'Don't be weird about this… even though I know you all will be,' Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told her 9.6 million Instagram followers, as she filmed herself lifting her shirt to pinch the flesh on her stomach and inject it with synthetic reproductive hormones.

Oh, something is definitely weird.

Last weekend's video was just the start of the rising progressive star's documented 'journey' to freeze her eggs.

She has since posted three installments but, immediately, something felt off.

Why would AOC, a 36-year-old woman with a fiancé of more than four years, go down the arduous and unreliable path of egg freezing when she could cryogenically preserve fertilized embryos (if the couple wanted to delay starting a family) or do things the old-fashioned way (presuming all systems were a go)?

By late Tuesday, it all began to make more sense… and get weirder.

Multiple outlets reported that AOC had secretly broken off her engagement with fiancé Riley Roberts about 18 months ago. That's fine, of course. Relationships fail and a woman's desire to safeguard her chance to have children in the future is entirely understandable and admirable. But an 'egg freeze' video series is strange way to indirectly inform the world that you're back on the market.

I can only imagine how Riley Roberts may have felt. Whether intentional or not, AOC has outed him, even though she won't admit it.

'I don't comment on my private life – thank you,' AOC told a New York Post reporter who caught up to her while she was walking her dog on Wednesday.

You don't?

Is this you?

'Today is my first ultrasound,' AOC told her massive social media audience on Tuesday in her 'Egg Freezing Day Four' post.

Let's just call this what it is: vulgar politicking. Ruthless ambition. And perhaps a touch of social media-induced narcissism.

In the videos, AOC implies that her 'badass' life choices are an act of defiance against you know who – the patriarchy, the Right, Trump.

'This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life… I feel empowered to make this choice,' she blathered.

Well, no one's stopping you!

'In this political environment, where this administration is denying reproductive care to women across the country, from abortion rights to the ability to carry out a healthy pregnancy, I think it's important for us as leaders to have these conversations,' she said Sunday on ABC's This Week.

For the record, Trump and this Republican Congress have done nothing to hinder a women's ability to 'carry out a healthy pregnancy.'

In fact, if anyone is endangering women's health, in my opinion, it is the congresswoman.

What many Americans don't know and what AOC fails to include in her 'How to' videos is that 'egg freezing' may only give women a false sense of control – and that can have devastating psychological consequences.

A recently released American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology study followed more than 15,000 women who underwent 'egg freezing,' otherwise known as oocyte cryopreservation. The mean age of the women in the study was between 35 and 36 – Ocasio-Cortez is 36.

Only 5.7 percent of patients actually attempted to use the eggs they had elected to freeze, and among those women, only about a third ultimately had a live birth. Of the entire 15,000-woman cohort, only 258 births resulted, for an overall live-birth rate of under two percent.

Shouldn't AOC's brave act of defiance have been tempered with a dose of reality?

Almost a decade ago, the poster child for egg freezing discovered the truth of the procedure in devastating fashion.

In 2014, Brigitte Adams appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek beneath the headline 'Freeze Your Eggs, Free Your Career.' Adams was presented as the embodiment of a new kind of female empowerment: a successful woman using reproductive technology to give herself more choices in the 'quest to have it all.' Today such procedures, rarely covered by insurance, can cost more than $10,000 to $15,000, with annual storage fees that can run around $1,000 in New York City.

Things did not turn out as Adams hoped.

Approaching 45 and still single, the Washington Post reported in 2018, Adams decided to have a child on her own. She thawed the 11 eggs she had frozen and chose a sperm donor. Two eggs did not survive the thaw. Three failed to fertilize. Of the six embryos that remained, five appeared abnormal. The final embryo was implanted – and failed.

Adams was left not merely without a pregnancy but confronting the realization that the biological future she believed she had preserved years earlier was essentially gone. She described screaming 'like a wild animal' and collapsing to the floor.

Since the Post published Adams's story, egg freezing has only become more popular, fueled by a cultural message that too often turns the offer of possibility into a promise.

Psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb has explained the psychological danger of the technology: 'When you freeze your eggs, you lengthen your logistical timeline for fertility, but you also lengthen your emotional timeline. When you can always think "I'll do it later," it is very painful to close off that avenue and deal with the grief that you can't.'

That pain isn't limited to women who eventually thaw their eggs and discover that they do not result in a child. The false sense of security can shape the decisions women make for years before they ever return to the fertility clinic – decisions about relationships, marriage, motherhood and how much time they believe they still have.

There is nothing wrong with Ocasio-Cortez deciding to freeze her eggs, and there is nothing wrong with a woman deciding that the expense and uncertain odds are worth it to her. What is wrong is using this intensely personal and intimate moment as a political stunt, all the while selling women a comforting fiction.

This is the one conversation that women most urgently need to have.