Stop telling me to have kids
American leaders really, really, really want young women to have kids. Why this is scaring me
I’ve always wanted children. For spiritual and personal reasons, I believe deeply in the importance of family, including in building a home with a spouse and in raising children who are kind and curious and make the world better. Beyond that, I just want kids. I want to care for little babies and help teenagers grow into good adults; I’d like to be a good mom.
Lately, though, I’ve noticed an alarming trend. I am being increasingly inundated by pronatalist messaging. I am used to religious messaging on the topic—my local religious leaders underscore the importance of having children in order to carry out God’s plan for the world—but they usually stop there, and they address the message to both men and women. But my political leaders go further. My social media, the news I read, and legislative reports are packed with the political glorification of childbearing—specifically, of becoming a mother—coming from politicians, bureaucrats, and political thought leaders.
And it’s starting to feel suspect.
As America’s far-right movement continues to push its vision for motherhood, my native excitement for children begins to recede—and I begin to suspect that the ground I am standing on as a young, Christian woman, soon poised for marriage (the end of August!) and motherhood (not for a few more years yet), is not trustworthy ground, but rather a sandy cliff about to crumble beneath my feet.
I have come to think this because prominent voices in the American conservative movement have a certain vision in mind for childbearing right now—and I’m not convinced that its vision, though stocked with the precious babies of my dreams, knows what is best for me at all.
The Trumpian vision of the family pursues the birth of babies, not the wellbeing of whole families.
Consider the elements of today’s pronatalist political movement. The government, led by U.S. President Donald Trump and a cabal of pronatalists, Christian nationalists, and—overwhelmingly—old, conservative white men who surely know much less than I do about a young woman’s abilities and ambitions, has begun to push pregnancy in a major way. They are considering policy proposals for creating government-funded fertility tracking programs while defunding contraception education, have implemented $1000 tax-advantaged “Trump Accounts” for newborn U.S. citizens, and have frozen over $65 million in Title X grants, causing the closure of numerous clinics in addition to a reduction in access to contraception, STI screening, and prenatal care. They are considering a $5000 baby bonus for new mothers, setting apart 33% of Fulbright scholarships to married individuals or people with children, expanding the Child Tax Credit, and tying transportation funding to birth rates—meaning communities with higher marriage and birth rates will receive more transportation funding.
Some of these policies could be partly, or even wholly, good. Supporting families financially may be in the best interest of a nation wishing to turn out well-educated, emotionally healthy, and productive citizens. Some policies, in particular, might allow individuals to more successfully parent while not receiving economic penalties if they must juggle their familial responsibilities with work.
But connecting all of it is a through-line so concerning that it forces me to ask: who are these policies actually for? Will I and my future daughters benefit—or, ultimately, only the men at the head of the movement?
Because the Trumpian vision of the family pursues the birth of babies, not the wellbeing of whole families. It pursues the economic and cultural ambitions of men, not the health or flourishing of young women. And it seems to have no interest in what young women might bring to the world beyond a womb.
Such a system is structurally coercive, not supportive, to women.
Consider the Trump administration’s Mother’s Day launch of Moms.gov. This site claims to help “mothers and fathers who face difficult or unexpected pregnancies.” Immediately, the site raises some red flags for the discerning viewer—one being that the majority of pictures of the website are seemingly AI-generated depictions of white women and babies, with one of the only pictures of a POC, being used to front a page about adoption. (This falls right into line with the rhetoric already espoused by the country’s leading pronatalists—it’s good when white people have more babies, but if you’re a black or brown woman with a lot of kids, then you’re threatening American culture (re: the Great Replacement Theory) and, quite possibly, a deadbeat.) Beyond that, the resources listed by Moms.gov are a sham. It links exclusively to pregnancy centers offering “limited medical services” with no abortion referrals, even for procedures medically necessary to save a mother’s life. Its long lists cover how women should eat for their babies, prepare their homes for their babies, and protect their babies from workplace hazards. There is no mention of maternity leave, career balance, or what fathers might contribute. (There is, notably, no Dads.gov. Maybe one will roll out on Father’s Day 2026—but only time can tell)
Let’s link Moms.gov to other efforts. The Trump administration has proposed a “National Medal of Motherhood” for mothers with six or more children—essentially incentivizing women to give up their careers and become full-time moms, out of the workplace and out of college, for the rest of their lives. Trump-aligned advocates have dogged on contraception, with Elon Musk even using X to amplify misinformation discouraging women from using birth control. Policy analysts close to the Trump administration have even advocated for defunding higher education, reasoning that higher education discourages young women from starting families by suppressing religious beliefs—as well as giving them more things to do with their time than having children.
