Eight long years ago, Meg Quinn decided not to share the details of a big decision.

She was 37 and just out of a long-term relationship when she started panicking. Was she running out of time to have children? Feeling helpless, she decided to do something that was expensive but might help her chances of becoming a mother.

She froze her eggs.

“It was hard to talk about,” Ms. Quinn, a food content creator who’s now 45, said on Monday in an interview from her home in Los Angeles. “There were so many different ways that it could go. Like, you could spend all this money and it could be for nothing.”

So when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 36, announced last weekend that she would be freezing her eggs — and then posted video on Instagram injecting herself with medication just before a TV interview — Ms. Quinn was stunned by the boldness of her actions.

“I just love that she’s making it public,” she said. “I think women, the more we share, the better it is.”

She added: “It’s hard on women. We have to do all these things, and, like, no guy has to do these things.”

Until about 2012, freezing eggs to preserve fertility was considered an experimental intervention for urgent cases like cancer patients whose fertility would be compromised by treatment.

But it’s only now, as thousands more go through a process, that women are freely talking about it.

Like breast cancer, menopause and menstruation, egg freezing has become yet another women’s health issue in which open discussion is seen as a form of empowerment. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez herself said that it was “badass that I’m going to be giving myself shots in the green room” of a TV studio.

Her very personal disclosure, however, also had a political overlay, as she linked her decision to freeze her eggs to the debates over reproductive choice.

“There is very strangely a political risk, or a political tax, that comes with sharing this info,” she said, adding that she wanted “to show more depictions of women having full lives in every context and every choice.”

Indeed, her announcement also brought disquiet over the medical messaging and outright condemnation of her choices.

Though some people refer to freezing eggs as an insurance policy, doctors said that it was not always a smooth process and hardly guaranteed fertility later in life. Conservative commentators, especially those who have decried the country’s dropping birthrate, said that in vitro fertilization and other reproductive technologies give women the false impression that they can wait to have children.

Allie Beth Stuckey, the popular conservative writer and commentator, posted: “She’s glamorizing the lie that women can have it all. You can’t. Biology is real and how you order your life makes or breaks your future.”

Whatever the risks or the politics, the rate of egg freezing has soared: In the decade between 2014 and 2024, the number of egg freezing cycles grew to 38,930 from 6,090, according to Jennifer Eaton, president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology.

Many women see egg freezing as a reflection of the times, as they search for ways to navigate their education, careers and relationships. In interviews, they described a personal decision, which could be both empowering, but also defensive, in case their hopes of finding suitable life partners do not materialize.

Egg freezing seems natural, said Karina Martin, who is 34 and lives in Sacramento. She underwent the procedure two years ago, before studying to be a physician assistant. She said she initially thought she would be ready to use the eggs in about five years. If she has to have a baby alone, she said, she will do it.

She sympathizes with Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to preserve her options. “She is a hard-working woman who has put her career first,” she said. “It’s a really smart decision, and I don’t think it’s political.”

Avni Barman, the chief executive of the media company Gen She, froze her eggs last year, even though she was in a serious relationship and didn’t expect to need them.

Ms. Barman, 29, posted videos of the process, hoping to show that it is not difficult, especially for younger women. “I feel so powerful,” she said, because she was taking control of something she didn’t want to leave up to chance.

On her videos, she explained that the cost to freeze her eggs in New York City was about $7,000 and that she easily squeezed the procedure into her busy day, which included a conference and an investor dinner.

“I’m friends with a lot of really successful seven, eight, nine-figure female founders — they all do it,” Ms. Barman said in an interview. “To them, it’s like getting a designer bag — freezing your eggs, they cost the same — and that’s kind of the mentality around it.”

Doctors and experts, however, say the process is often not that easy. Egg freezing and other fertility treatments can be as stressful as cancer treatments, said Rena Gower, a fertility therapist based in Manhattan.

A woman must inject a cocktail of hormonal medications into her abdomen over a period of eight to 10 days. A doctor then retrieves the eggs by a needle inserted through the vaginal wall while the patient is sedated.

Mature eggs are flash frozen in liquid nitrogen, potentially preserving them for many years. It is essentially the first step of in vitro fertilization, which involves thawing the eggs, fertilizing them in the lab and creating embryos.

Many infertility doctors said they hope that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s transparency will lead to a bigger, clearer conversation about supporting a woman’s desire to have children.

Right now, fertility is poorly understood, they said.

“I’ve had patients come in at age 48, and I’m ready to start talking about menopause, and they’re ready to start talking about fertility,” said Audrey Buxbaum, a gynecologist at Downtown Women in Manhattan.

Ms. Gower, the fertility therapist, said that she has encountered many women who were afraid to tell anyone that they have frozen their eggs.

Sometimes, she said, women feel forced into secrecy by their families, who believe it is morally wrong. Or they feel guilt or shame that their body might be seen as broken, or that their romantic relationships aren’t working out.

Some women are nervous that motherhood — even the prospect of it — would negatively influence their jobs.

Ms. Quinn, the content creator who was surprised by Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s openness, said freezing her eggs left her so drained that she felt numb.

She dove into her savings to pay about $16,000 for the initial cycle, which produced only seven of the 18 frozen eggs her doctor had hoped for.

She was devastated. The doctor suggested she complete one or two more cycles, but she couldn’t bear even the idea of it, emotionally or financially.

Two years later, in 2020, she met her life partner, Greg Gomes. And on Feb. 14, 2023, when Ms. Quinn was 42, a doctor implanted the embryo that became their daughter, Rory.

On Valentine’s Day of this year, Ms. Quinn felt brave enough to post the details of her motherhood journey on social media, and the lessons she learned. She wanted to give people hope “because there’s so much unknown before you get to this place.”

The title was, “I froze my eggs at 37.”

“I feel more confident to talk about it,” she said, “now that it has worked out.”

Annie Karni contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.