Who Should Reproduce? The Politics of Family Planning in the Trump Era

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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

This version of the Republican Party has introduced a host of new avatars for their ambitions.

There's Elon Musk and Russell Vogt, names we've learned as they raised the civil service and stole our personal data from government databases to likely auction off to their tech bros.

But they did not come to power alone, nor did they come for the sole purpose of decimating democracy.

As we discussed with the Atlantic writer David Graham, Project 2025 is a blueprint for the rise of Christian nationalism.

Phase one was breaking America.

Phase two is combating the permanence of multiculturalism by promoting policies to solve a numerical conundrum.

What is a proto-fascist to do when faced with a demographic transition that will result in an America with no racial majority in less than 20 years, at a time when we're also facing declining birth rates?

Now, to be fair, the United States, like several other Western nations, does indeed face a declining birth rate.

And this is a reality that that presents legitimate challenges.

In response, we desperately need policies that support families in a nation with crippling housing costs, with crippling child care costs, with limited parental leave, and with devastating maternal mortality rates, particularly for Black women.

Not to mention the evisceration of abortion access and reproductive health care across the board that has already killed pregnant women.

But the Trump administration's approach to policies that encourage people to have children, those policies don't seem to address these dynamics.

Instead of a solution that leverages what we already have and what we know works, like the American Rescue Plan, the Republicans have decided to champion an approach rooted in the pro-natalism movement.

Their ambition?

To bring forth a very specific vision for what American families should look like.

The pro-natalist movement espouses an ideology of higher birth rates, and for some, that means only among white families.

But overall, it embraces nearly any means to achieve those birth rates.

Elon Musk is an acolyte and unfortunately active proponent of this pursuit when he's not extorting African nations to hire his satellite company's unreliable services.

At its core, the movement thrives on fear, warning of an apocalyptic future where declining birth rates among their preferred demography will lead to total economic and societal collapse.

Republicans in the administration and unfortunately in Congress have picked up on these ideas and are now proposing incentives to boost birth rates.

Among them, a $1,000 baby bonus for every new mother, intrusive reproductive tracking tools, and yes, seriously, a National Medal of Motherhood for women who have six or more children, which harkens back to terrible, terrible behaviors during the Nazi regime.

Declining birth rates do have troubling implications for our economy and our ability to support an aging population.

But the pro-natalist approach raises very serious concerns.

You see, it's not just about encouraging larger families.

I'm the second of six kids.

I know about large families.

The issue is which families are being encouraged to grow.

Much of the movement embraces ideas like genetic engineering to create the quote best and brightest.

It includes calls to restrict access to contraception and to abortion.

And it even flirts with white nationalist conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement, the false belief that there is a deliberate plot to diminish white influence by replacing white populations with non-white immigrants.

This vision of America is not new.

And when it has been raised before, it has revealed dangerous, insidious, and horrifying policies that were put in place to make it a reality.

And so, today we will explore the myths and the reality of pro-natalism with two people who are immersed in the history of the movement and the motivations behind it.

Dr.

Karen Guzzo, the director of the Carolina Population Center and a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the senior writer for New York Magazine's Intelligencer, Sarah Jones.

Dr.

Karen Guzzo.

Sarah Jones, thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah, happy to be here.

Thanks for having me.

So let's start with the basics.

Dr.

Guzzo, if you don't mind, I'm going to call you Karen.

Would love to have you describe to our audience what exactly is pronatalism and what are the different branches of the movement.

Sure.

So pronatalism basically is this belief that there aren't enough babies being born, that the birth rate is too low.

And at the population level, we need to get people to have more births and really to get women.

It's about women to have more births because our birth rate is too low and it could potentially lead to a number of problems down the road.

And so there are different groups of people who are worried about different components of the low birth rate.

So there are folks like Elon Musk, who is, you know, has talked extensively about population collapse and low birth rates as sort of these existential issues facing the world and that they are kind of the most pressing issues we face.

And so he, as I'm sure you know, is kind of on this personal mission apparently to repopulate the earth.

He has many children and he's doing this,

I think we don't know all for sure, but through IVF.

And then you have other prominent sort of tech folks who are also using IVF and they want to not only make sure more babies are being born, but it's sort of the best and brightest, which

it skirts really closely to eugenics, you know, who should be having births and what kind of births we want.

