And she wants her fans to know all about it.
On August 8, attractively attired in a cream-colored top with her long brown hair hanging loose, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leaned into the camera, projecting an endearing girl-next-door vibe, and said, “I think we need to show more depictions of women having full lives in every context and every choice.”
The 36-year-old representative’s declaration seemed like a friendlier manifestation of the “Girl Power” tactics used by writers like Devanshi Mehta, whose name appears attached to numerous columns on womanguide.net, her snappy copy strangely reminiscent of ChatGPT: “Feminism’s not stopping at abortion—she’s got her sights on the whole reproductive buffet…She’s pushing for options—pills, patches, IUDs—served up like a menu at a feminist diner, where every woman gets what she needs, no judgment.”
In her big Instagram announcement, Ocasio-Cortez disclosed to her audience how she had saved up for the pricey procedure, which she felt would help her to “feel more in control of her life.” Later, the congresswoman would share videos of herself unboxing her meds and injecting herself with a hormone cocktail intended to stimulate the overproduction of eggs. Her lovely dark eyes glowed as she gushed about managing her fertility in the public eye, especially in conjunction with an upcoming appearance on ABC This Week: “I think it’s bad*** that I’m gonna be, you know, giving myself shots in the green room, get my glam on, roll out, talk about international events, domestic policy, elections, pop out, live my life, do my thing.”
The dangerous blend of ambition and immaturity in this statement reminded me disturbingly of an incident that I witnessed recently, watching a high school girl rush up to a friend’s mother and begging to hold her tiny infant. As she lovingly cradled the baby in her arms, the teenager remarked brightly, “This is very good birth control.” My heart sank at her words. You do not say such things unless your native understanding has been tampered with—and somewhere, somehow, that facility in the popular congresswoman seems to have gone terribly awry.
Unlike the use of birth control, egg-freezing is in and of itself an activity that carries little moral weight in Catholic moral teaching. However, when a woman decides to make use of her frozen eggs in the process of in-vitro fertilization, the picture changes drastically. Though widely accepted among Catholics and non-Catholics alike, IVF divorces procreation from its proper origin within the marital embrace, involves the objectively evil act of masturbation in the collection of sperm, and gravely undermines the personhood of children by treating them as objects to be marketed, curated, or disposed of at will. Based on her public life, sadly, there is little reason to suppose that these arguments would prevent the self-proclaimed Catholic congresswoman from turning to immoral means of family planning.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grew up Catholic in the Bronx and later in the suburb of Yorktown Heights. Her mother was an evangelical, her father a Catholic catechist. There is no clear evidence to say whether the congresswoman still practices her childhood faith. However, although she is a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (popularly known as AOC) has been not above using Catholic terminology to advance her political objectives. In a 2018 article for America: The Jesuit Review, she dressed up a prison reform crusade using a childhood anecdote about a family member with a tattoo reading “Only God can judge me.” From this emotionally appealing starting point, Ocasio-Cortez proceeded to offer a theologically confusing reflection pasted together from the creed of her youth: “Innocence, in its mercy, partly excuses us from having to fully reckon with the spiritual gifts of forgiveness, grace and redemption at the heart of the Catechism: I believe in the forgiveness of sins.”
The need for forgiveness presupposes the recognition of sin, and it is not difficult for the average alert Catholic to guess which evils are the truly heinous ones, according to the gentlewoman from New York. During a COVID-era phone interview with National Catholic Reporter’s Peter Feuerherd, she highlighted some of them: climate change, poverty intensified by the absence of universal health coverage. While the reporter briefly touched upon Ocasio-Cortez’s strong pro-choice position, he did not make reference to her recent 100 percent approval rating by NARAL (now known as Reproductive Freedom for All), which had been bolstered by the congresswoman’s recent vote to block Trump restrictions on fetal stem cell research.
Nor did the National Catholic Reporter take the trouble to question AOC’s condemnation of Mercy San Juan Medical Center for cancelling the hysterectomy of Evan Michael Minton, who was born female and had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. “There Is nothing holy about rejecting medical care of people, no matter who they are, on the grounds of what their identity is,” said the congresswomen, “There is nothing holy about turning someone away from a hospital.” She clearly had no intention of applying her maxim, “Only God can judge,” to the consciences of the doctors in the case.
