It came as little surprise to me when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed over the weekend the “sensitive” decision to freeze her eggs, trickling the announcement in a series of characteristically candid Instagram Stories. Her reproductive choice was years in the making, one the progressive phenom and maybe-possibly 2028 Democratic presidential hopeful first broached publicly when I profiled her for a Vanity Fair cover story in 2020.
The then 31-year-old House freshman, impassioned Squad member, and master Trump foil already had the political class frothing over her ambitions—Senate or president? —and the rising star was already contemplating her reproductive future. “I’m sitting here, I’m like, Do I freeze my eggs? Can I afford to do that?” the congresswoman said, laughing a little over breakfast at a Bronx diner (incidentally, eggs), seated in a COVID-era outdoor dining shed. “My orthodontist was telling me about how she was doing IVF, and I’m, like, asking her what her experience is like.” As a respite from the congressional grind, earlier that year she became a dog mom to her French bulldog, Deco—named for the architectural style found throughout New York—with her longtime partner Riley Roberts.
Ocasio-Cortez had a dawning awareness that, as the youngest congresswoman in history, serving in a political body overwhelmingly populated by elder men even in its most diverse incarnation, she’d waded into uncharted family-planning territory. “It’s important for us to talk about it, because women, we have to make these choices that men simply don’t have to make. Very few women have…” Ocasio-Cortez trailed off, seeming to grasp for role models that scarcely existed. She landed on Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth, who made history in 2018 as the first sitting senator to give birth in office. She welcomed her second daughter at age 50.
Almost six years after our interviews, Ocasio-Cortez, now a 36-year-old fourth-termer, is answering the questions she dangled over breakfast. Yes, Ocasio-Cortez is freezing her eggs— “a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life,” she said. After saving for “several years,” she can, in fact, afford the cost, which she estimates will be between $8,000 to $9,000. Though Deco remains a constant, popping up on her lap as she prepped hormone injections on a coffee table on Instagram, Ocasio-Cortez is reportedly undergoing the fertility procedure without Roberts. According to Puck, the couple who first started dating as undergrads at Boston University broke up about 18 months ago. At press time, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff did not respond to Vanity Fair’s request for comment. Ocasio-Cortez and Roberts were last publicly photographed together at the 2021 Met Gala, where she famously wore a romantic white Brother Vellies gown scrawled with “Tax the Rich” in blood red. She’s high-profile, but their pairing never was.
That their apparent change in relationship status could have gone unnoticed—in this TikTok-addled clime—is a testament to their vigilant approach to privacy. Confirming their engagement in May 2022, shortly after Roberts proposed in Ocasio-Cortez’s ancestral home of Puerto Rico, was a notable exception. Though Roberts featured prominently in the 2019 Netflix documentary Knock Down the House—filming Ocasio-Cortez on his cell phone at her first debates in Queens, crying behind his red glasses as the two gazed up at the Capitol after her primary victory—he never granted another interview about his longtime partner (believe me, I tried). Friends filled in the blanks, painting Roberts, a web developer and clutch early digital-ad adviser, as the Marty Ginsburg to Ocasio-Cortez’s RBG. According to one, Ocasio-Cortez and Roberts were “two awkward, supersmart, like-to-talk-about-issues kind of people that met through this super-wonky, nerdy thing”—a weekly Coffee and Conversation series. The weekend before the 2018 midterms that altered her life—and presumably his too—they drove to a cabin in Woodstock, New York, with a friend and hatched a backup plan: If Ocasio-Cortez lost, they’d buy a massive church for sale, or maybe start a ranch, retreating into crunchy seclusion.
This week, the congresswoman made no mention of Roberts as she pinched her belly and injected herself with hormones before nearly 10 million Instagram followers. She shut down questions about their relationship from the New York Post on Wednesday. “I don’t comment on my private life,” she said, smiling politely at a reporter trailing her.
For Ocasio-Cortez, there’s a distinct difference between the “private”—Roberts; her family—and personal, the latter of which is at the heart of her political rise. She’s proved the power of proximity to voters, bringing abstract issues crashing down to earth. Her beef with the American health care system is also her viscerally personal origin story: the waitress at Union Square taco joint Flats Fix helping to support her family after her father’s death from lung cancer dealt an all-too-familiar financial blow, threatening their home in Yorktown, New York, with repossession. Ocasio-Cortez is invoking the “broken” medical system again in her latest social media diaries, noting that oft-overhyped congressional insurance does not cover the cost of egg-freezing. In the millennial spirit of full disclosure, Ocasio-Cortez is chronicling the process on a near-daily basis, down to toting her hormone medications in a Target lunch box to ABC’s This Week in Washington, DC, and injecting herself minutes before appearing on air—a move she justifiably called “badass.”
The personal, once again, is political. “In an administration dedicated to politicizing women’s bodies and taking our choices away from us,” Ocasio-Cortez said in one Instagram dispatch, “we’re going to take our power back.”
As 2028 fever bubbles, Ocasio-Cortez is continually dogged by questions about her political ambitions—that pesky refrain of “Senate or president?” She’s no longer the fiery upstart who, as representative-elect, made her first congressional splash by joining young climate activists for a demonstration outside then House minority leader Nancy Pelosi’s office. Ocasio-Cortez is distancing herself from what she calls “woke 1.0” rhetoric and has positioned herself as a national leader, commanding massive crowds across the country—and delivered speeches that smacked as mighty presidential—alongside her political godfather, Senator Bernie Sanders, on their Fighting Oligarchy Tour. Ocasio-Cortez expects her egg-freezing journey to be tangled in the discourse now—the same gendered stigma that swirls around far less famous women of childbearing age in far more average careers.
“I am aware that there is, very strangely, a political risk or tax that could come with sharing this information,” she said, “and, per usual, that doesn’t influence my ultimate decision.” She isn’t ruling out a 2028 presidential run, or a potential primary challenge to veteran New York senator Chuck Schumer. “Anything is possible at this juncture,” Ocasio-Cortez said on ABC’s This Week. After freezing her eggs, that includes motherhood.
In 2020, she’d searched for examples of lawmakers addressing their reproductive choices—in real time, in office. Now, she is one. “I don’t want to be a savior,” Ocasio-Cortez told me then. “I want to be a mirror.”
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