Republicans/Absolute Freaks Want To Make Teen Pregnancy Great Again
But we repeat ourselves.
There was a time when people said that those likening the coming Trumpocalypse to The Handmaid’s Tale were being ridiculous and hysterical. No one was coming to kidnap all of the women and force them to breed children against their will. At one point even I started feeling like “Enough already, can we find a new analogy?”
There was a time when, if we could agree on anything, as a people, save for like some real freaks, it was that teen pregnancy was a bad idea and a thing we wanted to prevent. Sure, we had different ways — they had abstinence-only education, which did not work, and we had comprehensive sex-ed, which did.
However. In the last few years, the Right — especially the very online Right — has become increasingly hysterical about the birth rate. Some states have sued for the tort of “not enough teen moms.” And it should come as no surprise that they have a solution to this problem, and that their solution is not all that far-off from Gilead. Now, I’m not saying they want to kidnap anyone (just yet), but they are working their damned asses off to convince women that they are worthless garbage unless they get married very young (as virgins!) to some guy (whether they like him or not) and start popping out babies.
As such, we now must contend with a bunch of absolute freaks who are somehow upset about the teen birth rate going down.
One of these absolute freaks is Katie Miller. You know, the woman who found Stephen Miller so very sexually attractive and charming that she married him and had three of his babies (so she claims).
On X the Everything (but not yet) App, she wrote:
Since 2007, the teen birth rate has fallen 72%.
Hormonal birth control isn’t just poison for women’s minds and bodies — it’s killing population growth.
For the first time ever, birth rates for women in their late 30s have surpassed those in their early 20s.
Our biological destiny is to have babies — not slave behind desks chasing careers while our civilization dies.
So weird that people are increasingly responsible. It’s almost as if they’re … evolving? Becoming more civilized?
It should be noted that Katie Miller was not a teenager when she had her first, uh, offspring with Stephen Miller, that she has her Master’s, and that she has had several prestigious jobs, having acted as Mike Pence’s communications director and later press secretary while he was in the White House.
In fact, basically none of the (admittedly very few) pick-mes who parrot this line were teen moms themselves. Katie Miller, in particular, has not said that she regretted getting married at the ripe-old-age of 28. She hasn’t said she regrets going to college. She hasn’t said “Boy, I sure wish I’d gotten knocked up at 15!”
That’s for other women who aren’t as special and important as she is.
Of course, Miller wasn’t the only one talking about how terrible it is that high school sophomores are not getting knocked up on the regular. Fox News health expert Dr Marc Siegel also mourned the decline in teen pregnancy.
“But the problem,” he opined, “is teens and young adults from ages 15 to 19, the fertility rate is down 7 percent, and it’s down 70 percent over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation, until they’re more financially secure. Maybe they haven’t found the right partner …”
Um … yes? And can someone check this guy’s hard drive? Also the hard drives of any other adult men pushing for this, given that around 70 percent of teen pregnancies, the father is over the age of 20 and around 4-6 years older than the mothers are.
Siegel went on to talk about how his wife had their second (of three) child at 36 and was a physician and a neurologist. Katie Miller, it should be noted, had her first child at 29 and, again, has her Masters and has had a prestigious career. So it seems like what these people want for themselves and those close to them is very different from what they want for other people.
One of the things I’ve come to enjoy about these kinds of posts is that there is always at least one “OK, I’m conservative, but …” from a woman who was not aware the leopards planned to feast on her face. For every post about how women are horrible for not getting married young because their “standards are too high,” there are multiple Republican woman going “But wait! I want to get married now and I promise I have super low standards! It just hasn’t happened yet!” and a million angry men snapping back that their standards aren’t low enough and they will be horrifically miserable and lonely later in life if they don’t get married and have kids, wishing that they had just settled for whoever was willing to have them. For every post about how women who don’t have children are entirely worthless, there are multiple conservative women who physically cannot have children desperately promising these incel losers that they’re not bad, they just had health problems.
On both of these posts, there was our gal, former Ron DeSantis spokesperson, Christina Pushaw.
To Miller’s post, she responded:
“Isn’t it better for everyone involved, including society, to have a kid at 32 than 16? Kids of teen moms tend to grow up with a lot of instability, poverty, different stepdads, worse outcomes overall. Of course there are exceptions … but teen pregnancy overall is not a great or aspirational thing for society.”
And on a post featuring the video of Siegel, she wrote:
“Why not focus on the decline of birth rates in the 20s age groups instead? Less teen pregnancy is a good thing. Teenagers are kids, they should be studying and having fun with their friends. 20s is a better time to have children AFTER establishing a stable marriage. The real issue is the decline of marriage among non-college-educated Americans.”
That’s right. Christine Pushaw is making sense. Of course, all of that is the point. They do not want teen girls studying and having fun with their friends. Studying means they might go on to college and have careers. Friends might talk them out of a bad relationship. No, they want them to become stay-at-home moms who are entirely dependent on their husbands and unable to leave for economic reasons.
It sounds like I am exaggerating, but … that’s kind of the majority sentiment on that site these days.
Incel logic has taken over. The men (and a lot of women) on the site are obsessed with virgins, the evils of supposed female hypergamy (women wanting to date men with a higher status than they have), telling women that feminists “lied to them” by telling them they’d be happier with careers than with being mothers, claiming that women become hideously unattractive once they are over 25 (“hitting the wall”) but that men are attractive forever, that women who don’t get married and have kids are “miserable,” that women who have sex with multiple people lose their ability to “pair bond,” that having sex with multiple different men somehow affects the appearance and grip of female genitalia in some way that having sex with only one man does not, and generally trying to create a culture in which more women have so much anxiety over all of this that they are willing to settle at a very young age, ideally before they’ve even had sex, for a man who kind of sucks. Which is convenient, given that these men (#NotAllMen, just the creeps on Xitter) are absolutely fucking repulsive.
Men, of course, do nothing wrong.
Reality is a whole lot different. In real life, a recent study found that only a third of British women under the age of 25 hold a positive view of men and are twice as likely not to want children. It’s probably worse in the United States, as women have moved to the left and so many young men have MAGA-poisoned brains. Women are outnumbering men in college, outpacing them in prestigious careers, and instead of bettering themselves in ways that don’t involve hitting themselves in the face with a hammer, they’ve decided to go with this tactic of freaking out about birth rates and demanding that women get pregnant as teenagers and become stay-at-home moms.
It’s unfortunate, however, that it is going to work on some women, particularly those who are more vulnerable and insecure. Hopefully most figure it out it’s all bullshit before it’s too late (or before they decide to get knocked up at 15 to appease these creeps).
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
"My daughters are forbidden from college!"
Taliban: Stay off our corner, buddy!
So glad I didn’t marry until my 40’s and that I never had children. So is my husband. We’re doing just fine and in no way feel “unfulfilled”.
Also, get the hell off my lawn!