U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, says she is freezing her eggs as she weighs her political next steps ahead of the 2028 presidential election. She announced the decision on Instagram, as reported by infohub.kz.
“This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life,” said the 36-year-old Ocasio-Cortez about her decision regarding her reproductive options. The New York congresswoman, a leading figure of the Democrats’ progressive left flank, did not explicitly say whether she plans to have children. In her social media posts, she said she was taking a “political risk” in speaking so personally about her potential family plans.
Ocasio-Cortez said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that she has not ruled out running for president or for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrats’ floor leader Chuck Schumer in 2028. She explained that she wants to normalize conversations about what women face in their professional and personal lives, while also highlighting the policies of President Donald Trump’s administration.
“In this political environment, where this administration is denying reproductive care to women across the country, from abortion rights to the ability to carry out a healthy pregnancy, I think it’s important for us as leaders to have these conversations,” she said. Trump’s administration opposes abortion rights, and the Republican president’s first-term appointees to the Supreme Court provided the decisive votes in the 2022 ruling that struck down Roe v. Wade, which had established a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.
However, in 2025, Trump signed an executive order designed to lower the costs of in vitro fertilization. Ocasio-Cortez sponsored a Democratic bill in 2022, when the party controlled the House, to codify abortion rights into federal law after the Supreme Court’s abortion decision.
In her weekend announcement, Ocasio-Cortez noted that women — in politics and other fields — face different standards and scrutiny about their family status. “Men run for office, or frankly they interview for jobs, and people don’t think in the back of their minds, ‘OK, this guy’s running for office, how old is he? Oh, well, is he going to want to start a family?’” she said.