“Don’t be weird about this,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) says, an injection needle poised over her belly as part of an attempt to freeze her eggs. “Even though I know all of you will be.”
Sure enough, both sides of the political spectrum lived down to her expectations, and in a way that was doubly damaging for the pro-family cause. It’s hard to imagine that the gibes and scoffing sent the representative’s way from the Right didn’t serve her tactical purpose—here come the social conservatives to attack a woman and to openly hope she will fail in her desire for children.
This is the trap that AOC set, one that far too many fell into in the days after her video went viral. While her message should definitely be rejected, pro-family conservatives must approach this correctly if we want to be persuasive and convince more people—and especially more young women—to join our movement.
A winning message on this issue begins by acknowledging that, insofar as women like AOC are pursuing egg freezing because they want to have children, they are motivated by a positive desire. Podcaster and MAGA world advisor Katie Miller took this tack, arguing that “if [Ocasio-Cortez] inspires other women to have babies, we should celebrate that.” However, while the desire for motherhood is indeed natural and admirable, it’s still important to ensure that this desire is directed to its proper ends.
Unfortunately, blue-state America does not trust social conservatives when it comes to matching up and settling down. The political divide is hard to bridge already, and we make it harder for ourselves when adopting what I call anti-anti-family rhetoric. Vice President JD Vance was right to apologize for his “childless cat ladies” crack, and pro-family advocates should avoid the temptation to take potshots at liberals for their supposed hypocrisy in having children. It’s one thing to say “Get Married,” but another to convince people who have been trying that they can better their chances. Our job on the Right is to credibly present ourselves as rooting for others to find happiness.
Part of the case against egg freezing is purely empirical. When women freeze their eggs in their 20s, they’re much less likely to ever use them—it’s effectively an expensive insurance policy. Only 6% of women who banked frozen eggs returned to thaw and use them within seven years of the procedure. When women freeze their eggs later in life, as AOC is doing, they are more likely to use the eggs they’ve banked but, sadly, much less likely to succeed in carrying a baby to term. The average rate of achieving a live birth after egg banking is 28%; for women who freeze at 40 years old or later, it’s 19%.
The sad truth is that for many women who freeze their eggs in their late thirties or early forties, what they are buying is deferred grief. Many will learn upon thawing these eggs that none make viable embryos, or that the children they do conceive are lost to IVF-mediated miscarriage. What price would you set for five or so years of false hope?
Paula Amato, division head of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at OHSU School of Medicine, argued that what matters is the appearance of control, regardless of whether you have a baby or not. “Even if egg freezing ultimately doesn’t result in a live birth or the eggs are not used,” she wrote on X, “there is likely [a] psychological benefit to having done something proactively to try to extend fertility.”
There’s little reason to believe that this condescending statement reflects reality. If women think of egg freezing as stopping the clock, giving them more time to find the right guy, the end result can be counterproductive. Believing that they can slow down their efforts to find a match—still the most likely and most rewarding way to raise a family—may mean missing their best opportunity to form a family.
But pointing out these facts may not be the best way to convince the opposition, as it’s an inherently negative message that could itself come across as condescending.
So, let’s consider a different domain, one where conservatives have had more success winning converts. The growing classical schools movement offers a positive alternative to traditional public schools, not just a critique. There are over 1,000 classical schools operating now in America, a quarter of which have opened since the COVID-19 pandemic. These schools take the liberal arts seriously and seek to form students’ character, not just their intellect. An anti-anti-public schools movement would primarily highlight overreach and error (and there are certainly big mistakes in this space that deserve it). But it’s hard for people to choose against something if there’s no viable alternative on offer.
The growing networks of classical schools are a witness to our neighbors, an invitation they can accept. They showcase that conservatives are saying no to the cultural default not out of reflexive contradiction but for the sake of saying yes to something better. I was surprised, when chatting with a non-religious friend in the Bay Area recently, to hear her say she was considering a Catholic school for her kids. After researching the issue, she believed that the parochial school in her area was focused on forming students as independent thinkers, while the public school was devolving into woke, Maoist self-criticism sessions. That’s what a win looks like.
Schools regularly host open house events and actively recruit new families. In order to promote alternatives to mainstream dating, marriage, and parenting, conservatives need to offer open houses of our own. My husband and I make a deliberate effort to invite single friends and young couples over for dinner with us and our three kids. When bedtime starts, we don’t send our guests home but instead invite them upstairs to read picture books to our children. (I love to hand someone I Want My Hat Back and watch them discover the violent volta as they’re reading). My kids tend to make bedtime a full-contact sport. It’s impossible to be a passive spectator.
If our guests are a couple that has been dating for a while, I sometimes hope that seeing each other play with my kids will help them start thinking about marriage. If it’s a single guy, I sometimes hope the experience will spur him to start dating seriously. But often I just want the joy that I’ve been given to spill over into other people’s lives. I remember how much it meant to me to be invited into my friends’ homes during my single days, and also later, during a season of loss after loss as my husband and I endured six miscarriages. Whether or not someone has kids of their own, no one should have a life totally devoid of children.
Former New York Times columnist and now CBS News contributor Ross Douthat is particularly successful at making a pro-family, rather than just anti-anti-family, pitch. When he hosted Noor Siddiqui, founder of the frankly eugenic, embryo-screening company Orchid, on his podcast, Douthat posed plenty of critical questions. Yet the most powerful part of the interview wasn’t his cross-examination but his presentation of his own worldview as an invitation to conversion. Douthat read Siddiqui part of the Galway Kinnell poem After Making Love We Hear Footsteps, becoming increasingly verklempt as he did so:
In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.
“Do you worry,” Douthat asks, “about removing or diminishing from human experience that aspect of being a husband and a wife, in a relationship, with a child?” Siddiqui, non-plussed, politely replied, “what do you mean?”
The clip made waves because the contrast it set up was so strong. It did not convert Siddiqui in the moment, but it revealed a place where her personal philosophy fell short. What got Douthat choked up, thinking about the way his love for his wife was given life in his children, was incomprehensible to her. The moment offered her—and those who might be attracted to her pitch—a vivid portrait of another way of living.
A friend in my neighborhood who listened to the podcast told me it convinced him and his wife to try for a sixth child. They wanted more of the tearful joy made so visible on Douthat’s face. Our ideological opponents don’t just need to be pitched on a “no” to their current worldview, but a clear invitation to say “yes.” To promote the family, social conservatives need to be the right kind of weird—visibly and joyfully counter-cultural, and more focused on what we have to share than what we want our opponents to concede.
Since Ms. Sargeant name checks me in this article, I feel compelled to respond. Contrary to what she may think I consider myself very pro-family. I don’t actually disagree with much but I do want to pushback on the claim that egg-freezing causes women to postpone looking for a life partner. The two are not mutually exclusive. Most women I know who choose to freeze their eggs are actively looking but just haven’t found the right person yet, and plan to continue doing so even after they freeze their eggs. It just removes some of the pressure so that they can hopefully make better decisions and they and their future partner and children will be better off for it.
Great article. Same for religion