Rep. Sara Jacobs Talks Publicly About Her Period & Fertility. The Reason Is Deep

“As a young woman, reproductive health care is my health care, and like tens of millions of Americans, I’ve used apps to track my period.” Rep. Jacobs said as she touted the My Body, My Data Act this June amid the reversal of the landmark abortion decision Roe v. Wade, which had legalized abortion nationally for nearly 50 years. “It is unconscionable that our personal reproductive information could be sold to the highest bidder and weaponized against us.”

"Growing up, I was never told anything about fertility, except that after you turn 26, it gets harder — and you should be afraid of getting older. We get a lot of messages in our society about the importance of youth. We're often told you can't have it all. You can choose your career or having a family but not both, and there's just a lot of fear. 

"It's funny, when I first started running for office, people would ask me: 'Well, how are you going to do this job and have kids?' You know they wouldn't be asking me that if I was a young man running for office… And I'm sure if I had kids when I was running the first time, people would have asked me how I was going to be able to raise my kids and do this job. 

"Anyway, when I got elected to Congress, I realized it would be a few years before I was ready to have kids. I'd thought about freezing my eggs before, so I talked to my doctor and she agreed it was the right choice for me at this moment.

"So during my first year in Congress, in my first term, I ended up doing two rounds of egg freezing. It was a lot. The day before one of my procedures, I'd been at a dinner about China policy and during my last couple rounds of shots, I was working on the big defense bill that goes all night. I was pretty uncomfortable. 

"Often we talk about egg freezing and we don't necessarily talk about the entirety of the process. I felt the [effects of the] hormones a lot. I got really nauseous. I did about two weeks of estrogen pills that made me feel like I was going through puberty again. I gained weight, acne, all of it. Then I had about two weeks of injections starting once a day and, towards the end, twice a day, in my abdomen. My sister-in-law helped with that — I don't like needles. While working, I had to go to the doctor constantly to get my blood drawn and do ultrasounds. Then the eventual procedure was under twilight sedation. And so that whole day I was sort of out of commission. And then after that first round, my doctor called to tell me that I only got five mature eggs, so I'd have to do a second round.

"I got 12 mature eggs in that second round so now I have 17 in the bank.

"Although it was difficult as a process, it was worth it because it felt like I was giving myself some agency and taking control of my life. And [now I'm] more able to make decisions for myself. And that felt really empowering, even through the hard moments. 

"And there were hard ones for sure. There was one time where I was literally getting my blood drawn while on a Zoom voting virtually on something. Luckily, I have a great team that worked really hard to help make sure I was doing everything I needed to do on all fronts. 

"I was transparent about this whole process, and the thing that surprised me most was then how many people came up to talk to me about their own experiences. We often feel like we're in this alone, but, actually, so many people are going through the same things. And we should be talking about that. When I talked to people who were thinking about freezing their eggs, I talked to them about the pros and cons of it. I felt like it was the right choice for me because it makes me feel like I have a little bit more agency in deciding when it's right to start a family. But it's also a really difficult procedure. It's very expensive. It should be more accessible so that everyone can have the option to choose what's right for them — whether that's fertility preservation, whether that's needing fertility treatments because of infertility, whether that's choosing not to have a child, whether that's choosing adoption. All people should have the dignity and be empowered to make the decisions that are right for them and their family. And look: I know, I'm privileged and lucky that I was able to pay out of pocket for this option, but most people can't do that. And right now, insurance mostly doesn't cover this.

"Another thing I'll say: When I publicly shared that I was freezing my eggs, the differences in responses from my colleagues didn't break out on partisan lines, but generational ones. People who were younger, or who had kids who were going through IVF were more understanding. It's no secret that Congress is older than the majority of people in this country. And there were just a lot of people who didn't know anything about this — just had no concept of what I was doing. So it was a lot of educating. I think that's true of all reproductive issues. I've had to explain that people track their periods and that there are apps that help people do that. I've talked about my own period. I try to educate some of my colleagues on these issues that seem so commonplace and normal for me and my peers.

"In fact, I came up with the idea for the My Body, My Data Act as a bill because I was getting text messages from my friends and peers and constituents asking if they needed to delete their period tracking app after the Dobbs decision [which overturned Roe v. Wade]. And I used a period tracking app myself. So I started looking into it and realized we shouldn't have it be on each individual person to figure this out. It should be the government's job — but for a really long time, only a particular part of our society was really well represented in government. And so these kinds of issues that are almost pedestrian in my life are actually very shocking and new for this institution. Like, I was the first person ever to talk about my own period or my own use of [the emergency contraceptive] Plan B on the House floor. It's 2023. We shouldn't be just doing that for the first time… 

"We've seen a lot of support for this legislation from the public, including Republicans and Democrats, and in the House and Senate for this Legislation. Basically, what the bill would do is that for any reproductive or sexual health data — so period tracking app, website, search, anything like that — companies could only collect and retain what they strictly needed to provide the service. They couldn't sell it, they could only share it with your express written consent, and you can ask for it to be deleted at any time.

"This is especially important post-Roe. We're already seeing instances of states' attorneys general and prosecutors trying to use this kind of data to prosecute people. For instance, in Nebraska, police use private Facebook messages between a mom and her daughter to prosecute the daughter for having an abortion that was illegal under state law. So we know that this data is already being used. We know that there are many companies that are doing the right thing, but there are also many companies whose business model is designed where you do not pay for the service, but they sell your data to get more targeted ads. There have been reports that people can buy this data for pennies. And anyone can do that. 

"All this relates back to the world of fertility I know well — this would protect any tracking people are doing with a fertility tracking app or as they're looking online. All these issues are connected. This is about people in this country having the ability to control their own reproductive health, whether that's choosing when, how, or if to have a child. Miscarriage and abortion often present the same when you're seeking treatment. So let's say someone had an IVF cycle that didn't work or something else happened and they had a miscarriage — without this data being protected, who knows what a state attorney general or a prosecutor might try and say they were doing?

"All this also will shape the future world my eggs could be brought into. Like many millennials, I am thinking about the place we're leaving to the next generation, and I'm factoring that into my decision of planning to have kids. But that's actually why I'm in this job — because I want to make sure we have a climate and a world that's livable for future generations. I want to make sure we're building a country that we could be proud of. I want to make sure we have a social safety net for everyone in this country to be able to grow up and have opportunities to succeed."