And then you have kind of the religious groups who would agree we need to have more births, but they want to make sure we have births that are born with marital unions.

And ideally, it's sort of Christian births happening to sort of quote-unquote real Americans who are married.

And they're really thinking back to this kind of glorified and not entirely real

imagined history, really, of kind of the heyday of the family where people got married young and they had lots of kids.

And then you have this last group that is really concerned about sort of who's having births and not just their marital status, but really focused on births to true Americans.

So they don't want births to immigrants.

They don't want births to

people who they deem somehow of an inferior race.

They don't want other religions necessarily besides Christianity.

And so the pronatalist movement is

really

concerning for those of us who are worried about making a better life for everybody because it's really about focusing on certain types of people.

So Sarah, given the different strains of pronatalism that Karen has described for us, can you talk about why pronatalism has so aggressively entered the public conversation now?

Absolutely.

So Karen mentioned Elon Musk, and I see him as being a huge factor in sort of the rise of pronatalism as a topic that sort of preoccupies the media at the moment.

And for very good reason, given his, you know, his term in the Trump administration and,

the influence that he has as the world's richest man, but he's not alone.

I think we also have to think about J.D.

Vance, our vice president, who's made a lot of comments over the years about childless cat ladies and the need for

more births, but very specifically within the format that Karen was talking about when we're talking about Christian nationalism.

So these are, you know, these are American births and they're happening in quote-unquote traditional families.

So like a heterosexual union and, you know, biological children.

And I'm going to stick with you for a second, Sarah.

How do you see the conversation about pronatalism intersecting with the Dobbs decision and the changes we are seeing nationally to reproductive health and reproductive rights?

You know,

that makes me want to go back a few decades, really.

You know, I've written a little bit about pronatalism for New York magazine and from a personal perspective, because I grew up in an evangelical subculture where people have been talking about the need to have larger families and marry young for a very long time.

So in the 80s, when I was born and my parents decided to homeschool, this was a big topic of conversation.

People were worried about the population even then.

And not coincidentally,

there was the rise of the Christian right as we know it today and this emphasis on rolling back abortion rights.

And in some cases, access to contraception by reclassifying some forms of contraception as being abortive fashion, even though that's not how they work.

And with the Dobbs decision, of course, they really got what they wanted.

And so that's an important context for the conversation that we're having now.

And I think it's one of the reasons they see this opening to sort of press the attack.

And Karen, what are the legitimate concerns about the falling birth rate in the United States?

And I want to connect it back to Sarah's conversation about

reproductive health.

But let's start with just what are the actual facts about the birth rate in the U.S.

So the birth rate in the United States is at a record low.

So that is a true point.

It's been declining pretty steadily since the Great Recession.

We are now on par with some of our peer countries in Europe and East Asia.

And so the Estimate that we use is something called the total fertility rate.

And right now it's at 1.63.

And what that number measures is a hypothetical woman, if she's to go through her childbearing years at today's current age-specific rates, how many kids might she have at the end of her childbearing years?

So it's a hypothetical number.

So it assumes that, for instance, today's 20-year-olds, when they are 30, when they are 40, will have the childbearing behaviors of today's 40-year-olds.

And so that's not likely to be the case because we know people are waiting longer.

We're seeing birth rates increase among people at later ages.

So it's not likely to be true, but it's an easy number to estimate.

And the reason that draws so much alarm alarm is because there's,

in sort of the demographics speak, something called the replacement level, which is 2.1.

So every woman basically needs to replace herself and a partner.

And so if we have a number below that, we start to worry what will populations look like.

And so this is a relatively new conversation for the United States to have because compared to our peer nations, we were humming along right around replacement level for quite a while in the late 90s and early 2000s up until the Great Recession.

And so we didn't talk about low birth birth rates or those issues.

And then the Great Recession hit and birth rates pretty steadily fell.

And usually birth rates fall during a recession, but they recover and they didn't.

And so now people are starting to have these conversations.

Oh my gosh, what does it mean?

So when you have low birth rates and a large population, your population can still grow, but it starts to get older.

And so we have the baby boomers entering into their

retirement years.

We worry about what happens when you don't have enough labor market, workers for the labor market, or who pays into Social Security.

And so, the fix that pronatalists seem to latch onto is: we need more births.

I would argue, though, that births happening today are already kind of too late to help in the future.

So, we need to think about other potential solutions

to what's happening.

