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.
