US women in politics confront motherhood gap as lawmakers freeze eggs, seek balance

Last summer, Representative Sara Jacobs would slip away from the House floor, climb the stairs to her office, and inject herself with hormones before hurrying back to rejoin her colleagues in session. She was freezing her eggs—a procedure that costs upward of ten thousand dollars and is almost never covered by insurance, one that involves harvesting eggs from the ovaries and preserving them for a pregnancy that might come later, when the timing feels less impossible.

Jacobs was 37 then, and she described the experience as both empowering and brutal. "Your body hurts," she said. "Your hormones are crazy. It's kind of like puberty and menopause at the same time." When she first announced the process in 2021, few lawmakers were talking about it openly in the halls of Congress. This week, Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced she too had begun freezing her eggs, documenting the daily injections on social media. The timing was deliberate: the same week White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced her departure from the Trump administration, citing the impossibility of being both a present mother to her infant and fully devoted to her role. "I cannot be the best mum my two young children deserve," Leavitt said, "while devoting the constant time, energy and attention required" of the position.

These announcements have surfaced a conversation that has been simmering beneath the surface of American professional life for decades: the structural incompatibility between demanding careers and motherhood in a nation that refuses to mandate paid parental leave. The United States stands alone among industrialized countries in this regard. More than 120 nations worldwide—including every country in Europe—guarantee paid maternity leave. In America, fewer than one in four workers have access to paid family leave through their employer, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The gap has real consequences. From 2016 to 2023, the average age at which American women gave birth rose from 28.7 to 29.6 years old, and more women are choosing not to have children at all.

Michele Heisler, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, gave birth to her first child at 30, while in her third year of medical school. She now serves as medical director for Physicians for Human Rights. She was able to sustain her career only because she had access to resources—nannies, flexible scheduling—and a husband who shared parenting equally. "Unless it's clear that both are equal parents, child rearing is always going to fall on the woman, and then you're going to have to take a step back in some way," she said. She stayed up late into the night to work, sometimes waking at five in the morning to finish research, so she could be present with her children during the day.

Seema Patel, an associate professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, does something similar—burning the midnight oil to preserve daylight hours for her three children, now ages 13, 11, and seven. Early in her career as a federal attorney, her boss advised her to save her vacation days in case she ever wanted to have children. She was a young lawyer who had not yet thought about motherhood, but she took the advice. "I better be saving my vacation days," she remembered thinking. Patel has worked in workers' rights, including at San Francisco's Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, which became the first local government in the country to require employers to provide paid parental leave. Yet through her legal practice, she has witnessed countless lower-wage workers and parents with no access to paid time off at all. Even with some leave and a dedicated partner, the juggling act remains unsolved. "I have a high-producing job," she said. "How can I do that while also being there for my kids and attentive to them? I don't have an answer."

Jacobs, who has completed two rounds of egg freezing, has decided to delay motherhood while her job requires her to travel constantly between California and Washington. "Figuring out how to be a mum when I'm gone half the time across the country, it's logistically complicated," she said. Only a handful of women have given birth while serving in Congress, and a few dozen lawmakers are mothers to children under 18. The federal government, like most American employers, offers no paid parental leave. Jacobs sees the root of the problem clearly: "Both Congress and the general American workplace were designed by and for men who had often stay-at-home spouses who handled all of the domestic work. It's going to take a lot of work for us to create a society where the domestic work is really shared equally between women and men." For now, she finds comfort in having a backup plan—a way to preserve her options until the moment, if it comes, when she believes she can finally make space for children.