So, how might we fund Social Security differently?

What kind of things might we need in the labor market?

How can we care for the elderly?

And so, there are other solutions besides having more births, which, to be honest, is not a terribly helpful solution because it doesn't help for many years.

So a birth today isn't a worker for 20 years.

Right.

And just, I want to unpack the numbers a little bit more because I want to go back to the great replacement theory that also is driving this.

When you pick apart the falling birth rates, is there a difference based on the racial demography of the women giving birth?

And what does that say about this pronatalism movement?

Yeah, that's a great question.

If you were to go back 20, 30 years, you'd probably see some bigger racial and ethnic differences.

Right now, they're actually pretty small.

Hispanic women tend to have slightly more children on average, so their total fertility rate is about 2.3.

And for African Americans and whites, it's around 1.6, 1.7.

So there aren't actually these big differences.

The idea that Hispanics have really high birth rates

used to be more true.

There used to be more evidence to support it, but that's not really the case now.

So very few people are having kind of these large families

that some of the great replacement folks are worried about, although facts are not necessarily particularly important for them.

The other thing I would say that gets missed in this story of low birth rates and falling birth rates is that 80% of the decline is due to people, a fewer births of people in their teens and early 20s.

And those are almost always bursts that people themselves, when they're having those births, would say, I did not want to have a baby at this time.

Not that they didn't ever want to have kids, but they didn't want to have that baby that young under that context.

And so this is a good news story of contraceptive access, of reproductive autonomy, that people are able to avoid having births when they don't want to at younger ages.

The question then becomes: are they able to have the births when they want them under the context they want them at later ages?

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Sarah, I want to quote Indian Bronson, who is the founder of a Pronatalist matchmaking service, who said that the intention is to make more better people.

And Karen alluded to this earlier.

But Sarah, I want you to talk about what pro natalists see as the better people.

And am I mistaken in hearing echoes of Joseph Mengele in their narrative?

No, I don't think you are mistaken.

I think,

you know,

Karen's mentioned eugenics, and I think that's a really important strain to focus on when we're thinking about pro-natalism and who's promoting it.

I don't think you have to be a pronatalist to promote eugenic beliefs.

You know, going back to the 1800s, we're talking about, you know, eugenics and eugenic law laws that would eventually inspire you know Nazi Nazi Germany as you sort of invoked there but it never disappeared from American public consciousness or from American law we there's a long history of forced sterilizations of women of color of people with disabilities in this country it's very recent and so when I hear a statement like that I think about that history and you know, I see it as entering sort of a new stage where maybe they aren't going to explicitly say we should forcibly sterilize people, but it's about making sure that certain people aren't born.

And then someone who does identify as a person with a disability, you know, that really concerns me.

And I have a lot of questions about the implications of that.

And to me, it sort of pulls back the veil altogether.

Like we're not just talking about

what I think advocates for reproductive justice have always wanted, which is that a person has the ability to have the children they want and sort of the family that they want and making that possible for everybody.

That's not really what these people are talking about.

And Karen, you did an interview with Fresh Air, and you mentioned that part of what's missing from the pro-natalist movement is a stronger focus on truly being pro-family.

Now, I know hypocrisy is standard fare for the Trump administration and his Republican allies.

So it is no surprise that Trump has called himself the fertilization president, a moniker I don't think anyone has ever said they wanted to hear.

And yet, at the same time, the Republican agenda, including the bill that just passed the House and is now sitting in front of the Senate, includes things like slashing Medicaid and SNAP benefits, which directly support and serve families and children.

So, can you talk a bit about the distinction between pronatalist policies and pro-family policies?

And you alluded to it a little earlier, but I would love for you to pull that apart a little bit more.

Yeah, so the pronatalist policies that are being suggested right now, you've got one that, you know, the $5,000 baby bonus.

And I saw one sort of

prominent person in this area saying that would be great.

It would help pay for child care or birthing bills, you know, at the hospitals.

And I'm thinking, you know, what would be better than having to use a $5,000 baby bonus to pay for your child care or your hospital bills after giving birth would to be not having bills at all, right?

And so you mentioned some of the changes to food stamps and our social safety net.

So one of the things I saw over the weekend was that

they would cut

women, infant, and children's program benefits for breastfeeding mothers from $54 down to $10.

That is,

could anything be less pro-family than cutting food supports for a breastfeeding mother?

