Meanwhile,
the Trump administration is cutting if not outright eliminating women’s health
research. They are freezing federal funds for family planning, meaning
pregnant people will lose critical care. Trump claims to support IVF and jokes
that he’s the “fertilization president” one week, and the next he eliminates the team at the CDC working on
IVF. Trump celebrates the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade as
a personal victory, and after Dobbs, maternal mortality spiked. He’s breaking up families,
jailing mothers and fathers and leaving their children alone to defend themselves before
immigration judges—without their parents, without lawyers. The men he surrounds
himself with openly lean into eugenic thinking: lackeys like Elon Musk, who believes “A collapsing birth rate is the
biggest danger civilization faces by far,” and HHS director Robert F. Kennedy,
Jr, who complains that teens aren’t fertile enough and that “autism
destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource,
which is our children.”

There
is a continuity from the pseudo-valorization of motherhood to policing people
through reproductive coercion. “One of
the fastest ways to trap a woman in precarity is to push her into pregnancy,”
Jessica Calarco, University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist and author of Holding
It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net, told me this week. After
our conversation, it felt like these “pronatalist” policies are really more
like DOGE, but for reproductive labor—taking a chainsaw to what few supports exist for supporting people’s pregnancies and families, making people’s lives
more chaotic and unstable, and calling it making America “great” again.” As
ever, we have to ask: great for who, and at whose expense? 

With
pronatalism, Calarco told me, “the goal is not to make raising children easier
for everyone—really, it’s about providing a reward for families who do
childrearing the ‘right’ way.” What that often looks like among the
pronatalists is “breadwinner/homemaker families,” Calarco explained, men being
the breadwinners, women being the homemakers, and women rearing the children,
typically large numbers of children, perhaps homeschooling them. Hence policies
that reward women for having many children, and “education” to steer them away
from contraception and family planning and into monitoring their fertility.