The GOP’s Obsession With Women Having Babies Looks A Lot Like The Past

President Donald Trump is from three anti-choice states trying to restrict access to the pill, they use pretty barefaced pro-natalist terminology that makes me think of what you just said: “Defendants’ efforts enabling the remote dispensing of abortion drugs has caused abortions for women in Plaintiff States and decreased births in Plaintiff States. This is a sovereign injury to the State in itself.”

Oh my gosh. Yeah, that’s a great example of pro-natalism.

You wrote in that same article: “In Nazi Germany, improved economic conditions led to an increased birth rate. But pro-natalist policies helped to encourage this rise, particularly the laws prohibiting abortion and allowing for the prosecution of those performing and receiving abortions.”

It’s hard not to think of what’s happening in the U.S. when I read that. The fall of federal abortion protections in 2022 has led to nearly half the country criminalizing care, and physicians are being prosecuted, and pregnant people are dying.

The Dobbs decision [overturning Roe v. Wade] was a pro-natalist policy. I like the language of the current movement, the language of forced birth policies, because by banning abortion, they really do take away women’s autonomy.

One of the problems in the United States is that not only are we limiting access to abortion and birth control, but we have forced birth policies in a country that has aggressively rejected things like maternity leave, Medicare for all, adequate prenatal and postnatal care and affordable childcare. These things have not been remedied even when Roe was in place.

One of the arguments behind pro-natalism is that the state needs people to do labor — right now we are heading toward a demographic cliff with an aging population and fewer younger people to do the work needed for society and to take care of the aged. Of course, this could be solved by immigration and creating pathways to citizenship, but the very same people committed to pro-natalism take hardline stances against immigration. This just further demonstrates that pro-natalism’s primary goal is to enforce second-class citizenship on women.

Are there any pro-natalist policies from Nazi Germany or other fascist regimes you’ve studied that stand out or are similar to the ones that the Trump administration is entertaining?

I was having a conversation with one of my colleagues the other day about the proposed $5,000 allowance for someone who has a child. That reminded me of the loans that Nazi Germany afforded to white Aryan families. That is very similar. It’s also a joke — $5,000 isn’t going to do much.

Under Nazi Germany’s racial hygiene laws, they gave out loans to families, specifically to the husband, that promised you could reduce your payback amount with every subsequent child. One of the big things that the women I studied — and they talked about it well into the Cold War — is the fascist triple K: Kinder, Küche, Kirche, which means “children, kitchen, church.” This pro-natalist ideology sought to confine women, essentially, to second-class citizenship.

I keep thinking about the idea to award a “National Medal of Motherhood” to women who have six kids and the similarity to Nazi Germany’s motherhood medals.

It really reduces women to breeders. It ignores the deep complexity of childbirth. You have a uterus and ovaries, but that doesn’t mean you have the ability to have children. But if you can’t have children and you have a uterus and ovaries, do you no longer have status in your own country? It marginalizes fathers and fatherhood. There’s so many layers of issues.

How does pro-natalism intersect with race and eugenics?

In United States’ history, pro-natalist policies were directly linked to eugenics. Eugenics emerged in the U.S. when middle- and upper-class white women were having fewer children, while immigrants and people of color continued to have more children. A lot of that has to do with access to birth control information, and eugenicists wanted to flip that script completely and encourage white birth rates. But only appropriate white birth rates.

One of the doctors involved in the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell was given a citation by the Nazi government. It was about this woman, Carrie Buck, who had been confined to a mental health institution. It’s likely she was probably raped by a doctor there, but became pregnant with a second child out of wedlock and she was accused of being an “idiot,” which was a eugenics term for someone who might have had a second to fourth grade mentality.

Carrie Buck was white, but eugenicists were like, “Well, we don’t want idiots to have children either, and the Nazi government is going to learn from that case.” Essentially, the Nazis really liked our racial hygiene cases because it glorified not just white births, but appropriate white births.

Of course, as the 20th century goes on, eugenics itself becomes stigmatized, but it still lives on. So Black women, Latinas and Indigenous women faced forced sterilization, while white women were often refused permanent sterilization until they had a specific number of children.

Do you see any of that today?

We can definitely still see the eugenicist language today. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that forced birth policies jeopardize people of color the most because white nationalists have no interest in their birth outcomes. They’re only concerned about producing more white babies.

There was a senator from Louisiana who basically said, “We have a great maternal mortality rate if you don’t include Black women.” And that was only a couple of years ago. Our policies around forced birth do disadvantage people who are already disadvantaged, and I don’t think that’s coincidental.

Where do we go from here?

One of the things that I think about a lot is the question around health. Politicians don’t talk about reproductive care as an issue of health. We see conversations on social media that say, “Well, birth is a natural part of life.” And, sure, but maternal mortality rates were very high until the 1950s and one of the things that changed was access to care for the reproductive body.

Those poor birth outcomes weren’t that long ago. I worry that we’re heading towards a future that’s gonna look a lot like our past. I just hope it doesn’t last very long.