The Real Reason Women Freeze Their Eggs

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently announced her decision to freeze her eggs, she said she was “empowered.”

“This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life,” the 36-year-old Democrat said in a social media video. “If people want to make assumptions about my decision, let them make those assumptions. I feel empowered to make this choice.”

But Ocasio-Cortez’s rah-rah rhetoric can’t disguise the bleak reality of why some women freeze their eggs.

Ocasio-Cortez, who has been engaged since 2022, was mum about any personal reasons or timing factors related to her decision. (The New York congresswoman did suggest in a TV interview Sunday she was open to running for the presidency or Senate, which could certainly affect her workload.)

But according to one researcher, clear patterns emerge when you look at why women decide to freeze their eggs. And no, it’s not because they are all trying to “girl boss” their way to the corner office and don’t want to risk the distraction of babies.

Yale University Professor Marcia Inhorn, who focuses on anthropology and international affairs, conducted a study of 114 women who chose to freeze their eggs for her 2023 book, “Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs.”

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Of those 114 women, exactly one did it “specifically for career-planning purposes,” writes Inhorn.

Instead, “[d]espair, or the loss and absence of hope, is a running theme in many women’s egg freezing stories.” Women who choose to freeze their eggs are largely not doing it because their first choice is to have kids later in life.

Inhorn writes that “heterosexual relationship troubles” are the driving force behind egg freezing, and that the “vast majority of women I interviewed found themselves in their late thirties without partners.”

“Egg freezing was not about their careers,” she writes. “It was about being single or in very unstable relationships with men who were unwilling to commit to them.”

Talk about the opposite of a fairy tale.

Take the story of Ruth, who told her boyfriend, “If you propose, this means you’re having children. If you decide you don’t want to have kids, then you need to break up with me.” The boyfriend proposed. They got married. They purchased a house.

And then he told her he had changed his mind: He “thinks he won’t enjoy it and then he’ll be depressed. And he’s fearful of, like, racing up his depression …”

Ruth ultimately did three cycles of egg freezing, Inhorn reports in “Motherhood on Ice.”

“Ruth admitted to weeping on the ultrasound table, telling the technician, ‘I should be having sex with my husband, having a baby. And I’m here freezing my eggs,’” writes Inhorn.

Another woman, Lily, was in a relationship with one man, Jack, for almost a decade, starting when she was 31. During the next five years, Lily talks to Jack about wanting children. “But Jack always replied that he was ‘not ready,’” Inhorn writes.

When Lily was 36, she once again brought up the topic to Jack. “He was like, ‘I really want it. I see myself with kids, playing ball … in theory, when I close my eyes, it’s in the picture, but in reality, I’m totally paralyzed with fear.’” At 38, Lily stopped taking birth control, and Jack responded by refusing to have sex with her for 14 months. They broke up.

Ultimately, Lily froze 16 eggs. In her mid-40s, she tried to get pregnant, using those eggs and even using Jack’s sperm (he agreed but wouldn’t commit to parenting the children).

She never became pregnant.

She’s not alone in that outcome, either.

In fact, many women who freeze their eggs either don’t succeed in having a viable pregnancy from their eggs or they never pursue motherhood further. A 2022 New York University Langone study found that only 39% of women aged 27 to 44 who froze their eggs had a child.

Interestingly, many women don’t even try, despite undergoing the grueling process of egg harvesting. Only 5.7% of women who froze their eggs tried to use them in the five to seven years following the procedure, according to a 2025 University of California, Los Angeles study.

Clearly there’s a problem. A 2025 Gallup poll found that 39% of women wanted two children, and 37% wanted three or more children. Yet right now the average birth rate is 1.6 children per woman in the United States.

And while only 3% of women want no children, about 15% of women aged 45 to 50 have never had a child.

Obviously, many women want kids, but life isn’t working out as they hoped it would. Rather than focusing on egg freezing, we’d be better served by creating a culture that encourages men to become great husbands and dads and embrace raising families.