Anna Russell’s New Yorker essay takes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s public egg-freezing — documented on Instagram, shots in a greenroom between interviews — as a starting point for something sharper than the predictable right-wing outrage. The conservative reaction split predictably: Matt Walsh called it “totally backwards and ridiculous”; Katie Miller blamed the “feminist lie” for women delaying childbearing. But Russell’s interest is elsewhere.
The numbers behind the story:
- Egg-freezing in the US for nonmedical reasons: ~4,000 in 2014 → ~40,000 by 2024
- Only ~6% of women who freeze eggs later return to use them (UCLA)
- Apple and Facebook cover elective egg-freezing; most insurance policies, including AOC’s, do not
Russell presses on the “empowerment” framing that surrounds the procedure. The word “badass” stuck in her head like an off note. Egg-freezing is expensive (storage costs, no insurance), physically demanding (daily hormone injections), and far from guaranteed — yet it’s the market-friendly “solution” to a structural problem: the years when women feel ready to start a family are the same years as career peak, and society has built no accommodation for that collision.
AOC herself hinted at the asymmetry: “Men run for office, or frankly they interview for jobs, and people don’t think in the back of their mind, O.K., this guy is running for office, how old is he?”
The essay’s real subject is how difficult calculations get privatized — treated as a “secret second job” women must navigate alone — when they should be a collective conversation about time, work, and what we owe each other. That inconvenience is the truth the title names.