Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has announced that she’s freezing her eggs, basically planning ahead to defer reproduction. Some people have feelings about this.
As predicted, a cohort of conservative critics emerged on social media to bemoan AOC’s personal choice, which challenges their prescriptive vision for American mothers: young, married and uninterested in pursuing a career.
Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative podcaster and author, is a vocal figure in the proudly antifeminist, pronatalist movement known as the “womanosphere”. She once described herself as “unapologetically pro-life” yet sounded decidedly anti-reproductive health, writing on X that Ocasio-Cortez is “glamorizing the lie that women can have it all. You can’t. Biology is real and how you order your life makes or breaks your future.”
Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, chimed in, writing that egg freezing was “one of the reasons why fertility rates are cratering”.
“AOC turns 37 in a few weeks so if she got pregnant tomorrow it would already be a geriatric pregnancy,” added Kolvet, who has no medical credentials. “This is not female ‘liberation,’ it’s a cautionary tale.” (Factcheck: Ocasio-Cortez’s birthday is in October.)
Rightwing commentator Matt Walsh also called out the congresswoman’s age, writing: “I’ll have kids in [their] 20s by the time I turn 50. AOC apparently wants to have a toddler at that age. Totally backwards and ridiculous.”
I say, shut the fuck up you busybodies. It is her body, her choice, you don’t have the right or the knowledge to complain about it.
This is what they want to do with everybody’s reproductive choices.
My only question is why I needed to know this.
Doesn’t that graphic describe embryo freezing rather than egg freezing?
These people want a remote control to what’s in everyone else’s pants.
I bet these jokers have all said nice things publicly about the Duggars and their almost a whole baseball team brood of children, despite Momma Duggar having her youngest children very late in the day.(Privately they probably think the Duggars are idiots, especially Walsh.)
Speaking of big families, I would like to remind people that humans are generally K-type reproducers, especially in the modern world where kids need to learn a lot to prosper. We do better by investing more energy in fewer kids. Leave the r-type reproduction to other organisms.
One wonders how much criticism would have been leveled from those quarters if Ms Ocasio-Cortez had acted identically, at the same age (and with the same “family status”), had she been Laura Loomer — the right (Right?) race, politics, etc.
Give ’em time, they’ll have “questions” for all of our choices.
They just started with reproduction because SEX.
timgueguen @ # 4: … the Duggars and their almost a whole baseball team brood of children…
Eh? Last I heard, they had two teams and an ump, unless you omit the three in jail.
I was thinking of the 26 man roster currently used in Major League Baseball.
One of the historians I enjoy recently put out an excellent video on declining birth rates, and the history of various birth rate panics.
While there are multiple factors involved in why women are having fewer children and having them later in life, the reason behind the conservative panic is mostly just racism.
Birth rate panics tend to coincide with immigration panics.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VMmmPFnHF90&ra=m
Of course, had she elected to not have children at all, they would have mocked her for that. “Childless cat lady” or something along those lines. One reason the more progressive arm of the Democratic Party is having some success in elections is because they know the only proper response to right wing trolls is to ignore or mock them because no matter what a Democrat does, even if it is exactly what Republican politicians have done/are doing, the Democrat will be pilloried for it. Meanwhile the establishment Democratic leadership all too often seems to bend over backwards to accommodate this bad faith criticism. Which both disheartens the base and gives others ammunition to declare that there is no real difference between the parties.
The idiot Duggers, Elon Musk, and the “quiverful” religious fanatics sure do seem intent on switching from a K type to an R type reproductive strategy. Odd how many of them are such horrible parents, toxic belief systems in action. Musk is afraid that the white race is going to become extinct, overrun by the “Coloureds”. Oddly matching his parents and grandparents strong Apartheid support. And he has even assisted South African racists getting into the US to escape their “oppression” in South Africa, which the very racist Orange Felon fully supports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_Kids_and_Counting
https://www.instyle.com/all-about-elon-musk-14-kids-and-their-four-mothers-11940372
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/2/11/elon_musk_was_raised_under_racist
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-brought-6-000-white-204425513.html
https://www.grunge.com/935500/the-untold-truth-of-quiverfull-christianity/
@6
It’s as if “pro-life” / “Christian morals” / “good old-fashioned family values” are just half-arsed disguises for “White [preferably northern European] and patriarchal”. Like how they look the other way for the current president trampling all over decency and family, whereas Obama’s impeccably traditional home life did nothing to protect him from racism at every turn.
