Looking at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram — an account followed by nearly 10 million people — is an ambivalent experience. The 36-year-old Democratic congresswoman has spent almost two weeks sharing every detail of her egg-freezing process. Thursday’s post, for example, begins: “Day 12. Trigger shot. Sorry for the delay in upload, but I promise it’s worth the wait.”
Following every step of that process can become a fascinating form of entertainment that provides education on how a woman might try to safeguard her future fertility. But it is also punctuated with moments that raise privacy concerns about what she has exposed and suspicions about her motives. She herself referred to the “political risk” of recounting this personal experience when she announced the procedure on August 9. All of this is happening at a time when discussion is growing about the possibility that the flagship of the Democrats’ left wing will take the step to mount a presidential bid in 2028.
AOC’s announcement helps break a taboo surrounding a process that is still shrouded in secrecy, even though tens of thousands of Americans undergo it every year. Before her, fellow Democratic Congresswoman Sara Jacobs had announced a similar decision.
Ocasio-Cortez has also pointed to another major wound in her country: the unaffordable cost of healthcare. The Puerto Rico–born politician said her insurance does not cover the procedure, so she must pay for it entirely out of her own pocket: between $8,000 and $9,000 per cycle, plus about $1,200 a year to keep the eggs frozen. According to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, U.S. patients underwent about 39,000 cycles in 2024. The number of women using the technology is lower, because a single patient can undergo multiple cycles.
Ocasio-Cortez burst onto the national scene eight years ago with a highly personal communication style. Her surprise arrival in the House of Representatives in 2018, alongside other leftist politicians dubbed The Squad, rejuvenated the Democratic ranks and provoked thinly veiled resentment from more centrist party colleagues.
The young would‑be congresswoman, who worked as a bartender in New York before entering politics, is known for a direct style that mixes pure political messaging with more personal posts about her everyday life. But in recent weeks several factors have converged that have put her even more squarely in the media spotlight.
Nothing ruled out
There is virtually no doubt that AOC will retain her House seat in the November 3 midterm elections. The question is what she will do afterward. A politician who identifies as a socialist in the United States, she is ruling nothing out. She could run for president — which would be an unquestionable show of strength for the left wing — or she could seek a Senate seat for New York, a post now held by the not‑very‑popular Chuck Schumer (the party establishment figure with whom Ocasio‑Cortez and her allies often clash). “I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” she replied, as she often does, in an interview with ABC’s This Week when asked about a presidential bid. She also said she felt “humbled” by the support she was receiving.
In that interview she also said something U.S. news outlets have been analyzing relentlessly in recent days. Laughing, she referred to a remark by New York politician Chi Ossé: “Woke 1 was crazy.” Woke, the term that became fashionable early this decade to describe people concerned with equality, nondiscrimination, and the environment, has been loaded with negative connotations by a Republican Party led by Donald Trump, which has equated wokism with everything it sees as wrong in American society.
With an ambiguous remark that nonetheless clearly criticized early woke positions, AOC appeared to be trying to distance herself from past statements advocating cuts to police funding, abolishing the prison system, decriminalizing border crossings, or using expressions such as “menstruating person” instead of “woman” to avoid offending trans people. The idea is that if she wants to run for a higher office — such as senator or even president — she needs to smooth out certain rough edges that could hurt her in an election beyond the boundaries of her current district, in the New York boroughs of the Bronx and Queens.
To gauge her chances, it will be key to watch what happens in the midterm contest for the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, Abdul El‑Sayed. If a leftist like him wins there, in a swing state, it will signal that the doors are open for Ocasio‑Cortez, who was one of El‑Sayed’s strongest backers in the party primaries.
Finally, one detail covered alike by celebrity media and the mainstream press is Ocasio‑Cortez’s recent split from her college partner, web designer Riley Roberts, to whom she was engaged in 2022. As Annie Karni suggested in The New York Times, if AOC hopes to win voters nationwide, she needs to shed the aura that she is only interested in her work and not in starting a family. In that context, announcing that she has frozen her eggs could be read as a signal that this is not the case — that she also wants to be a mother: an additional burden that a man in a similar situation would most likely not have to bear.
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