For some women in American politics, the question of when to have children is becoming increasingly difficult to separate from the demands of a political career.
For Democratic Representative Sara Jacobs, the decision led her to freeze her eggs.
Last summer, the 37-year-old California lawmaker would sometimes rush to her office in Congress to administer hormone injections before returning to legislative sessions.
It was the second time Jacobs had undergone the egg-freezing process, which she first announced publicly in 2021.
“It was an empowering decision that gave me more agency,” Jacobs said, while acknowledging how physically and emotionally demanding the experience could be.
“Your body hurts. Your hormones are crazy. It’s kind of like puberty and menopause at the same time.”
Egg freezing involves stimulating the ovaries with hormones, retrieving mature eggs and freezing them for possible use in the future. In the United States, the procedure can cost more than $10,000 and is often not covered by insurance.
Now, another prominent Democratic lawmaker has brought the issue back into the spotlight.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently revealed that she was also undergoing egg freezing and shared parts of the experience, including hormone injections, with her followers on social media.
The announcement triggered a wider conversation about the realities facing women who want both successful careers and families.
The discussion came at almost the same time White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that she would leave the Trump administration to spend more time with her family, including her infant child.
Leavitt said she had realised after returning to the White House following her daughter’s birth that she could not simultaneously give her two young children the attention they deserved and devote the enormous amount of time and energy required by her position.
Her decision highlighted a question that extends far beyond Washington.
How much are women expected to sacrifice to succeed professionally while raising a family?
The challenge is particularly significant in the United States, where there is no federal requirement guaranteeing paid parental leave.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than a quarter of workers have access to paid family leave through their employers. More than 120 countries provide paid maternity leave, including every European country.
At the same time, American women are increasingly having children later in life.
The average age of mothers giving birth in the US increased from 28.7 in 2016 to 29.6 in 2023, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For professional women, however, delaying motherhood can create another set of difficult decisions.
Michele Heisler, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, had her first child after returning to medical school at age 30.
She credits childcare support and having a husband who shared parenting responsibilities equally with helping her build a demanding career while raising a family.
Without that support, she believes women are more likely to carry the greater burden of childcare.
“If it’s not clear that both are equal parents, [child rearing] is always going to fall on the woman,” she said.
Heisler also relied heavily on flexibility. She would work late at night or wake up as early as 5am to complete research so she could spend more time with her children.
Seema Patel, an associate professor of law at UC Law San Francisco, has faced a similar balancing act.
She often works late at night because she wants to remain present for important moments in her children’s lives.
“The reality is that these years in your kids’ lives are so fleeting, and I’m super aware of the time,” she said.
Patel’s career has also exposed her to the other side of America’s parental-leave debate.
While working as a workers’ rights lawyer, she saw lower-income parents struggle because they could not afford to take unpaid time away from work.
When she became a federal attorney, her boss advised her to save her vacation days in case she eventually needed them for childbirth.
At the time, Patel had not even seriously considered motherhood.
But the advice forced her to confront a reality many women face: planning a family can also mean planning around the limitations of the workplace.
Today, Patel has three children, aged 13, 11 and seven. Even with maternity leave and an involved partner, she says the challenge has not disappeared.
“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.”
For Jacobs, the problem is particularly complicated because of the demands of Congress.
She frequently travels between California and Washington and says the idea of raising children while spending so much time away from home is difficult to imagine.
“Figuring out how to be a mum when I’m gone half the time across the country, it’s logistically complicated,” she said.
Jacobs has watched other women in Congress manage to combine motherhood with political careers, but she believes the broader American workplace was never designed with working mothers in mind.
“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,” she said.
She argues that the solution will require more than individual women simply working harder.
Domestic responsibilities, she says, must be shared more equally between men and women.
For Jacobs, freezing her eggs has provided a sense of flexibility while she continues building her political career.
She has completed two rounds of the procedure and hopes to have children someday.
But for now, she says the timing is not right.
And that may be the central dilemma facing many women in demanding careers: not whether they want a family, but whether the systems around them give them enough room to have one.