The War on Children

American children get seriously ill and die at much high rates than kids in our peer nations. The "pro-life" GOP's response: immiserate more of them.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

American children are in crisis, and it’s largely because of America’s “pro-life” party.

Kids in the US die at alarming rates. Over the past two decades, American kids have died at almost twice the rate of children in similar nations, a study published this summer in the medical journal JAMA found. While children in our peer nations have been living healthier and better lives, American children have lived sicker and shorter ones.

Some of these deaths are genuinely difficult if not impossible to prevent. But most them are not — we could prevent them if we chose to. The truth is that American children die at stunning rates because of policy choices, and mostly because of policy choices made by the “pro-life” right.

American kids are more than twice as likely to die in traffic accidents than kids in similarly rich countries. They are 15 times as likely to die by firearm. American babies die at 1.78 times the rate of babies in similar countries. While other wealthy nations see an average of 18 excess child deaths every day, the US sees an average of 54.

American kids are sicker than kids in otherwise comparable nations, and they’re sicker than American kids used to be. An American child in 2023 was as much as 20% more likely to be living with a chronic health condition compared to an American child in 2011. Nearly a third of American children now live with at least one chronic health condition, including depression, anxiety, diabetes, and limitations on physical activity. One in five has obesity.

The Republican Party has long claimed the mantle of defending life. The new Republican Party has promised to make America healthy again. Instead, they’re leaving kids sick and dead.

Here is a brief list of what state and national Republicans have done in the last few years when it comes to children’s health and lives:

• Republican-run states have instituted strict abortion bans, many of which have no exceptions for rape, incest, severe fetal anomaly, or the pregnant woman’s health. Women living in states that ban abortion are now roughly twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or soon after compared to women living in more liberal states.

• While maternal mortality plummeted by 21% in states where abortion remained legal after the Dobbs decision, it went up by 56% in Texas alone in the year following the Texas abortion ban (and it was even worse for white Texas women, who saw maternal mortality go up by 95%). Black women in states that ban abortion have a maternal mortality rate that is more than three times that of white women. A pregnant Latina woman or new mom in Texas is three times as likely to die than a white woman living in California.

• States that restrict abortion tend to have significantly higher infant mortality rates than those that have kept the procedure legal. While anti-abortion states have dedicated enormous resources to banning abortion and defending bans in court, they have not done much of anything to decrease the alarming rates at which babies in their states die during or soon after birth.

• Republicans have tried to force ten-year-olds and other child rape victims to have babies, and used the power of the state to persecute doctors who helped them.

• Republicans have exacerbated the crisis of maternity care deserts in rural areas by using the One Big Beautiful Bill to slash $930 billion from Medicaid, which pays for 41% of births in America, a move that could close as many as 144 labor and delivery units in rural hospitals. Rural mothers already die at close to twice the rate of pregnant women and new mothers in cities, and their babies are more likely to die, too.

• The same bill hands ICE some $30 billion — and ICE is an agency that has deported US citizen children, including one with cancer, and is currently in a legal battle to deport hundreds of unaccompanied Guatemalan children, some as young as three.

• Trump HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed the entire board of CDC vaccine experts and is replacing them with “vaccine skeptics” while Republican leaders and prominent “pro-life” activists argue that we should no longer give newborns routine Hep B vaccines.

• Florida just announced it will end vaccine requirements for schoolchildren. This year, the US experienced its largest measles outbreak in decades, 25 years after measles was declared eradicated in the US. Multiple children died wholly preventable deaths.

• Yet another mass shooting targeted and killed children, something American conservatives seem to have decided is simply tolerable. Instead of doing a single damn thing about guns, Republicans focused on the fact that the shooter was transgender.

• Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill cut SNAP funding — food stamps for poor kids — to pay for tax cuts to the very richest and to give ICE more funding than the militaries of every other country in the world save for the US and China.

• Trump’s obsession with fossil fuels has led him to tear up environmental regulations and turned giant gas-guzzling cars into status symbols of right-wing politics — while ever-larger SUVs are a big reason so many children and pedestrians are killed by vehicles.

• The administration is trying to revoke part of the Clean Air Act, which would make the air we breathe much worse — something that is especially dangerous for children and even fetuses, with their less-developed lungs.

• The administration is working to dismantle the Department of Education.

• The administration has already dismantled USAID, a decision that is projected to cause the deaths of some 14 million people, including 4.5 million children, in just five years.

This is a war on children.

It is also a war on women. The “women and children” framing can feel incredibly condescending, but the truth is that women’s and children’s lives and wellbeing are indelibly intertwined. Women make children with our bodies; if we are not well, they are not well. Women still do most of the work of raising and nurturing children; if they are not well, we are not well. This does not apply to every single woman on earth. But it applies to women as a class, and to children as a class.

It’s not news that the GOP is an openly sexist party, electing to the White House a man found liable for sexual assault whose candidacy was carried along by virulently misogynist influencers. And it’s not as though the pre-Trump Republican Party was doing much for children either. But there seems to be a growing and increasingly transparent disregard for children’s lives and their health. That disregard turns to disdain if those children have poor parents, and especially if they have parents who are poor immigrants.

Any modestly decent society cares for its children; there is nothing more fundamental than the impulse to protect our young. Trump’s Republican Party is actively sacrificing children’s lives and wellbeing, sometimes even reveling in their suffering. And while we should always search for hope even in the deep darkness, hope for a better future isn’t going to save the millions of children in America who will suffer and the many who will die because of the party that calls itself “pro-life” — nor bring back those who have already been sacrificed in service of the delusion that we’re making America great.

xx Jill