Why Fewer Americans Are Having Kids: It’s the Cruelty, Stupid.
I may be well past my childbearing years, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about babies — quite the contrary. I adore babies — other people’s. I also have an overdeveloped respect for the human right to raise those babies in a world that isn’t actively trying to starve them, poison them, smother them, or shoot them before they hit kindergarten.
MAGA leaders, the MAGA faithful, and the white supremacists who love them are on the high freak about our birth rate collapse. Fox News pundits clutch pearls over declining “American values,” and think tanks funded by billionaires with litters of children panic over birth rates. Yet, no one seems willing to do the one thing that would fix it: listen to women and the men who love them.
Fact: Americans still want kids. But they also want housing that won’t bankrupt them, healthcare that won’t kill them, and paychecks that stretch past the 15th of the month. Americans want a support system that doesn’t evaporate the minute the baby bump becomes a baby scream. We want our lives to matter beyond our reproductive organs.
Meanwhile, Republicans, and the MAGAs running the country like the Keystone Cons, defend embryos and forget children eventually exit the womb and need things like food, education, safe drinking water, and parents who aren’t broken by the cost of childcare, which is currently $15,000 per kid.
So, I’ve concluded that Republicans don’t care about kids. Not the ones walking around, anyway. Not the ones in foster care. Not the ones poisoned in Flint or shot in Uvalde or deported to a Salvadoran prison camp. They care about the unborn because the unborn don’t talk back, don’t need lunch money, and don’t get in the way of tax cuts for billionaires.
If Republicans actually cared about kids and their families, we’d have:
- Universal childcare, like every other advanced country in the world.
- Paid family leave, which 184 countries have managed to pull off — but not the U.S., because “family values” apparently don’t apply after birth.
- Affordable housing, because it turns out cribs don’t fit in studio apartments priced like Versailles.
- Student debt relief, because parents shouldn’t have to choose between diapers and paying the bank.
- A universal healthcare system, not this labyrinth of co-pays, denials, and GoFundMe medical miracles.
Instead, we get moral panics about Drag Queen Story Hour, and fetal personhood bills written by men who don’t know a cervix from a croissant. We get social media sob fests from Kristi Noem about the “beauty of motherhood,” then her MAGA cronies cut food programs, Head Start, and Medicaid.
What mystifies me is when birth rates fall, these same folks act shocked — shocked— and blame women for being selfish, career-obsessed, Godless Jezebels. Never mind that we’re asking them to raise children in an economic hellscape where two incomes barely buy a stroller, let alone a life.
American women, and their significant others, don’t hate babies, and they’re definitely not selfish. They refuse to have children they can’t afford. That decision doesn’t make them irrational narcissists who favor Fluffy the dog over Chad the human. They are just being smart. They’re saying: I love this future child too much to bring them into a world where cruelty is the business model.
Because that’s the real issue, Republican leaders don’t just lack empathy. They loathe it. They hate humanity. They fear it, especially when it’s diverse, demanding justice, or asking for breathable air and drinkable water. The fewer children born, the fewer humans they have to pretend to govern.
The conservative movement isn’t pro-life. It’s pro-power. Pro-control. It’s Pro-fantasy, where women smile through their third shift and babies raise themselves while billionaires cash checks. But this fantasy is killing us — slowly, then all at once.
So here’s my advice to the leaders of the free world: If you want more babies, make America a place worth raising them.
Until you do, consider most American wombs closed for business.
