AOC: I Don't Know What to Do With That Hat Tossing and Frozen Eggs

I woke up this morning, and the first thing that came to mind was, “I wonder what the status of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ ovaries might be,” said … well, no one ever. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop AOC from making them into a national story today. Why? Perhaps she needs to distract the country from the prospects of “Woke Two.”

The New York Times reports on Ocasio-Cortez’ launch of a video series in which she publicly shares the process of freezing her eggs. Even AOC admits that this is an odd thing to do, although she calls them a “political risk,” which may be true of the videos but hardly true of what has been a common procedure for decades. The NYT connects this to Ocasio-Cortez’ reported presidential aspirations, which makes sense in more ways than one:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York posted a series of video clips on social media Saturday night saying that she would freeze her eggs despite what she called a “political risk” for sharing her decision.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, 36, a Democrat who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, made the announcement hours before saying in a TV interview Sunday that she is open to running for president or the Senate.

“There is very strangely a political risk, or a political tax, that comes with sharing this info,” she said of her decision to freeze her eggs. She added that she had shared the information “to show more depictions of women having full lives in every context and every choice.” The announcement further fueled speculation on social media that she is gearing up for a presidential run.

Asked on ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday morning if she would consider a White House bid, she said, “I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” adding that she was “humbled” by the support she is receiving.

Stoking speculation about a presidential run is certainly part of it. No one answers the question of why egg-freezing would be necessary in the first place. We’ll get back to that shortly, but it’s clear that AOC wants to posture this as some sort of response to The Patriarchy. People Magazine gave her a boost with this narrative, to no one’s surprise at all:

However, she explained she’d rather give a platform to the issues women face than allow potential scrutiny to influence her decision.

“You know, men run for office … and people don’t think in the back of their mind, ‘Okay, this guy’s running for office. How old is he? Is he going to want to start a family?’ ” she said.

“People don’t go down those rabbit holes and fixate on them for men in terms of their decision the way that they do for women,” Ocasio-Cortez added.

Er … has anyone argued anything like this when women run for office in the past 20 years? When Sarah Palin ran for VP, I recall a lot of attention from the Left about her family planning choices, but not so much from the Right. Otherwise, it rarely comes up, if at all, as AOC’s own career has amply demonstrated.

Furthermore, the idea that this is some sort of esoteric practice defies reality. The AMA reclassified egg-freezing to remove the “experimental” tag in 2013, and the practice has become common. The site Cofertility reported this summer that the most recent data available – from 2023 – shows sharp year-on-year increases, with over 40,000 procedures performed in 2023 alone. The study also notes that the main priority for women choosing this procedure at and after the age of 35 is “the desire to find a life partner,” even above careers and friends.

And that makes this curious, for a number of reasons. First off, if AOC is freezing eggs in anticipation of a 2028 presidential run, she must not be planning to win the election. She’d be 38 during the campaign, and if she wins two terms, she’d be 47 years old on the other side of a presidency. That’s pretty late to start families, especially given that the odds of success start declining significantly at ages well below that.

It’s also curious because Ocasio-Cortez already has a life partner. The Free Beacon took note of that last when the House Ethics Committee rebuked AOC for turning Riley Roberts into her Schrödinger’s Spouse:

The committee’s rebuke stemmed from a lengthy explanation Ocasio-Cortez’s attorney provided to justify why the New York lawmaker accepted a free ticket worth $35,000 for Roberts to attend the 2021 Met Gala alongside her. At the time, that was a gift Ocasio-Cortez could only accept for her legally-married spouse. But Ocasio-Cortez has never been legally married. She has lived with Roberts since 2016 and the pair became engaged in 2022, but there’s no evidence the couple has legally tied the knot, and Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t been pictured wearing her engagement ring in public since November 2023.

Despite that, to Ocasio-Cortez, “Roberts is considered a ‘spouse’,” her attorney, David Mitrani, explained to the House Ethics Committee in his May 16 letter.

Roberts is only considered her “spouse” in context of federal campaign finance law, Mitrani said, an interpretation that Ocasio-Cortez has used to grant her partner several privileges typically afforded only to legally-married spouses of lawmakers. That includes securing Roberts his free ride to the 2021 Met Gala and later, in 2023, gifted travel to Japan and South Korea, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Mitrani revealed in his letter that Roberts has also owned a congressional “spouse pin” ever since Ocasio-Cortez entered Congress in 2019, a bauble that grants him access to parts of the Capitol complex not accessible to the public.

There are drawbacks to being a congressional spouse, such as having to disclose one’s sources of income and financial holdings. But Roberts isn’t subjected to those, Mitrani explained to the committee. That’s because “under the Committee’s … financial disclosure guidance, Mr. Roberts is not considered a spouse,” Ocasio-Cortez’s attorney wrote, adding that the couple hasn’t yet “taken steps to bring the law or religion into their relationship.”

There’s a good reason for that. House members (and Senate members) have to disclose their own finances and also those of their spouses. No one is really sure what Riley Roberts does or where his money originates. Suspicions have arisen that Roberts makes his money on Wall Street, which would certainly complicate her Marxist appeal, and make her signature legislative project a massive exercise in hypocrisy:

Federal laws that require the spouses of lawmakers to disclose their financial affairs to the public exist to prevent congressional spouses from profiting from their partner’s position in Congress or from being used as a pass-through to influence legislation. Other spousal restrictions could soon be implemented if Ocasio-Cortez has her way and passes her Bipartisan Restoring Faith in Government Act, which would ban congressional spouses from buying or selling stocks. It’s a severe restriction that would apply to every congressional spouse with one notable exception: her own.

Ocasio-Cortez’s office has not returned numerous requests for comment asking if Roberts participates in the stock market, nor has she acknowledged that her “spouse” would be exempt from her own proposed legislation to ban the spouses of her colleagues from trading stocks, so long as they never legally marry.

That may explain why AOC and Roberts want to punt on family planning for at least a couple of years. If they have children, the pressure for Roberts’ disclosures will increase dramatically, in and out of the House. And that might make it impossible for Ocasio-Cortez to toss her hat in the ring next year for the 2028 primaries. Rather than address that honestly, AOC wants to dress up her family planning as a Blow To The Patriarchy.

I doubt that AOC has enough support to sustain a presidential run. However, a pregnancy or two might provide more connection to voters than egg-freezing will provide. This is a bizarre choice, politically and culturally, that only emphasizes her disconnect from mainstream America.

For those who don’t get the headline reference, here’s Kelsey Grammer performing his own theme song for the classic TV series Frasier. It’s the best egg song since I Am the Walrus and the original version of Yesterday.