The Trump administration is considering how it might encourage more Americans to have children, and progressives aren’t happy about it. This means they have to throw every argument – no matter how silly – against the initiative.
The Advocate’s John Casey penned an op-ed in which he claimed this idea is authoritarian and dangerous and a threat to members of the LGBTQ community and women who don’t want to live in a real-life version of the left’s favorite television show: “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
The New York Times published a report about how the Trump administration is looking at a sweeping cultural shift by endorsing pronatalist policies aimed at reversing America’s declining birth rates. The administration is reportedly considering a myriad of ideas, including reserving 30 percent of Fulbright scholarships for married applicants or parents, awarding a $5,000 “baby bonus” per child, and funding fertility-awareness education for women.
Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and other Trump allies are pushing this movement to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life.”
However, critics like Casey suggest this initiative would exclude non-traditional families. In his op-ed, he refers to the idea as “a dystopian unveiling of a pro-natalist agenda that social conservatives have been carefully constructing brick by brick, headline by headline.”
He further argues that “the federal government is coming for your bedroom, your uterus, and your right to choose if, when, and how to have children – and sex.”
Let’s be clear. Telling women to have more children is not “encouragement.” It is coercion wrapped in a phony flag and sealed with a sanctimonious cross. It's a policy designed not for liberty but for control. The same extremists who cheer when a woman is forced to carry her rapist’s child are now crafting federal proposals to “incentivize” women into becoming baby-making machines.
Then, Casey rolls out The Handmaid’s Tale trope as any good progressive hack would.
Does all this sound familiar? It should. Margaret Atwood wrote the warning decades ago. In The Handmaid’s Tale, fertile women were forced to bear children for powerful men and shuffled between households like property. You had three chances, three homes, three assignments. Refuse? Resist? You’d end up in the Colonies, discarded, punished, or worse. It was fiction once. But now it’s a blueprint for Trump, Musk, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Sen. Ted Cruz, among others.
The author goes on to insist that the effort to convince women to have more children “is not some quirky cultural proposal or a benign baby boom fantasy – it’s another attack on bodily autonomy after restricting reproductive rights and limiting types of gender-affirming care.”
There it is. Casey is using this idea to argue that women should be allowed to trans their children or kill them in the womb.
Somehow, encouraging people to have more babies will negatively affect members of the LGBTQ community. He claims the effort “is about a radical right-wing movement, fueled by white nationalism, Christian domination, and toxic masculinity.”
They’re also the ones like Cruz, who are openly calling for a reversal of Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court decision that found it unconstitutional to criminalize sex between two consenting adults of the same gender. They want to outlaw your family, your love, your very existence, and most especially “deviant homosexuals.”
Because if sex isn’t for procreation, it’s sinful in their eyes. That’s the logic. That’s the theology masquerading as law. Christian fundamentalists believe that the only righteous form of sex is between a married cisgender man and cisgender woman with the intent to conceive.
Everything else, including gay sex and even straight pleasure without pregnancy, is perverse. So if the government can tell a woman she should have more children, it can also tell two men or two women they must not have sex. It’s all part of the same crusade.
They want to reshape American bedrooms into sterile procreation chambers. They want to replace intimacy with obligation, consent with command, desire with duty. It’s not “family values.” It’s state-imposed M-F breeding. And when they’ve finished controlling women’s bodies and trans bodies, they will come for other queer bodies next. Count on it.
I have to give Casey some credit. He hit all the major progressive rhetorical devices. Handmaid’s Tale? Check. Baseless allegations of white nationalism? Check. Attacking Christians? Check. Providing not a shred of evidence to back up his claims? Check.
Unfortunately, this brand of hysteria works on those who are already on the far left. These people are convinced that anything involving traditional values is a direct threat to their lifestyles.
But there is a silver lining. This type of rhetoric works only on progressive-minded folks. Most moderates aren’t goofy enough to be convinced that having more children is a negative thing. However, this does not mean progressives won’t stop trying.
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