I mean, it sort of boggles the mind.

We see these cuts to, or redefinitions rather, of what a dependent is.

So some of the eligibility for SNAP programs, the food assistance food stamps program, would define a dependent as someone seven and under if you're unmarried.

But if you're married, it would count dependents under up to age 18.

And so again, it's, these are just positively, to me, draconian policies.

So all these things that would support families and support children are going by the wayside, but we're going to have a $5,000 bonus maybe, but maybe not to everybody, or maybe a medal, which is very kind of reminiscent of Nazi Germany.

And so, again,

there's what they say, and then there's what they're doing.

And what they're doing is extremely anti-family.

Well, speaking of the,

again, hypocrisy and what is said and what is done, Sarah, like you, I grew up in a religious family.

I grew up in a United Methodist household.

My parents are both pastors.

And we had to read the whole Bible, all of the pieces.

And often what I hear being espoused in the Christian nationalist narrative has very little relationship to the red, you know, the red letters of the Bible, the Christian part.

There is a tendency to hold to the authoritarian pieces that are espoused in the Old Testament, but very little about

how Jesus actually talked about Christianity and the intentions of Christianity, the narratives, the parables.

Sarah, you grew up and you've written about being from a family of quiverful Christians who do not believe in birth control and who encourage the growth of large white Christian families in part to, quote, out-reproduce secular families and to maintain cultural dominance.

We know that opposition to birth control and that growth of large families is typically associated with right-wing religiosity.

not necessarily with the sort of Musk style tech industry folks who are now subscribing to pronatalism.

And this is a very long way of asking you, what do you think are the similarities and the differences between these groups?

And how do you understand

the intersection that we are seeing today between what has traditionally been the hue and cry of religious organizations now meshing with Silicon Valley?

Yeah, so as you said, you know, I grew up in the homeschool world where there are a lot of Quiverfool families.

and

which sort of entered public consciousness with the Duggars and what have you on TV.

So that was sort of what I encountered often as a child and later at an evangelical college.

And I've thought a lot about the question that you just asked because it was very strange to sort of leave that world and realize that these ideas were everywhere.

They weren't really just limited to the church and the sort of churches that I'd grown up in.

And that was sort of startling.

And then I thought about it some more.

And I've been thinking about it now for a long time.

And

I think it really, if you really drill down, I think it's just about power.

I think it's about power and hierarchy and this vision of an America where,

you know,

that is organized by race and by gender, and that has people like Elon Musk at the top and the rest of us in our places on the ladder beneath him.

And I think that's really what it's about.

And I think that Christian nationalism and, you know, the tech right that we've been talking about have that sort of vision in common.

They're going about it in different ways.

They're justifying it kind of maybe in different ideological fashions.

But when you really get to the heart of it and, you know, you kind of take the scripture out of it, I think, you know,

they're both sort of backfilling to justify the sort of world that they want to live in.

And Karen, I want to come back to you because part of what's happening in this intersection of technology and religion is this focus on using technology to produce the best and brightest children, which, as we talked about, very much echoes not just Nazi Germany, but this country's own ugly history of eugenics.

And this isn't new territory for the Trump administration.

For example, Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

has made the very disturbing decision to create a national autism database, which advocates

that researchers and others focus on finding

who could fall into this database and keeping this list.

And we know that advocates and researchers have warned that this is a slippery slope to eugenics.

So Karen, what do pronatalist policies say about children with disabilities, about neurodivergence?

I know Sarah alluded earlier to the disabled community writ large, but talk a little bit about what the science is telling us and what policies are telling us about this moment.

Yeah, so what's interesting, I think, about the pronatalists is that there are different strands of this.

So some strands, the more religious strands, would say that's great.

All children are God's children.

We would want to embrace them and support them and then you would have the folks who are sort of like the Musk who would say those are not the right children we don't want those kinds of children and so they're saying that they are trying to do genetic testing of their embryos ahead of time to not only

I think guard against sort of the more egregious or sort of like life threatening kind of issues that a child might face, but also things for like height or eye color or athleticism.

yeah I mean that's just really problematic because again you think back to some of the things we have done in the United States where we said these people are not fit to reproduce because the children they would reproduce are not good enough

and so I think this is where there's this this tension in the pronatalist movement where some people are good enough to reproduce and some children are good enough to exist and others are not.