So….if you happened to miss having kids earlier in life, it’s anti life to plan ahead to have them later? Isn’t it more pro-life to do that rather than to just forget the whole thing?
“Geriatric” preganacies, so what? Michelle Kwan just had two kids (not by surrogate) at ages 42 and 45 respectively, and she hadn’t even had eggs frozen, it was by fertility methods.
Everyone cheered, two more towards 9 billion!! And she’s not even white, the Great Replacement!
It’s absolutely none of my damn business whether AOC is having eggs or embryos frozen, but I am rather selfishly hoping it’s the latter purely because of the common practice of implanting only the strongest embryos and (when they will definitely not be used in future) discarding the rest. Of course, this process will happen in due course anyway, but if they are already fertilised then the control freaks will be apoplectic as babies are being frozen before being “murdered”.
I’m sure it will come as a massive surprise that Matt Walsh is a hypocrite as well as an ass. He left out that he has a younger set of twins that are 3 years old, which would have made his geriatric sperm about 37. And his wife, though she hides her age, is about as old as he is.
https://dailycitizen.focusonthefamily.com/matt-walsh-is-right-you-wont-regret-a-large-family/
It’s the freedom-for-me-in-forming-a-family-but-no-such-freedom-for-thee caucus.
I will say this much: forced procreation is abhorrent to me.
—
imback, not just political Social.
Anecdote: when I got married (mid 20s) it had to be Catholic wedding (I was the only atheist around) and that meant being vetted by the officiating Priest. Basically, we had to promise to at least try to have children. To reproduce. Else, no go.
So I went along with the LARPing. With a wink and a nod. We both knew.
But I am not normal, of course. Anyway, social pressures. They work on most people.
Are they also worried about men becoming fathers at an older age? Because their sperm quality really declines and causes miscarriages and birth defects…
Oh, right, I forgot, cis men don’t bear the physical costs of these, especially not of dying from a miscarriage under abortion bans.
Imagine being Matt Walsh and calling someone else, “backwards and ridiculous”. O.o
@John, my history is similar. I was atheist and my fiancee was Catholic. Fortunately, my then graduate school office-mate Brian was a Jesuit priest and he agreed to preside over a Catholic wedding in a small chapel within St James Cathedral in Seattle, with a ceremony trimmed to the minimum the church required. We did not have to promise to have children (though we did eventually). Now over forty years later, my wife is now an atheist Buddhist and a regular member of the local UU congregation, and Brian has also left the church and gotten married.
Don’t see anything wrong with “childless cat ladies”. Fewer children means more homes for cats – which are much nicer and cheaper.
My wife used to belong to a small church known variously as the “church with no name” or the “two by twos”. They tried to follow the example of Jesus and his disciples simple lifestyle, no churches and their clergy had no possessions and relied on the charity of their congregation for food and shelter. I’m atheist but I had a lot more respect for their willingness to live like Jesus than all the venal televangelists and Christian nationalists that pass for believers here.
@8: Re Duggar-spawn: according WP, Joseph and Kendra have just this week been given some sort of conditional discharge (IANAL), so no actual conviction and jail time, but pretty clearly they did Something Bad. So out of 10 sons, 20% of them turn out to be kiddy-diddlers — pretty sure that’s well above the background rate. One might be tempted to hypothesize that raising kids in a super-authoritarian, sexually repressed environment fails to turn out morally-responsible adults with benign sexual preferences.
Childless cat and dog man here FWIW. It works well for me and for the cat that owns me and the dog that’s part of my family. Both much loved and much nicer than almost (?) all humans with very few exceptions.
Too many people on this planet already albeit overpopulation isn’t quite the boogeyman it is painted as and feminism, education and giving more people a proper social welfare safety net and reducing infant mortality is (Obvs? Should be obvs?) the answer to it. See old Hans Rosling yt clip on the population issue
Don’t Panic: The Truth About Population | Full Documentary (1 hr long) & why that’s overblown as an issue and obvs its resource distribution and consumerism more than sheer numbers of humans that’s the big problem.
recursive rabbit @3
Kinky!!
A couple of commenters here saying “None of my business”, but as I understand it, AOC has deliberately made the procedure public to provide information to other women, and to challenge prejudice. Good for her.
Yeah, it’s not enough that she wants to maybe contribute against the birth rate. Proving that was never their concern.