After Decades Of Making It Harder To Have Kids, The GOP Wants To Bribe You To Have One
Or seven. How's seven kids sound to you?
For the last few years, the Right has been absolutely hysterical about birth rates, for a number of highly suspect-sounding reasons — nationalism, racism, a desire to return to a “traditional” way of life in which women stay at home and spend their days making Cinnamon Toast Crunch from scratch on TikTok, etc. It’s something that started with white nationalists afraid of the Great Replacement and filtered on down to, well, white nationalists afraid of the Great Replacement, but with a lot more political power and nicer suits than your average Aryan Brotherhood member.
This week, The New York Times (gift link) reports that the Trump administration is considering a variety of approaches to getting people to have more children, beyond just letting the worst states force them to against their will by banning abortion:
One proposal shared with aides would reserve 30 percent of scholarships for the Fulbright program, the prestigious, government-backed international fellowship, for applicants who are married or have children.
Another would give a $5,000 cash “baby bonus” to every American mother after delivery.
A third calls on the government to fund programs that educate women on their menstrual cycles — in part so they can better understand when they are ovulating and able to conceive.
Now, I see nothing wrong with giving new parents $5,000 at all. Most countries in the EU do the same thing — plus the adorable Finnish Baby Boxes. I also believe that pregnancy, childbirth and childcare, school lunches and more should all be subsidized. But, then again, I’m not a Republican.
Similarly, there’s obviously nothing wrong with being aware of one’s menstrual cycle, for the purpose of making babies or because you have severe PMDD and want to know the difference between being sad or angry for an actual reason and being sad or angry for hormonal reasons, or because you are planning a vacation and don’t want to be stuck inside with cramps for half the day. For many reasons. However, there is a lot that is creepy about the government getting involved for the explicit purpose of trying to knock you up.
The Fulbright scholarship thing … sounds a lot like their own version of “DEI,” except theirs has actual quotas.
The creepiest by far, however, from comes from “pronatalist” couple Simone and Malcolm Collins — a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who have six or more children. It also comes from Nazi Germany, which did more or less the same thing.
The irony with all of this, however, is that that it’s actually the Right that has been making it both more difficult and less appealing to have children for literal decades now. Let us count the ways!
Opposing a robust social safety net so that people don’t have to be scared that they will fall on hard times and not be able to care for their children
Opposing doing anything about school shootings beyond “arming teachers” and praying
Opposing gun control in general
Opposing universal health care
Opposing universal childcare
Opposing subsidized college
Opposing sex education
Creating anti-abortion laws that make pregnancy more dangerous
Banning books at public schools
Banning discussion of LGBTQ+ issues at school.
Working to get rid of Head Start.
Being actively hostile to anything that might be good for the planet.
Christian nationalism
White nationalism
Extreme misogyny
Trying to get AI to replace all creative professions and instead push people into factory work.
But more than anything else, they have created a world that one could be reasonably scared to bring a kid into. They want a country where everyone is forced to practice Christianity, drink lead-tainted water, where there is practically no social safety net but there is an extremely unstable economy, where college is absurdly expensive but your kid will need a degree to get most jobs that pay a living wage, where LGBTQ+ kids and adults are discriminated against, where school shootings are a fact of life and where pretty much everyone who is not a straight white cis man is a second class citizen. Oh gosh, where do we all sign up?
People who have kids right now probably do deserve a medal, but not for the reason the creepy eugenicists think.
If they want people to have kids, they should work to create the economic and social conditions that will make them confident that their children will have the best possible chance in life, instead of … whatever it is they are doing now.
<How's seven kids sound to you?>
I couldn't eat that many. Six is enough. With six you get egg roll.
The $5000 payout is actually hilarious, because that isn't even going to cover the hospital bill for giving birth. It's not even close to covering the hospital bill. I wonder if these people walk into a car dealer and offer them $25 for a new car.