And I find this a very dangerous and slippery slope because we have, as Sarah mentioned, we have

sterilized poor women.

We have sterilized women who are deemed infit

solely based on their race.

Some of our

kind of various welfare programs over the years have had what I would deem as coercive policies saying you need to be on birth control to be eligible for this program.

I mean, we have done a lot of slippery slope stuff in the past, and the eugenics movement is, I think, really undergirds a lot of this.

But again, not everyone in the pronatalist movement would agree with it.

So some are saying everybody should have children and we welcome all.

And others are saying, no, only certain children.

And so that's where there's some tension, I think, in this movement.

Well, just to stay with that for a second, we know that there is a sort of strange bedfellows moment that's happening with the pronatalist movement and with others who would normally push back, where there is the bipartisan bill that's moving through the Senate right now that is seeking to expand access to certain services.

Can you talk a little bit about how those other strains of the pro-datalist movement are defining themselves and are pushing back against the more aggressively eugenic prone branch?

Well, I think one of the things we have to consider is the way the

Different people have this administration's ear and have made different contributions to getting this administration in office.

And so the religious groups, though, I'm thinking, so like the Heritage Foundation, Family Research Council, sort of those areas,

are often very much against the type of behavior that Elon Musk has.

So, having 14 children by, I don't know, five, six women, I don't know,

that's not the right kind.

And so, these are the same types of people who would be very much against having IVF widely available to folks because they consider

every

conception as, you know, that's when life begins.

And so

I wonder about,

you know, the campaign promises.

Well, I guess I don't really wonder.

The campaign promises that Trump made about getting IVF covered.

I think that's going to hit some real resistance among some people who were responsible for getting him elected.

I've read these stories too where people are like, I voted for Trump because I thought he would, you know, get me access to infertility treatment and it's not happening and I'm upset.

And you know, I sympathize for people who really need assisted assistance to have the children that they want, but this is not the person who's going to do that.

Well, Sarah, you're nodding.

Republicans have long called themselves the pro-family values party, and we know that evangelicals are more likely to identify as Republican than as Democrat.

How does this more extreme ideology map onto the policies that Republicans have traditionally promoted?

And how do you see this tension playing out?

Yeah.

I know back in the 70s,

before in the years prior to Roe v.

Wade, you know, there wasn't, at least based on my reading and research, necessarily consensus among Protestant evangelicals on the issue of abortion and contraception.

And then for a lot of complicated historical reasons, that began to change.

This sort of movement that we now know as the Christian right really coalesced around abortion restrictions.

And now we're seeing the fruit of it.

And so I think of it as a, you know, it's a political alliance.

It's been very fruitful both for sort of the mainstream conservative movement as it existed in that time and also for the for the Christian right that was forming.

You know, the Christian right is ascendant.

It's in power now.

It controls the U.S.

Supreme Court.

There are some tensions that we've sort of touched on throughout this conversation.

I don't know quite how that's going to play out.

But to sort of bring it back to this notion of power and hierarchy, again, I think that's really where you see the overlap at its strongest.

Well, Karen, you know, what kind of concerns do reproductive justice advocates raise about these policies that are designed to incentivize birth?

Because, as you pointed out, we have this history in this country of forced sterilization, of trying to weed out who is considered not the right American.

But what are the concerns about coercion that would try to incentivize birth?

Yeah, I don't know if it's coercion that we're worried about so much as

really kind of a going back in time.

So taking away women's rights.

So one of the things that bothers me as a feminist demographer is that when we were worried, the U.S.

and the world were worried about overpopulation, you know, 50 years ago, it was like, all right, we're going to have to get women to have fewer kids.

And now we're worried about low birth rates and low population.

And still, we're like, okay, now we still have to get women to do things.

It's about controlling women.

There's a lot of anti-feminism in here.

There's sexism and misogyny.

You know, what's wrong with women?

Why aren't they marrying young men today?

And why are they too picky?

They're too focused on their careers.

And that sits uncomfortably, of course, with many of us

because we know that

You know, women can still do both.

They can have children.

They can be in the labor force.

They don't necessarily have to be married.

They don't have to have kids.

But we always use women's reproductive labor as the solution to some macro problem.

And forcing women to go back is not the way to do it.

And you know, one of the more egregious things I've seen is, so we've had all these cases, all these dates pulling back on abortion rights after jobs.

