I had my first child in December; he will also be my only child. I’m going one-and-done with kids for the same reasons many women in the United States are having fewer babies, and later in life. Faced with economic uncertainty, climate change, and vanishing reproductive rights, it feels like a prudent choice. Most importantly, it’s what I want.
The Trump administration is trying to figure out how to change my mind, and doing a terrible job of it. On April 21, The New York Times published an article about various incentives the White House is kicking around in hopes of reversing the country’s historically low birth rate. Among them are a $5,000 “baby bonus”—cash in hand for each infant delivered—and a “National Medal of Motherhood” bestowed on women with six or more children.
The public response to the Times story was fast, and much of it was furious. Social media was flooded with references to The Handmaid’s Tale. Bewildered parents wondered who could be convinced to have a baby for $5,000. (A recent study found that it costs nearly $300,000 to raise a child in the United States.) Why not enact policies, such as paid family leave and universal preschool, that would actually ease the burden of parenting?
The simple fact is that many of the pronatal voices with Trump’s ear either don’t care about this burden, or don’t see it as a burden at all. Among them are Vice President J.D. Vance, who has suggested that parents should have more voting power than other citizens, and Elon Musk, who has fathered at least a dozen children he seems to play little part in raising. Behind these men is a chorus of pronatal activists desperate to kickstart a baby boom. Many of them recently attended NatalCon, the subject of another viral Times article. A running theme of that event, held in Austin, Texas, in March, was that bearing children is a woman’s obligation. “Women need to take their jobs seriously,” one female attendee told the Times reporter. “Not their jobs. Their duty.”
This sentiment should terrify women—not least because we’ve heard it before, emanating from some of history’s darkest chapters and ugliest corners. The natalism promoted by the Trump administration and its allies echoes insidious forces and regimes. In the United States, the far right has long insisted that motherhood is not only a woman’s deepest desire and biological destiny, but also a role she must inhabit to avert the collapse of Western civilization. The 14 Words, a popular white-nationalist slogan, is a pronatalist rallying cry: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The Turner Diaries, a racist novel published in the 1970s that served as inspiration for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and January 6 insurrectionists, depicts white women as racial soldiers charged with replenishing the world.
Across time, far-right propaganda has been littered with images of women holding infants or surrounded by broods of children. The women appear joyful and stalwart. They are always beautiful. Some images depict mothers as goddesses or warriors, ready to rise in righteous defense of their progeny. The language used to describe motherhood is equally glorifying: In the 1920s, the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, the organization’s department of propagation declared, “[A mother] has waded into the jaws of her death for her offspring and is willing to lay down her life again if need be that their lives might be spared…. That is a mother’s love.” At the time, the KKK had some three million female members. A woman named Robbie Gill Comer, “imperial commander” of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), once reminded her followers that, as mothers, they could “prove a power in the preservation of America for Americans.” More recently, a tradwife influencer named Ayla Stewart issued a “white baby challenge.” (Stewart is one of the main subjects of a book I wrote about women who support white nationalism.) “I’ve made six!” she declared online. “Match or beat me!” Her handle at the time? Wife With a Purpose.
The Nazis—not the neo- variety, the OGs—also talked about motherhood in terms of duty to a cause greater than themselves and their immediate families. “The calling to motherhood [is] the way through which the German woman will see her calling to be mother of the nation,” Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the leader of the National Socialist Women’s League, said in a speech. “She will then not live her life selfishly, but rather in service to her people.” For Adolf Hitler’s acolytes, the home was the microcosm of the nation, and mothers were its keepers. The Nazis went so far as to reward mothers as part of what historian Claudia Koonz has called “the world’s most ambitious fertility drive.” The prize for bearing many children was a medal. According to Koonz, “Whenever a member of the Hitler Youth met a decorated mother, he had to snap to attention with a brisk ‘Heil Hitler!’” One wonders what the equivalent protocol would be for a MAGA stan who one day encountered an American woman with a newly minted National Medal of Motherhood.
Perhaps NatalCon’s crowd would have suggestions. As a Mother Jones dispatch details, several prominent bigots attended the event. Many of them are keen on eugenics, whether that means harnessing emergent technology to create genetically “superior” embryos or ensuring that only certain people have the babies America lacks—immigrants of color need not breed, and feminists can take a hike too. In fact, NatalCon participants place much of the blame for the country’s low birth rate on feminists, what with their insistence on letting women make their own choices. NatalCon’s organizer, a far-right influencer named Kevin Dolan, has called feminism “incompatible with human life.”
Maybe, then, the Trump administration and its pronatal allies aren’t hoping to persuade me to have a few more kids. As someone who values bodily autonomy, I’m a lost cause. The question, I suppose, is who isn’t. Who might be convinced by pronatal propaganda? For all the online outrage directed at the notions of baby bonuses and medals, some women may well find appeal in the government’s promise, however hollow, to esteem motherhood.
That is a thought that should terrify us all.