In short, while the administration supports baby bonuses, it also supports restricting access to birth control and abortion—life-saving, health-protecting resources—rolling back opportunity in education and in the workplace, and has made cuts to healthcare and food assistance that low- to moderate-income families rely on. Then, reckon with a lack of national paid maternity leave or affordable childcare options—how are women supposed to support themselves or contribute financially to their families and have children, especially in a world where rising costs necessitate two working parents and where grandparents are not always available to help? On top of that, even—reckon with rising costs! Gas is over $4.50 a gallon in my town, and rising across the country. How could I afford to drive children around? How could I afford meals for children while saving for retirement, a car, and funding foreign wars, all while the threat of nuclear retaliation hangs over my head from heightening international conflict? Yet all of this is underscored by political threat and an increasingly risky landscape for women who want to work. Childcare is too expensive for most women who want to work; therefore, they have to stay at home, and they end up sacrificing career progress and eventually a whole career. The administration and its allies are building a political infrastructure hostile to working women—remember when Congress blocked two of its own members, women with new children, from voting remotely? And they are financially incentivizing more and more kids, while framing childless women interested in careers as misguided, dangerous, selfish, not worth listening to, and even, in many cases, not worth giving a vote, as the right-wing pastors who lead the churches attended by Cabinet officials advocate for the stripping away of women’s votes.
Such a system is structurally coercive, not supportive, to women.
Pay no attention to what a woman can do. Only to what her sons could.
The rhetoric makes this plain. Vice President J.D. Vance framed childless women as people who “want to make the rest of the country miserable”—not men who abandon their children, not the powerful abusers in the Epstein files. Charlie Kirk called single women “one of the biggest issues facing civilization”—who cares about single men—and told young women that a life filled with education and professional achievement was empty and miserable, apparently unaware that it is precisely the men who achieve such things who currently control policy. Erika Kirk, now CEO of Turning Point USA, told young women they could and ultimately should rely on men—that financial independence is a distraction, that they can always go back to work, that they can never go back to having children. Matt Walsh declared on The Daily Wire that society’s goal should be “fewer women in the workforce because a lot more of them are home raising their kids.” And at a Green Bay rally in October 2024, Donald Trump told his audience he was going to protect women “whether the women like it or not.”
I don’t want to be protected by someone who doesn’t listen to me.
This brings me to the question I keep returning to: why? My mother sacrificed enormously to have me. Why can’t I live a full life doing what I am capable of—advocating, creating, serving, changing things? Why the relentless pressure to produce children? I was the child once, the child that conservatives wanted so badly to come into the world. Did they want me born just so I could reproduce? What is the point of babies if not to eventually become people who get to shine?
The truth is—the far right only sees boys shining. Boys are encouraged to go out and work; a rollback in DEI operations are effectively trying to station white men at the head of business, while preventing low-income or minority groups, like women from ever having the chance to prove that they could meet the same qualifications; a lack of enforced protections for pregnant women in the workplace maintains the gender wage gap and makes it more financially viable for husbands, not wives, to work, further separating women from the public sphere and depriving the world from any valuable output they might themselves create, outside of a son. Because daughters are meant to stay home, meant to rely on men, meant to have many children. Among those children, those daughters will again have many children; among those children, those daughters will again have more children. And so women pass away without memory or record beyond a card on Mother’s Day and a boy’s fond recollection of his mother doing so much for him—then he goes home to a wife deprived of the financial and educational resources to pursue her own skills and talents, though he can, every day between 9-5.
This is the far right’s dream. The far right’s dream reduces me to a baby-making shell. Pay no attention to what a woman can do. Only to what her sons could.
I don’t want to fall into this trap.
Children come in their own time. I will not have them just to find political and economic value in the eyes of men who think my opinion and work are worthless. I will not allow my God-given gifts and skills to be subsumed so early in my life by the time-consuming demands of children and related bills. I will work until I am sure that my employer will not fire me for having kids; I will work until I am sure that my right to vote is secure; I will work until I am sure that having children will not result in my political disenfranchisement and my financial devastation.
In short—stop telling me to have kids. I will when I’m ready, and the more you tell me to, the less I want to.