned, it has a name.
THE “FERTILITY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX”
Who knew we were so wealthy in industrial complexes! Military and prison, boo. Tech, ominous. Celebrity, allegedly. Wedding, the current bane of my existence as my friends and I enter this zone in the peak of the Pinterest age (a topic for another time). Is this really another thing we have to worry about?
I pinged Kylie Cheung — staff reporter at Abortion, Every Day and author of “Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans” — for the answer. Her verdict: “largely astroturfed.”
“The anti-abortion movement is simultaneously going after birth control and IVF right now. Around the same time, we’ve started seeing this wave of female lifestyle influencers using virtually the same language, pushing this completely baseless narrative: The generation that started widely taking birth control is now heavily relying on fertility technology/IVF. So that means birth control must cause infertility, and the ‘fertility industrial complex’ is exploiting them.”
“Right-wing fertility panics,” Kylie says, are just a tool for “both out-and-proud white nationalists and closeted white nationalists stoke paranoia” and justify attacks on women’s reproductive care: “For lack of better words, it’s about control.” And much to a sect of the right’s delight, non-political influencers are doing their bidding as well.
“Digital spaces are so saturated with birth control disinformation already, and much of it has been at least a little successful: There are some surveys that show young women, in particular, self-report a willingness to change birth control methods or go off birth control based on what they see online.”
THE CARE AND KEEPING OF YOU
Do you want to know the thing that’s become more readily apparent to me than anything else in writing this? That I know absolutely nothing about post-pubescent women’s health. Fertility, who? Perimenopause, when? Freight-train collision menopause … what???
I hate to have a minor existential crisis in front of the class right now but, damn. I didn’t know how much I didn’t know. And now I see how this lack of knowledge about ourselves has been weaponized against women since the dawn of time.
Everything that I know about my biology is directly connected to varying degrees of emergencies I’ve had in the past ten years that necessitate visiting a physician, who I aggressively badger with every question I can squeeze into the 15 minutes they’ve so generously allotted me. This is, for all intents and purposes, a way to survive. It’s most certainly not a way to thrive.
When you consider how many tens of thousands of dollars it costs to obtain basic information about women’s health from a medical professional — only to sometimes be told the medical field doesn’t know a ton about women’s bodies either! — deciding to obtain basic information from randoms on the internet feels like a great money-saving opportunity. Occasional inaccuracy and hidden agendas be damned!
Do you know what I want? I want the made-for-30-year-olds version of the traumatizing American Girl puberty book we all had to read in fifth grade. Give me “The On-Going Care and Continued Keeping of You.” Who can write this book? I will give you an advance! It won’t be a good one, but I’ll literally venmo it right to you. You’d be providing a great service to us women who know nothing about ourselves.
This existential crashout is the product of just three days of one person sharing information about what hoops she is jumping through to preserve her ability to have kids one day. It …
reaffirmed my fear of needles
expanded my awareness of options available
deepened my respect for women, like my mom, who have taken on this process
broke my heart for women whose results aren’t what they hoped
It shouldn’t be up to AOC to teach a seminar on how the injections stimulate follicle growth … or why you risk ovarian torsion if you workout … or where to comparison shop to get better medication prices … or what happens to your frozen eggs if you die. But I learned all these things from her in the past 72 hours.
While some influencers are calling her “selfish,” I am, selfishly, grateful she’s willing to make her life experience our learning experience.
LOOSE ENDS
📝 Word I learned today: throughput
the amount of something (such as material, data, etc.) that passes through something, such as a machine or system — “We want to empower consistent user throughput on your platform.” (Tisya Mavuram, So what do you really think about AI?)
🥹 Something to make you smile today, brought to you by Goodable 🥹
Duck Friendship Helps New York Golden Retriever Recover From Health Issues and Start Smiling Again
“‘I never expected to own a duck. Never expected him to stay long term.’
A couple of years ago, Barley (dog) started having seizures. The family put her on medication and the seizures stopped, but they also noticed side effects.
‘She just lost her spunk,’ Tori said. ‘She lost her goldenness.’
Now the two are virtually inseparable. Louie (duck) pecks at Barley, and Barley chases Louie. They wrestle and relax together.
‘She wanted to be friends with Louie and hang out with him a lot, so she kind of stretched her joy and fit in with him.’”
Grace Note: If you haven’t seen the actual CBS segment on this, do yourself a favor and hit this link too. The comedic timing of the duck is everything.