Don’t buy MAGA’s baby boom hype
Everyone’s heard of someone having a baby in a doomed bid to save a marriage. But to save a fascist ideological project is a new one. Okay, okay — no one can prove that Second Lady Usha Vance, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, all got pregnant as a concurrent MAGA propaganda project. No more, anyway, than we can say that it’s anything but a wild coincidence that nearly all the women vying for Donald Trump‘s favor seem to have undergone the same intensive cosmetic surgery regimen to achieve “Mar-a-Lago face.” But it sure is lucky timing that all these women got pregnant, right when the MAGA coalition is starting to feel forlorn, torn asunder by infighting and the growing sense that the president’s declining health does not bode well for their future.
Jokes aside, all these pregnancies would likely be unremarkable except for the fact that the MAGA movement is obsessed with making babies. Vice President JD Vance famously spent years denouncing childless women as “miserable,” “sociopaths” and claiming they “must be stopped” from having a role in public life. Billionaire Elon Musk frequently rails about the supposed dangers to humanity from slightly lower birth rates. Kevin Roberts, the architect of Project 2025 who heads the Heritage Foundation, even ranted in his book about the evils of dog parks on the unpersuasive grounds that well-to-do urban women were substituting pet ownership for their duty to have more children. The late Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, frequently scolded women to give up their careers to have “more kids than they can afford.” There’s even Natal Con, an annual right-wing conference attended mostly by men, who get together and hype the idea that American wombs are being under-utilized by the women who still have control over them.
The result of this “obnoxious hyper-independent girl boss mentality,” as the Federalist’s Brianna Lyman put it? The “country is dying.” In a typically overheated article, she directly linked declining native birth rates to the alleged evil of immigration. “If we don’t make more Americans, we won’t have any more left,” she wrote, skirting the obvious fact that, by her definition, no one outside of a small minority of Native Americans count as real Americans.
Underpinning all this happy talk about “more babies” is a hateful project aimed both at white-ifying America and destroying decades of women’s progress.
It would be funny if these views weren’t tied to dangerously bigoted policies and tactics, from funding anti-birth control propaganda to Trump’s unleashing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to terrorize people of color in Minnesota, whether they are citizens or not. Underpinning all this happy talk about “more babies” is a hateful project aimed both at white-ifying America and destroying decades of women’s progress.
The “great replacement” conspiracy theory is mainstream in the GOP these days, as most Republican leaders, including Vance and Stephen Miller, endorse the false belief that Democrats are deliberately trying to “replace” white Americans with supposedly more pliable voters of color. This view, in turn, creates the rationale for indefensible efforts to actually engineer the ethnic make-up of the U.S. through mass deportations and abortion bans.
The GOP’s mini-baby boom is happening in this context, and unsurprisingly, MAGA media is hyping these pregnancies as hard as possible. In her Fox News segment on Leavitt’s pregnancy, Lara Trump warned “we’re going to be in a pickle if we don’t get more babies coming,” while falsely claiming Trump’s policies provide “safety and security for every child.” (In reality, Trump has stripped health care from millions, undermined public education and rained terror on families targeted by ICE for not being white.) “The White House practices what they preach about increasing the fertility rate,” Katie Miller wrote on X, as if a rich woman being pregnant was the same thing as making it easier for anyone else to have kids.
Pro-natalists always hide behind a paper-thin pretext that they’re merely concerned about the future economic health of the nation, even as they ignore that immigration stands to solve labor market shortages that could, in theory, arise. But sexism is never far from the surface. On Tuesday, Kid Rock laughably claimed that the “low birth rate” is due to “ugly ass broke liberal women” being so allegedly untouchable that “dudes” only “want to sleep with each other.” Katie Miller agreed, saying the reason conservatives supposedly have more babies comes down to aesthetics: “Conservative women are just factually more attractive than liberal women.” Her claim comes just a few months after she attacked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Fox News as a “sad, petty, childless adult,” all because the New York congresswoman described Stephen Miller as a “clown” giving off “4’10” energy.
If readers are skeptical that the Millers will convince anyone that Mr. Miller is besting Ocasio-Cortez in the attractiveness category — well, let’s just say equally unpersuasive is the entire effort to sell the MAGA mini-baby boom as a meaningful shift in the broader American culture toward having bigger families. Despite all the right-wing media hype around these pregnancies, the response of the general public has cut against their hopes that this would lead to a Great Fertility Awakening among young women, who suddenly realize they need to quit their jobs to spend the next 20 years of their life staying constantly pregnant. Usha Vance’s pregnancy was mostly met with jokes about how she’s trying to steal her husband back from Erika Kirk. The Millers were greeted with speculation that the real father of the their child is Elon Musk. Leavitt’s announcement inspired cracks about how pregnant women aren’t supposed to use fillers, along with jokes about the 32-year age gap that exists between her and her 60-year-old husband: “Closer in age to the baby than her husband btw,” one Instagram user noted.
Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
Tellingly, the reception to the trio’s pregnancy announcements wasn’t a whole lot better with MAGA true believers. Despite relentless hysteria from right-wing media about low birth rates, conservative social media users didn’t seem to feel that these women’s pregnancies matter very much. There were some generic congratulatory responses from elderly Republicans with white Jesus pictures in their bios, but right-wing audiences mostly just didn’t care. Even diehard MAGA types don’t seem to think that the news will inspire other women to have more babies. The only true passion came from some MAGA types who are mad at Usha Vance for having another baby who will not be white.
All of this matters because the prescription from the right to raise the birth rate has, for years, come down to social signaling. Liberals point out that it’s hard to have kids in a country where employment is uncertain, health care is expensive, public schools are being gutted and maintaining a healthy work-life balance is a pipe dream. Republicans scoff at this, saying it’s only that women aren’t being encouraged and/or shamed enough into childbearing. A typical example of this came this week from Seth Kaplan at Fox News, who argued that all that’s necessary is for women to see other women having babies, because “having babies is contagious.”
And yet even conservative audiences can’t muster excitement about these alleged role models having babies. Perhaps that is less of a surprise when one recognizes that these three women have no intention of retreating from public life to become full-time stay-at-home mothers. Leavitt talks frequently about how she balances motherhood with “building my success in my career,” often with the unsubtle implication that women who struggle just don’t try hard enough. Katie Miller is still plugging away at her job as the world’s least-charming podcast host. Usha Vance has been forced out of her career into the role of second lady, but even she can’t convince people that she stays at home washing dishes all day — or that she’ll jump right back into high-paid work the second her husband is out of office.
The world has over eight billion people in it. A century ago, it was fewer than two billion. The notion that the “world is running out of children,” as Seth Kaplan’s headline claims, is preposterous, no matter how many centrists at the Atlantic or the New York Times buy into the conservative freakout over fertility rates. Panic over “birth rates” is a pretext, often a laughably thin one, for other right-wing grievances: social change, racial diversity and women’s equality. That’s why even MAGA doesn’t get too excited about prominent women getting pregnant — unless there’s a hope that it will prove the end of her career.
Read more
about this topic