Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez emphasizes the importance of men joining the fight for abortion rights: 'We need men to be speaking up'

• In GQ's October issue, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said men need to step up for abortion rights.
• AOC said Congress hasn't codified bodily autonomy yet because it's "easier" for the courts to do it.
• "For almost every woman that has gotten an abortion, there's a man who has either been affected or liberated," she said. 

An outspoken advocate for abortion rights, especially since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in a new interview with GQ that men need to be doing more to support the cause.

"For almost every woman that has gotten an abortion, there's a man who has either been affected or liberated by that abortion too," Ocasio-Cortez told GQ's Wesley Lowery. "In this moment it's really only going to be the vulnerability of men, and men talking to other men, that gives us the greatest hope of shifting things the fastest, soonest."

Ocasio-Cortez said she thinks there are plenty of "well-meaning reasons" why men feel they can't speak about issues like abortion. She said it's similar to how sometimes white people feel they can't take up space in conversations about race because they want to "center the person who's most impacted."

"But we know that when white folks take up space and say the right thing in rooms of other white people, that is the most shifting activity that can happen, more sometimes than any protest or any person writing a letter to the editor or anything like that," she said. "And we need men to be speaking up in that way as well. But I think men, sometimes they think, I'm not a woman. This doesn't affect me the most."

She added, "Men suffer from being under patriarchy. They don't go to the doctor. They suffer from much higher rates of completed suicides. Even though they report lower levels of depression, that doesn't mean that they suffer from it less. Just a couple years ago the American Psychological Association released a very deep paper and a campaign about how these traditional cultural markers of masculinity—stoicism, competition, domination, dominance—are leading to mental health issues for men. There's a stigma around men being vulnerable."

The congresswoman also said she thinks it's powerful when men share their stories of growth. In the profile, she reflected on the "good men" in her life, like her partner Riley Roberts, her cousins in the South Bronx, and her chief of staff, Gerardo Bonilla Chavez.

"There are amazing men in this world, and not men as a final product. There are men on incredible journeys, internal journeys, journeys of transcending beyond just anger as the acceptable masculine emotion," she said.