Less than six months after Feuerhard’s article came out, OCA’s shocking mischaracterization of a beloved Catholic saint went too far for a prominent prelate of the Church, who promptly took her to task for it. In an Instagram story, Ocasio-Cortez had taken aim at a statue in the Hawaii State Capitol which she characterized as a symbol of white supremacy and imperialism. The target of her attack, Father Damien De Veuster, had made a complete self-gift to the lepers of the dreaded colony of Molokai, dying of the disease there at the age of 49. Canonized in 2009 by Benedict XIV, St. Damien has long been revered by the Hawaiian people, Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Uncharacteristically riled by the congresswoman’s blatant airing of leftist rhetoric, Bishop Robert Barron leapt to De Veuster’s defense on YouTube: “To associate this man in any way with colonialism or white supremacy is so ridiculous and insulting, and it shows the superficiality and the simplistic quality of these, sort of, woke categories.”
This year, AOC’s uncomfortable relationship with His Excellency dramatically reentered the public forum. In February, Bishop Barron stepped out on social media to address AOC’s contention that Western culture was a simply an evolving veneer overlaying human civilization, saying that the congresswoman’s remarks came “right out of the Marxist playbook.”
The situation intensified on the 9th of August, the day after AOC had announced the decision to freeze her eggs. That morning, after self-administering the hormone cocktail she had gleefully referenced on Instagram, the politician made her much-anticipated appearance on ABC’s This Week. Her eyes possibly on a 2028 presidential run, Ocasio-Cortez appeared to distance herself from previous radical statements she had made, humorously repeating a New York councilman’s remark that “Woke 1 was crazy.”
Bishop Barron did not find this quip amusing in the slightest. He quickly posted a scathing indictment of the congresswoman’s statement:
I was appalled by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s giggling dismissal of ‘Woke 1’ as ‘crazy.’ In case you’ve forgotten, she herself was one of the most passionate advocates of de-funding the police, tearing down statues of American heroes, establishing racial quotas, dividing the country between oppressors and oppressed, etc….One of the bitterest fruits of Wokeism was the cancel culture that resulted in armies of people losing jobs, reputations, and careers because they didn’t correspond to the reigning orthodoxy. I happen to know several people whose lives were devastated by Woke crusaders. But now it’s just ‘ha-ha, wasn’t that crazy.’ No, it was brutal and inhumane.
Adopting a more moderate political persona might be AOC’s strategy these days, but will these modifications be of any use at propelling her into the White House? Within days of her flippant “Woke 1” comment, some progressives have lashed out against her in response to what they see as a betrayal of the rising socialist power apparatus. Meanwhile, faithful Catholics in the pews are not any more likely to swallow the deception than the Bishop of Winona, Minnesota.
Rather than walking back the extreme positions of her “salad days,” AOC seems to be shoring up the confused moral framework she has embraced alongside so many of her contemporaries. You won’t hear her lamenting that Maura Healey, the Catholic governor of Massachusetts, made a “crazy” decision on August 10th by signing the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, a horrific measure which removed the limited statewide protection in place for preborn children beyond the 24th week of pregnancy. Nor will she be tempted to dissociate herself from the views of California representative Sara Jacobs, Co-Chair of the Transgender Equality Task Force, who preceded her in publicly airing the details of her own egg-freezing decision.
If AOC’s political future were only the consideration at stake, concerned Catholics could simply pray for her conversion—something that, in charity, we should certainly be doing—and allow her to grow up at own pace. However, she is an undeniably striking young woman who seems to possess the knack of harnessing the power of social media—a surefire way to draw in a generation of girls raised on the pluckier Disney heroines. With the Kamala Harris campaign still fairly close in the rear-view mirror, it is hard not to issue prognostications of the doom that may be unwittingly wrought by this young feminist politician. Her latest offering at the feast of female autonomy expands the familiar trope, “Women can do anything!” to the fallacious assertion “anytime they want to,” despite the biological imperatives we all must contend with.
Our duty is clear. We must give young women other voices to listen to, better role models, like Our Blessed Mother, like St. Gianna Beretta Molla, whose joy in the midst of sacrifice reveals the ultimate antidote for selfish ambition: “Look at the mothers who truly love their children: how many sacrifices they make for them. They are ready for everything, even to give their own blood so that their babies grow up good, healthy, and strong.” It is a far cry from “Sit in the freezer; I’ll get to you later.”
We cannot guarantee that the young women who move through our lives will choose to act in accordance with their universal vocation to motherhood, particularly when so many elements, both worldly and supernatural, militate against it. But unless we are willing to surrender these girls—and their children–to the banquet of reproductive exploitation, we must offer them real nourishment, even if they initially recoil from the taste. It’s a bit of common-sense Catholicism that, we ardently pray, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may yet learn.
