Babies? In this dystopia?

I don’t want to shock anyone, but it appears that the efforts of the U.S. government to outlaw abortion in nearly all cases has left women a lot less eager to start families. Who could possibly have seen this coming?

Truly, there is no better illustration of a political party’s sheer headassery than the piece in last Monday’s New York Times whose headline, atop a photo of J.D. Vance and his family, reads “White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women To Have More Children.” Take a pause to do a spit take, because come the fuck on. 

The piece comes after nearly three years of dispatches from hospitals, parking lots, and other places where women have died needlessly because—whoops!—even very much wanted pregnancies have complications, and because lifesaving interventions often require the same procedures as pregnancy terminations, and because medical professionals know that overzealous legislators don’t care about the distinction. This is not mentioned in the piece. 

Also not mentioned in the piece: any talk from these ding-dongs of creating conditions in which women might want to have children, like improving parental-leave policies, keeping affordable housing out of the grabby hands of private equity, access to childcare, non-access to guns. Sorry ladies, none of that is on the table. But can this administration interest you in some government-funded programs about your menstrual cycle? Perhaps a “National Medal of Motherhood,” to be awarded to women who birth six or more children?

We already knew that the Trump 2.0 goal of “restor[ing] the family as the centerpiece of American life” depends, like so much of his agenda, on ignoring the emergent needs of actual American families in favor of flowery appeals to a future shaped by eugenics. Some of the president’s closest allies, including Vance and Elon Musk, are bronatalists: men who have almost definitely never changed a diaper but who rarely shut up about women’s duty to bear children because their actual concern is that white people are being outbred. Musk in particular has been frantic about falling birthrates for some time despite evincing little interest in being a parent. And the credulousness with which his mask-off moments are greeted (surely that wasn’t a real Nazi salute! It’s not like he was wearing an SS uniform, guys!) is currently in full effect at the paper of record. 

Monday’s quaint tale of proposed persuasion followed two recent dispatches from the NYT (“They Want More Babies. Now They Have Friends in the White House,” from March 30, and “The Women Who Think the World Needs More Babies,” from April 17). Each one tiptoes around the racist core of pronatalism with vague language (noting that believers “dismiss immigration as a remedy, arguing that it can weaken the culture of the receiving country”) or suggestions that white supremacy is just a slightly controversial stance that an otherwise completely chill movement just happens to have welcomed to its broad coalition. 

It’s not. Pronatalist sentiment famously surges in times when white men feel fragile about others having the same rights or status as they do: In the early 20th century, white women in the United States gained voting rights and access to higher education and were promptly scrutinized for s signs of indifference to future childbearing; after World War II, when women who had been told it was their patriotic duty to work in munitions factories were dismissed and told their patriotic duty was to breed more soldiers for future wars. In the Islamophobic aftermath of post–9/11 America, financially stable white women were inundated with news of an “opt-out revolution” and wishful thinking about a coming baby boom. When this didn’t materialize at scale, TV filled the void with a glut of reality shows about supersized families; the most successful of these, 19 Kids and Counting, focused on the Christian-fundamentalist Duggar family, whose “Quiverfull” approach to family—birth as many children as possible to be arrows in the Lord’s arsenal, and stave off the threat of being outbred by immigrants—was downplayed.

Today’s pronatalists and the outlets breathlessly covering them want to be clear that they are no Duggars: these aren’t regular breeders, they’re cool breeders. God can kick rocks: They’re doing this for humanity, and, more specifically, leveraging technology to populate the world with humans exactly like them. The most relentlessly platformed of the cool breeders are Simone and Malcolm Collins, the self-styled avatars of modern pronatalism who execute the hat trick of being insufferable in all three NYT articles. Media outlets from The Wall Street Journal to Bloomberg to CBC News can’t seem to get enough of mother Simone (former employee of notoriously litigious Silicon Valley moneyman Peter Thiel, dresses like a milkmaid who is also in the band Kraftwerk), father Malcolm (told a Guardian reporter that his priority is “ensur[ing] that my kids have an isolated and differential breeding network,” slapped one of said kids in front of a different Guardian reporter), and their four offspring/content generators (conceived through IVF with embryos tested and selected for IQ, saddled with names like Titus Invictus and Industry Americus). 

The proposal to award a medal to particularly fecund mothers mentioned in “The Women Who Think the World Needs More Babies”? That idea was put forth by Simone Collins. She got it from Adolf Hitler: Beginning in 1938, the Nazi party bestowed the Cross of Honour of the German Mother on women who produced multiple children, and rescinded it in cases where those children weren’t raised Nazi enough. That’s not mentioned  in the NYT piece, which reports from the Natal Conference in Austin, Tex.

Also not mentioned: Jack Posobiec, one of the keynote speakers at the conference, wrote a book about fighting back against “unhumans” like Black Lives Matter activists, socialists, and people who refuse to see January 6th Capital rioters for the patriot heroes they are; J.D. Vance provided a blurb for the book. Mentioned only in passing: The conference was founded by a guy who watched a Tucker Carlson special called “The End of Men” that prescribed testicle tanning to counteract the “calamity” of men’s falling sperm counts and testosterone levels. (The response to this intervention from actual professionals was a resounding “lol no.”)

The pronatalist movement is very real and increasingly influential, which is why coverage of it should involve much more than Look at these weirdos who want lots of kids but aren’t Bible-thumping, becankled hicks! I realize this is asking a lot from news outlets that appear to have learned nothing from the “Dapper Nazi” backlash of 2016, but reporting on the actual motivations of the new pronatalists needs more context and less coyness. Pronatalist pushes of recent history happened in a United States where the right to abortion—if not the equality of access—was still the law of the land. In the Project 2025 era, the party in power is doing everything possible to mandate forced childbirth, and outlets like the NYT have to do more than cover pronatalism as though it’s actually about babies and thriving families—and not about, you know, a ruling political party whose explicitly white-nationalist agenda sees women as vessels and children as weapons.

Further reading

• I know I literally just complained about these weirdos being everywhere, but this undercover investigation into the link between pronatalists and the far-right, by the UK organization Hope Not Hate, is really worth a read.

• Colorado governor Jared Polis signed two bills into law on Thursday that will safeguard access to abortion by permitting public funding for the procedure and protect both patients and medical professionals from out-of-state investigations. In November, Colorado voted to enshrine access to abortion in the state's constitution.

• The FBI arrested a Milwaukee, Wis. judge for interfering in an immigration arrest. It's the first instance of a local official being charged as part of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration. So that's terrifying.