Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is making a deeply personal choice about motherhood — while revisiting a question she once encouraged young people to ask themselves: Is it even okay to have children?

The New York Democrat announced Saturday that she is freezing her eggs, openly documenting the process on social media and even filming herself injecting fertility medication into her stomach.

“Normally, I keep my private life quite private. But I have made the decision to freeze my eggs,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And I want to share this because I was weighing it for a very long time, and there isn’t a ton out there, and it can feel very daunting.”

She acknowledged that discussing such a personal decision publicly could carry a political price.

“I am aware there is, very strangely, a political ‘risk’ or ‘tax’ that could come with sharing this information,” she said.

But the announcement also puts a spotlight on a striking contrast between Ocasio-Cortez's personal decision and rhetoric she used earlier in her political career.

In a 2019 Instagram Live video, the then-29-year-old congresswoman warned that climate change could make future children's lives so difficult that young people were justified in questioning whether they should have children at all.

“Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don’t turn this ship around,” Ocasio-Cortez said at the time. “And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, ‘Is it okay to still have children?’”

Those words are worth remembering now.

Ocasio-Cortez is not doing anything wrong by preserving her fertility. Quite the opposite: her decision is personal, and every woman should have the freedom to make choices about her own future.

But politics has a funny way of making personal decisions public — especially when a politician has previously used her platform to tell millions of young people how they should think about the future.

Now Ocasio-Cortez says egg freezing gives her greater control over her life.

“I feel empowered to make this choice,” she said. “I think it’s a very privileged position that I’ve been able to make, and it’s also a result of, I think, changes in technology that have also made it more financially accessible.”

She said she hopes documenting the experience will educate women about fertility and other aspects of women's health, including puberty, pregnancy and menopause.

The congresswoman also described the unusual pressures of growing into adulthood under the public spotlight.

“When you get elected later in life, you’ve made all of your mistakes in private. You’ve learned. You’ve grown in private. But when you get elected in public, and when you’re young, you have to do all of that in public,” she said.