AOC’s eggs, and mine
  June 26, 2026 Dearest Meteor readers, For reasons that are still unclear to me, I rewatched the entirety of “The Handmaid’s Tale” this summer, then belatedly just finished Margaret Atwood’s 2019 follow-up to the novel, The Testaments. Not exactly a beach read, but! It did cause me to rethink one of the pet names I use for my daughter Pearl. Whoops.  Speaking of babies and obsessions with uterus-related content, we’re taking a closer look at AOC’s egg-freezing journey—and mine, too. Plus, some blunt words for the Kamala haters, and your Thursday mood booster. Blessed be the fruit, Nona Willis Aronowitz  WHAT’S GOING ONEggs in many baskets: Over the weekend Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez shared, first on Instagram and then on ABC’s “This Week,” that she was freezing her eggs and would be documenting the experience on social media. Since then, the speculation has been deafening: She’s doing it because she’s running for president! Or wait, maybe it’s because she broke up with her fiancé and wants to wait until she finds a suitable partner! Whatever the reason, it’s “selfish” and “baffling.” No, it’s “bold and ethical.” Plus it helps her sidestep the “leftist single woman who hates men” stereotype. People can theorize all they want about AOC’s reasons, but she’s pointedly not giving them in her Q&As on Instagram, so we don’t know them, and we don’t need to know them. In fact, they are often, on some level, unknowable. I speak from experience: I’m another one of the hundreds of thousands of women who have frozen their eggs, and I didn’t even know what my eventual reason would be when I did it.  OHHH GOOD OL’ GONAL F. DON’T FORGET THE 90-DEGREE ANGLE! (VIA INSTAGRAM) It was 2020, knee-deep in COVID. My partner Dom and I knew we eventually wanted two kids, but we didn’t feel ready yet—especially Dom, who was barely 30 and had no close peers with children. Like AOC, I was 36 and nervous that I’d struggle by the time we tried for that second kid. So, to give ourselves options, we pooled our cash and went through the process of egg-freezing, which had spiked during the pandemic. All in all, it cost about $11,000—none of that covered by insurance—and then about $800 a year in storage fees. Unlike AOC, I wasn’t public about the process. I felt ambivalent and sheepish as Dom gave me shots and I trudged to “morning monitoring” appointments. I had my own real concerns about the industry: I’d noticed the predatory marketing of egg-freezing companies, and thought it was dystopian that big corporations like Facebook and Apple had started to cover egg-freezing for their employees instead of, you know, improving a workaholic office culture that’s inhospitable to parenthood. I also had my own prejudices about what “kind” of woman freezes their eggs (not me!), no doubt influenced by the frankly sexist media framing of egg-freezing as a naive, girlbossy move. Dom and I maintained an ironic distance from the process, and gently mocked ourselves when I easily got pregnant (the old-fashioned way) with my first daughter less than a year after freezing my eggs. We started to refer to my oocytes as “the panic eggs.” But you know what? The “panic eggs” came in handy—although not for the reasons I thought they would. When my first daughter was two and I was 39, I got pregnant again fairly quickly. But 14 weeks in, we got some devastating news from a genetic test and decided to have an abortion. The trauma of that loss caused me to reconsider my little eggs on ice; if I used them, I realized, we could test the embryos before I got pregnant so I’d have reassurance that the baby was genetically normal. I was so grateful to have had that option, and doubly grateful that New York law required insurance companies to cover IVF (unlike the initial egg freezing, the fertilization and embryo transfer was considered IVF and thus completely paid for). And it worked. My second daughter turns one year old tomorrow. I tell this story now not to endorse egg-freezing as a magic bullet—people should absolutely pore over the data before deciding whether it’s worth it—but to emphasize how personal and complicated these choices are, and how fruitless second-guessing anyone’s motives is. The bottom line: The more reproductive choices we have, the better. That includes access to abortion and birth control, but also more ways of having babies. Anything that demystifies the process of egg-freezing will ultimately help make it as accessible and affordable as possible, and dispel the kinds of weird value judgments I initially put on it. No one needs to know anyone else’s reasons, but we all need, as AOC put it, “more depictions of women having full lives in every context and every choice.”  ME CELEBRATING THE END OF THE EGG-FREEZING PROCESS, WHEN I COULD FINALLY HAVE A DAMN DRINK. (PHOTO VIA JESSICA TAYLOR) AND:
 MOOD BOOSTEREvery Thursday, one of our editors shares a small thing that’s getting them through. If you’ve got something brightening your week, we want to know—reply to this email and share! This week I had a two-hour creative brainstorm with a woman I’ve known for several years. During that time, we worked together on one big, meaningful, and personal project, and remained friendly after that—but it wasn’t until this meeting that we realized how much we liked each other. The reasons we like each other tumbled out of our mouths, via ideas about our work, the media and entertainment industries, being Black women surviving being Black women, navigating adult mean girls, and choosing ourselves. In this era of doomscrolling and AI anarchy, it was a revelation to discover that we can still make meaningful connections, simply by sitting across from someone. —Rebecca Carroll  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
