Two prominent American women from opposite ends of the political spectrum have reignited a long-simmering national debate about the unique struggles women face when building high-demand careers while planning for or raising a family, shining a bright light on systemic gaps in U.S. workplace policy that disproportionately disadvantage working mothers.
This week, progressive Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced she had begun the process of egg freezing, sharing step-by-step documentation of her daily at-home hormone injections on social media to demystify the procedure for other professional women. Just days earlier, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, a conservative appointee in the Trump administration, revealed she would step down from her high-profile role to prioritize time with her young family, including her newborn infant.
Leavitt framed her decision as a deeply personal choice, explaining that since returning to work after her daughter’s birth, she had come to recognize she could not simultaneously meet the relentless demands of the White House press secretary role and be the fully present parent her two young children deserved. Her announcement and Ocasio-Cortez’s reproductive planning came on the heels of similar shared experiences from other women in public office, including California Democratic Representative Sara Jacobs, who has already completed two rounds of egg freezing to delay childbearing while building her congressional career.
Jacobs opened up about the grueling logistical and physical challenges of the procedure, describing how she would dash up to her Capitol Hill office between legislative sessions to administer hormone shots during her treatment. The 37-year-old lawmaker noted the process, which typically costs upwards of $10,000 and is rarely covered by U.S. health insurance plans, brought significant physical side effects: body aches, extreme hormonal swings that felt like going through puberty and menopause simultaneously. Still, she called the decision empowering, saying it gave her greater agency to choose when to fit children into her demanding career that requires weekly cross-country travel between California and Washington D.C.
When Jacobs first began her egg freezing journey in 2021, she said the topic was almost never discussed among lawmakers in the halls of Congress. Today, just a small fraction of sitting members of Congress are mothers to children under 18, and only a tiny handful have ever given birth while holding office.
The conversations sparked by these high-profile women have pulled back the curtain on a broader systemic issue: the United States remains the only industrialized nation in the world that does not require employers to offer paid parental leave. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms that fewer than one in four U.S. workers have access to employer-sponsored paid family leave, while more than 120 countries across the globe — including every European nation — mandate paid maternity leave for working women.
Shifting demographic trends have only amplified these challenges. A 2025 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows the average age of mothers giving birth in the U.S. rose from 28.7 to 29.6 between 2016 and 2023, as more women delay childbearing to build their careers, while a growing share choose not to have children at all.
Interviews with professional women across a range of fields illustrate the uneven playing field for working mothers, even for those with significant privilege. Michele Heisler, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan and medical director for the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights, gave birth to her first child after returning to medical school at age 30, and carried her second child during her third year of training. Heisler said she only been able to advance in her high-profile career because she could afford childcare support like nannies and had a partner who shared domestic work equally. Without that equal division of labor, she noted, child rearing almost always falls disproportionately on women, forcing them to step back from their career ambitions. She relies on a flexible schedule that often requires working late into the night and waking as early as 5 a.m. to complete research, so she can prioritize time with her children during the day.
Seema Patel, an associate professor of law at UC Law San Francisco and a former workers’ rights attorney, echoes that experience. Like Heisler, she completes most of her academic work after her three children, now ages 13, 11, and 7, go to bed, so she does not miss key moments with them while they are young. Even with access to partial maternity leave and a supportive partner, she says the constant balancing act between career advancement and active parenting remains an unresolved challenge. “How can I do that while also being there for my kids and attentive to them? I don’t have an answer,” she said.
Patel, who previously worked for San Francisco’s Office of Labor Standards Enforcement — the first local U.S. government to pass a mandate requiring paid parental leave for private sector workers — points out that lower-wage working parents face far greater barriers than women in professional roles like hers. Most low-income workers have no access to paid leave at all, leaving them with impossible choices between keeping their jobs and bonding with a new child.
Jacobs points to a root cause of the systemic issue: most U.S. workplaces, including the federal government, were designed by and for men who traditionally had stay-at-home spouses to manage all domestic and childcare responsibilities. Even the U.S. Congress does not offer its own members paid parental leave, she notes. “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,” she said.
For now, egg freezing has given Jacobs a safety net, allowing her to delay childbearing until she can navigate the logistical challenges of raising a child while serving in Congress that requires half her time away from her home state. “I hope to be able to do that one day, but I just haven’t figured the time is right just yet,” she said.