And yet we actually haven't seen a decline in abortion because medication abortion has risen.

And so the majority of abortions now are medication abortion, but that's under threat too.

Mifipristone is one of the two medicines that are used in medication abortion, abortion, and that is totally under attack.

And as a really egregious example of this, the last time the Supreme Court considered mifopristone, I think maybe last year, it said it didn't have the plaintiffs didn't have standing.

Well, Missouri, Idaho, and I think Kansas are trying this again.

And Missouri in particular has claimed standing because it says when teenagers use mifipristone to end unwanted pregnancies, that hurts their population growth.

And I'm thinking, you're saying the quiet quiet part out loud, like you want more teen births, you want to create more workers, more, you want to trap people in a phase of their life where they're not ready to have kids.

You're going to increase poverty.

And we're cutting the social safety net.

So you have to have these kids, but we will give you no support for this.

And it's deeply concerning.

I mean, I am all for like $5,000 when you have a baby.

That's great.

You know, give people money, absolutely.

But what's frustrating is that

that kind of money is money often with strings so that some of the conversations I've seen around it have been well it phases in at you know a certain income threshold you have to so we don't want to incentivize poor people and you have to be married and of course the other thing that's frustrating is that we had a program that gave families money we had the American Rescue Plan it gave families money it cut child poverty immensely and we chose as a country on across part of the lines to not extend it

and so I hear all these other things and I'm thinking it's lip service because they have no interest in supporting families.

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So here in Georgia, we have women who have died as a result of our draconian abortion ban.

In fact, we have a woman who is brain dead right now who's being forced to stay on life support and act as an incubator for her fetus against her family's wishes because she was nine weeks pregnant when the doctors declared her brain dead in February.

And we know women in states with abortion bans have been forced to wait until they are septic while miscarrying before they can get their life-saving abortion care.

And this reality post-Dobs has made much of the United States a terrifying place to be pregnant, whether the pregnancy is desired or not.

And I would love for both of you to weigh in.

I'll start with you, Sarah.

Do any branches of the pro-natalist movement acknowledge or try to address this reality?

Based on what I've seen, I would say no, at least not in what I would consider to be a substantive or meaningful way.

You know, the Christian nationalists, of course, oppose abortion rights.

And so they sort of hand-wave past that and like, well, the doctors aren't following the law.

And that's why these situations happen.

And if doctors did follow the law, you know, these women would be able to get care.

And of course, it's far more complicated than that.

And the laws are, in my opinion, anyway, working exactly as designed.

But even

moving beyond the Christian nationalist into these other pronatalist strains, I think that there's sort of this natural friction between what they're advocating for and the notion of reproductive rights, and especially reproductive justice for anyone who can get pregnant.

And so,

I think a lot of the more secular types, at least based on what I've seen and read, they kind of don't talk about it a lot, or if they do,

they prefer to focus on like incentives for having as many kids as possible rather than on like the actual obstacles that exist when it comes to like having

having a pregnancy and like carrying that pregnancy safely and giving birth safely.

Karen?

I would add too that we know why women have abortions.

They have abortions because they've decided they can't parent a child.

And none of what we're doing or what the pronatalists are doing are going to help alleviate either of those situations, how to go through pregnancy and have a safe pregnancy or to help raise a child.

You know, under the Dobbs, you know, part of the decision was Amy Comey Barrett saying, you know, we could give a child up for adoption as if pregnancy is nothing.

Pregnancy is no joke.

I mean, we're hearing what happens when people can't get the pregnancy care that they need.

But even people who have healthy, quote-unquote, pregnancies still can have side effects or, you know, long-term changes in their well-being.

Pregnancy is a very real and dangerous condition, much more so than taking abortion, medication, or having an abortion.

People die in childbirth.

We have huge maternal mortality rates compared to other countries.

I mean, it's still relatively low.

Most people will have a safe pregnancy,

but our rates are much higher than they are in other countries.

We have high rates of complications in ways that other countries don't have.

They are deeply classed and especially race, these differences.

So we know that black women in particular really do not get the kind of obstetric care they need.

So, you know, what I'm seeing is that even if

people are,

you know, thinking that these pronatal list policies would be helpful for them, they are going to be outweighed by how terrifying it would be to be pregnant right now.

You know, I work on a college campus the week after the election.

There was a huge run at the campus student health center on getting IUDs because people were really worried.

