AOC’s egg freezing sparks conversation about fertility

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Support for Here & Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

**Scott Tong** (0:16)
WBUR Podcast, Boston.

**Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez** (0:22)
I think we need to show more depictions of women having full lives in every context and every choice.

**Kalyani Saxena** (0:28)
AOC announces she's planning to freeze her eggs. So what should people know about the process? It's Monday, August 10th, and this is Here & Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR Boston. I'm Kalyani Saxena.
Today on the show, we'll unpack a story that made this youngest child a little cranky. It's all about older siblings and why they tend to have higher educational achievements and lifetime earnings. Turns out it might have something to do with germs.

**N. Meltem Daysal** (1:08)
Second born children exposed to more respiratory illness early in life, were less likely to finish high school or college.

**Kalyani Saxena** (1:18)
But first, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had an interesting announcement this weekend.
Sharing on Instagram that she plans to freeze her eggs. You know, it's not the typical statement that you hear from officials. An AOC acknowledged that there's a political risk in revealing something so personal, especially as she weighs a run for president in 2028

**Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez** (1:42)
Just by me choosing to not keep this private, there may be a consequence. But you know what? I'm okay with that.
This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life.

**Kalyani Saxena** (1:58)
So how exactly does freezing your eggs work? Indira Lakshmanan speaks with Emi Nietfeld, a journalist and author covering fertility technology about the process and the state of egg freezing today.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (2:11)
So how big of a deal is it for a public figure, especially a high-profile female politician, who, as we know, are judged so harshly for how they dress, how much they smile. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris know this firsthand, to go public about something as personal as egg freezing.

**Emi Nietfeld** (2:31)
It's a really big deal. The rise of egg freezing is largely from growing awareness, and AOC is putting so much awareness out there by live posting all the shots on Instagram.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (2:44)
Right. Well, you yourself got interested in fertility when you worked as a software engineer at Google and Meta. Tech giants, of course, pioneered generous policies for covering the cost of egg freezing for employees. Critics say that's because they wanted young females like you to work longer and harder if they felt they could put off childbearing. Talk us through how you got interested in this and take us through the process that AOC is going through.

**Emi Nietfeld** (3:11)
When I was a 25-year-old software engineer, I had this new benefit at work, egg freezing. It seemed really exciting. It seemed like the promise to have an empowered future. And so I went through it at 25 Now, all of my friends who are single basically have gone through it and a lot of people who are engaged or married are also freezing their eggs. And it involves about 10 to 14 days of injecting yourself with medications that cause multiple eggs to mature. In a normal month, you have one egg released.
When you ovulate, and with these medications, you might get five or eight or 10 or 30 or 60 eggs to all be mature at the same time. When you do a trigger shot, that causes your body to be willing to release them. And then they do a surgery, usually with a needle through the vagina to extract the eggs.

**Indira Lakshmanan** (4:08)
Well, Ocasio-Cortez is 36 years old.
Research shows that most women who freeze their eggs are in their mid 30s. I'm curious though, what are the trends in terms of how young women are freezing their eggs and what is the success rate? Because I've certainly read that it's more successful the younger you are when you freeze your eggs.

**Emi Nietfeld** (4:32)
The vibes are definitely that younger and younger women are going for this. There's so many TikToks about women in their mid 20s or even early 20s freezing their eggs. In part, because you really do get more eggs and higher quality eggs.
The statistics are that if you're 35 or younger, you have a 50% chance of having a living baby from frozen eggs. And if you're 40, the rate drops to a 20% chance if you're 40 or over. So it's pretty dramatically different numbers based on when you do it. And there is so much more awareness now coming to younger women, even though the data hasn't really borne out, that they're really actually flocking to the fertility clinic and finding $20,000 to do this.