Baby, Oh, Baby
Thoughts about marriage, family, and the birth rate
Time was, you settled down, got married, had kids. Many women were told that that was the natural order of things, with mothers staying in the home to raise their children.
The only problem was that some women, if given the choice, may have made other decisions. Some women didn’t want to be mothers, they wanted to work at an outside job. Some wanted to be mothers, but they also wanted to work.
During World War II, women’s work in factories and in typing pools helped the war effort. Once the war was won and Rosie the Riveter was put out to pasture, women were told to shuffle back to the kitchen. Thanks for your service, resume your previously proscribed roles.
The time was not yet right for a rebellion against gender norms, so most women did as they were told, but how I wish they hadn’t. It only postponed the inevitable.
And the inevitable is that women want a say in the direction of their lives, and the exercise of such has made their lives richer. Not everyone agrees with this assessment, of course.
Some see the freedom of women as the downfall of American civilization. If only women had stayed at home, they say, our country would be intact, like it was in 1950.
Underneath that supposition, though, is the assumption that women would be having babies every few years, and our national birth rate would not be in its dismal state. Here’s a news flash: Birth rates in most industrialized countries are also in a dismal state.
The current powers that be, however, find the notion of female self-determination and procreative choice threatening. 45/47 said in Green Bay, Wisconsin in October 2024 that he was going to protect women, whether they “like it or not”, and now we are getting a clearer picture of what he meant by that.
The New York Times recently reported that the White House is entertaining ideas about how to increase the birth rate. If anyone read Project 2025, the seeds were already there.
In the Foreword to Project 2025, the writers summarize “consensus recommendations,” the first point of which is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”
This seems an innocuous statement, except let’s ask this: What is the current centerpiece of American life that the family is meant to restore? According to Project 2025, centralized political power “subvert[s] the family.”
In other words, anything that issues from Washington’s bureaucratic largesse, AKA our social safety net is subversive. So, SNAP benefits, then? They subvert the family? Gee, I thought they helped to feed a family that might otherwise go hungry.
Medicaid benefits, are they family-subversive? According to Project 2025, home health or hospice services undermine this country as an outgrowth of centralized political power.
Honestly, the American family can use all the help it can get, but the American family is not some mythical never-was, plasticized, white bread conception of a pipe-smoking dad and a pearl-wearing mom and blankly obedient children playing tiddlywinks by the fireplace while Mitch Miller asks us to sing along on the telly.*
And just how many children sit on the living room floor? One child? That’s the count of current US press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s offspring, whose husband is old enough to be her father.
Should it be two children, like the vice-president, “good Catholic” that he is? Or maybe five, like the re-president? Oh, wait, that won’t work. There are too many wives in that scenario.
Ditto for his head of DOGE, who wants to broadcast his seed until he has a legion of little Musk melonheads in his own image. At last count, there were 14.
Republicans don’t really care about the birth rate per se because the list of anti-family policies in America is long and deeply entrenched. Economist Robert Reich recently noted that the Republican Party has historically blocked:
-Paid sick leave
-Paid family & medical leave
-Universal childcare
-Universal pre-K
-Expanded Child Tax Credit
-Programs to support reproductive health
Additionally, 45/47 wants to stamp out Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PFLS) for student loan debt, a move which will do nothing to encourage young people to start families sooner.
Let’s be clear: The current administration wants more WHITE babies because Hispanics and Blacks have higher fertility rates than White people do.
To that end White House aides have been soliciting ideas on how to boost the birth rate in Dear Leader’s image.
-Offer $5000 cash “baby bonus” for each live birth
-Reserve 30% of Fulbright scholarships to be awarded to married applicants or families with children
-Start government-funded programs to educate women about their menstrual cycles
-Award a National Medal of Motherhood to women with six or more children
Is this what the parents (and hopeful parents) of America want? Did anyone ask the struggling folks who wonder how they can save for their children’s college, let alone a family vacation because both parents have used up all their PTO on taking care of their sick kids?
These solutions aren’t designed for non-white people, but they aren’t aimed at the White hoi polloi either. They don’t want the mom who works at Walmart and the dad who works at Tyson to have a passel of kids. They’ll just muddy the bloodlines that the re-president wants to breed.
No, these measures are intended to breed a super race, but there’s a small problem. The folks behind these ideas fall desperately short of being super themselves. Their ideas are insular, out-of-touch, and contradictory to their own aims.
I want good childcare and paid maternity/paternity leave for my children and their spouses. I want them to have what I didn’t have. As much as I want better policies for the young mothers in my life, I want that for every parent, married or not, straight or gay, brown or black or white. Yes, we need more babies, so let’s support those who want them with wide-ranging policies that make life better for all.
*Sing Along with Mitch was a popular family TV show from 1961-1964, encouraging families to sing along with the televised words to popular standards. Incidentally, this was the same span of time when the Beatles came to America.