MAGA ❤️ Motherhood (If You’re White)
Mitchell Zimmerman in Common Dreams
Of course, that program, the Child Care and Development
Fund, is already woefully underfunded—only 1 in 7 eligible parents is able to use it. Most of those
are single working mothers, the kind of hardworking people who do tough work
for low wages and are derided by conservatives as “Welfare Queens.” They would
not be eligible for the stay-at-home moms benefit.
MAGA leaders like Vice President JD Vance have a model of family life that is a caricature of a 1950s TV family: Dad works and Mom stays home with the kids, shops, cooks, cleans house, and puts on a clean apron and a big smile for Dad when he comes home from the office. A woman’s appropriate concerns in that model life are “Kinder, Küche, Kirche.” Children, cooking, church, as 19th-century Germans described the feminine role.
Or put more simply, “barefoot and pregnant.”
In Vance’s view, women who seek a professional career have
chosen a “value system that leads to misery.” Consistent with the MAGA conception of
women’s roles in society, Vance opposes abortion in all
circumstances, wants to make divorce more difficult, and sees traditional
family life as “the path to happiness and to fulfillment.”
But Vance and the right are motivated by bigger concerns
than female happiness. They believe more pregnancies are critical to preserving
civilization. It’s a “crisis,” says Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy,
Jr. “Low birth rate is the number one threat to the West,” says Elon Musk.
This despite the well-documented medical
and developmental risks of teen pregnancies for both mother and child: high
blood pressure, preeclampsia, post-partum hemorrhage, systemic infections,
mental health difficulties, life-long health issues, premature births, neonatal
fatalities and stillbirths, low birth weight. And the teen mom’s interruption
in schooling commonly means a life of poverty and instability.
MAGA family policy bears striking similarities to that of Nazi Germany, which linked national greatness to more
babies—of the correct race. In the interest of higher birth rates, German
mothers could not terminate pregnancies if the child would be “of good blood.”
The Nazi state also offered “marriage loans” and child financial incentives,
and—in a society that treated single mothers as pariahs—they even tried to
destigmatize unmarried motherhood.
Medals for motherhood were a Nazi honor Trump might consider
offering. Hitler awarded the Mother Cross for large families. (In bronze for
mothers of four children, silver for six, gold for eight or more babies.)
The American fertility rate is indeed substantially below
the 2.1 required to maintain the American population level. But if a declining
population is a problem, the answer is obvious: Welcome immigrants.
America is already suffering from Trump’s mass deportation
efforts, as the agricultural workforce is decimated, and workers in home healthcare, food
packing, restaurants, home construction, and building services are in
desperately short supply, exacerbating inflation. We plainly
need more immigrants, not fewer, to sustain our nation.
Immigration
is not an acceptable solution for MAGA because they demand a whiter America,
and more immigrants come from what the president has called “shithole countries” than from “Aryan”
nations like Norway. But non-whites are not “replacing” supposed “real”
Americans because America is and always has been a multiracial, multinational society.
MAGA right-wingers define America as a white nation and seek
to shrink our non-white population, so the only solution acceptable to them is
persuading or forcing (white) women to have more babies than they want. It
won’t work.
A 2025 survey of Americans showed that two children was the
most desired family size, and only 20% wanted to three or more. Similarly, an international survey conducted by the United Nations
showed most respondents wanted just two children.
In the US survey, cost and the state of the world were high
among the reasons Americans gave for not wanting more children.
Here is what the Trump regime is doing to address those
concerns: defunding healthcare; slashing food assistance for families and
children; weakening education and child welfare systems; imposing eligibility
requirements for government rental assistance; denying climate change;
ignoring the challenge of AI; deregulating polluting industries; and fueling
inflation through deportation, tariffs, and an unending
war.
Why are women in the workforce and not staying home with the children? The determination to lead full lives is a driving force. But, in all likelihood, the number of stay-at-home moms has plummeted since the 1970s because rising income inequality has made it impossible for a working class or middle class family to survive on one income. Before right-wing “traditionalists” utter any more demands that women give up their jobs, ambitions, independence, and self-respect, perhaps they can start by confronting the unbearable greed of the billionaire class that has rendered the supposed MAGA aim beyond reach.
Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning. He's also a longtime contributor to Progressive Charlestown. His writing can also be found on his Substack, Reasoning Together with Mitchell Zimmerman.
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You may also be interested in my road-trip novel / social thriller Mississippi Reckoning. Read an excerpt. Read the Progressive Charlestown review HERE.