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The Republican Party is obsessed with the birth rate. News that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is freezing her eggs has provoked immediate and vocal criticism from the same faction that screams about demographic panic at every turn. If they actually cared about the birth rate, they would celebrate a woman in her 30s taking steps to preserve her fertility and plan for her future family. The reaction to AOC’s announcement is yet another moment in which they're showing us who they really are.
They don’t care about women having babies: They care about young women—teenagers even—having babies. This distinction is critically important. Because when young women have babies, they will be less likely to go to college, less likely to become financially independent, less likely to have a life unmoored from men. This would bring us closer to the world envisioned in Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s latest screed: Saving America by Saving the Family. This agenda is evident in the Trump administration’s efforts to end funding for teen pregnancy prevention, an enormously successful, decades-long bipartisan effort that has reduced the teen pregnancy rate to unparalleled lows. They don’t want to prevent teen pregnancy; they are encouraging it.
Some demographers warn that the birth rate panic is misplaced—it’s not that birth rates have fallen off a cliff, it’s that the timing has shifted. For the first time, women over 40 are having babies at higher rates than teenagers. This is exactly what conservatives don’t want, because those women have often put their educational and professional ambitions first.
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Anti-abortion groups are critical of egg-freezing as part of their growing opposition to in vitro fertilization, which often involves frozen eggs or embryos. They claim their anti-IVF position is aligned with their belief that embryos are people, and that IVF can result in the destruction of human life—meaning, unused embryos.
That is a convenient narrative when what they are attacking is a primary way that women can maintain control over their professional lives, become pregnant on their terms and timeline, and become pregnant without a male partner. Importantly, IVF also helps LGBTQ people to build families. Attacking IVF is about taking away women’s power and control and reinforcing a patriarchal vision of the family.
Indeed, Trump campaigned on a promise to make IVF more accessible and affordable, a position that’s popular across the political spectrum. But it incensed his anti-abortion base, and some state GOP platforms are now embracing anti-IVF stances. The Republican Party is between a rock and hard place—IVF hovers at 86 percent approval. That is why other conservatives have publicly shifted away from being vocally anti-IVF to instead focus on a "Make America Healthy Again"-coded claim that IVF is not actually necessary; women should instead focus on better understanding their fertility and not delaying pregnancy. They’re pushing pseudo-science called “restorative reproductive medicine.” Erasing the needs of LGBTQ people, single people, and people diagnosed with conditions that can make IVF necessary, the message at its core is: Just have babies earlier.
If they actually cared about America’s falling birth rate, they would appreciate AOC’s efforts to plan for her future family. But they don’t. She is delaying her family-building so she can pursue her ambitions. To America’s far right, that is the true threat.
Dana Sussman is the senior vice president of the national legal nonprofit and advocacy organization Pregnancy Justice, which advances and defends the rights of pregnant people—no matter if they give birth, experience a pregnancy loss, or have an abortion.
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