What Exactly Are Women Supposed to Do?
The new MAGA pro-natalist strategy: Mock, judge, ostracize, and punish women who don't submit to a very strict life script.
Few forces have emerged from the MAGA new right as forcefully as pro-natalism. Pro-natalists aren’t a unified group — there are the tech bros who are happy to use IVF and surrogacy to create dozens of “perfect” children, and there are the traditionalists who want to ban IVF and push all women to marry at 22 — but they share a unified vision of a world in which radically raising (white) birth rates is a top priority. And they all understand that the only way to do that is to radically constrain women’s rights and opportunities.
There are, of course, ways to gently increase birth rates through support for women and families; France, for example, has had some success through a combination of generous childcare policies, paid leave, and cash payments for each child. But so far, no country has seen the huge upticks that pro-natalists want. The countries with the highest birthrates tend to be those in which women have the fewest rights and opportunities. And as women gain more rights and opportunities, birth rates go down, while age of first marriage and first birth go up.
This is why there is such a concerted effort on the pro-natalist right to force or at least coerce women to marry in their 20s and get to reproducing. It’s why the strategy includes pushing women out of higher education, banning or highly limiting contraception and IVF, and legalizing workplace discrimination against women so that employers can favor bread-winning men.
But that, of course, is not enough. The pro-natalist right is also using public shaming to criticize and mock any woman whose life doesn’t run on their ideal course. The idea seems to be that the US is in need of an anti-feminist cultural shift in which women who marry and reproduce early and then stay home to raise their children are praised, while women to delay until they’re settled into their careers or until they find the right person are derided. It really does give away the whole game on the right’s views on women. It’s not motherhood or children they value; it’s compliance.
Case in point: Prominent conservatives are angry about the fact that the number of children born to women over 40 is rising, as is the number of children born to single women over 40. These are still pretty small numbers: Only about 4% of all births are to women 40 and older, and it’s closer to 1% for births to single women 40 and over. And thanks to the incredible success of campaigns to decrease teen pregnancy via long-acting contraception (coupled with much lower rates of teenage sex), there are now more births to women 40 and over than there are to teenage girls.
One would think that this would make conservatives happy. Teen pregnancy has been a focus of the left and the right for decades, with the left promoting contraception and the right promoting abstinence. If the goal is more babies born to women who are ready to be mothers, then the pro-natalists should be glad to see that women who are nearing the end of their fertile years are deciding to have them. That is, sadly, not the case. The pro-natalists are incredibly disparaging of these women, and especially of the professionally successful women who choose to have children while single. They are what happens “when you perfected your career and one day wake up that biology is passing you by.” It is “just a cruel thing to do to a child on purpose.” It means a fatherless child and a love-less mother. It’s “immorality and selfishness.”
The solution? The absolutely ubiquitous and only right-wing solution, which the Heritage Foundation wants to take money away from poor single moms in order to pay for?
Get married in your late teens or early 20s. Start having babies right away. Have as many as you can. If you don’t, be socially shunned. See? Easy!
Except, of course, that women have free will.