They're like, oh my God, I can't get pregnant now.

Holy crap.

Like, they were really terrified to the point where our campus health was contacting local providers and making deals so that young women could get contraception because they were worried that not only could they not get pregnant, they don't want to get pregnant now, but that contraception access was going to go away.

And they're right to be afraid.

Most people who have abortions, the majority of them, already have children.

And so they're thinking, you know, if I were a person of childbearing age and I already have a kid and maybe I had a risky pregnancy before, I'd think I owe it to my current child maybe not to have another one because I can't risk not being around to parent them.

One of the issues that you raised, Karen, is what's happening with young women.

And I'm actually going to tie this to a question for Sarah.

You know, some refer to the religious sector of the pro-natalist movement as the quote, trad branch, which of course brings to mind the trad wife trend on TikTok.

And that's where female creators promote traditional gender roles like cooking and cleaning and child rearing.

So, Sarah, how does this kind of content serve as a gateway into the broader pro-natalist movement?

And how should we be thinking about either counteracting, contributing, changing what's happening now, and how should we understand it?

Yeah, that content is really interesting to me.

I always wonder with any sort of trend, whether it's trad wipes or something else, you know, how much of a constituency does this have offline?

But we do know, for example, that

you know, even a woman who might be college educated, works full-time,

the burden of child rearing and housework is still going to fall predominantly on her if

she's married to a man.

That's, you know, Arlie Russell Hosschild wrote The Second Shift a long time ago.

And

based on my understanding, you know, not much has changed since then.

That's still the basic dynamic.

And so I see that content online and I wonder, you know, are they trying to make women feel comfortable with a dynamic that's kind of already in place?

You know, don't question it.

I got served a reel the other day on Instagram from someone talking about entering their soft wife era, which again, many questions.

What does that mean?

And from what I can tell, it just meant like accept it.

You know, accept it, you know, stop picking fights with your husband and sort of go along with the flow.

And so I've been seeing a lot of that.

And I do think it's this push to get women comfortable with the fact that we still have

so much ground to cover and so many advances left to fight for.

And

there's very much much this push telling us not to do that and to sort of be happy with our roles, our traditional roles, and not ask for anything more.

But we do know from research that young women, especially Gen Z, Gen Alpha, tend to be very progressive still overall.

So while a lot of the Tradwife content is being produced by young women in particular,

at this point, it strikes me that they're still outliers as far as their generations go.

So, Sarah, you also recently wrote in a New York magazine article about how in response to the origination of the pro-natalism movement, a group of black women emerged and started calling themselves the women of African descent for reproductive justice.

Can you talk a little bit more about their work and how their focus on reproductive justice contrasts with pro-natalism?

Absolutely.

I think this is such important history.

So back in the early 90s, this group of women got together to talk about some legislation that was being put forward by the Clinton administration.

And

they found, you know, had fallen short in a number of ways.

And so they put out a, they took out ads and newspapers and, you know, really sort of started advancing this notion, this framework of reproductive justice,

moving beyond, you know, abortion rights as a matter of the right to privacy, but something more all-encompassing and more comprehensive.

I think that's a really important concept to sort of contend with now

that especially Dobbs has killed Robert V.

Wade and we're sort of moving beyond this notion of the right to privacy and what would it mean and what would it look like to establish a more robust sort of notion of what it means to exercise your reproductive freedom in this country.

So a right to housing, a right to health care.

And of course, there are concepts that the pronatalist movement isn't contending with.

Karen, I know you understand this, but I'd love for you to talk to our audience about the danger of data erasure that's happening under this administration, especially when it comes to conversations about demography and birth rates and what the pro-natalism movement is going to both espouse, but what they're also going to be able to use as support for their policies.

Can you talk a little bit about what's scaring you and what's cheering you about what's happening?

Yeah, so there's a lot of data that's really under threat or has already disappeared.

It remains up and running except for they've gutted the office.

So being able to track

pregnant women and follow them after they've given birth for a number of months and sometimes a couple of years.

We need that data to know who's doing well and where and what sort of interventions they need and what kind of policies work.

We're worried about selective data manipulation.

So even if data still exists, are they taking out indicators of gender identity or indicators of reproductive behaviors?

We're cutting things like the National Center for for Health Statistics under, you know, the Health and Human Services.

And so

who actually has access to our data and who will monitor it so we can study trends?

You know, do people live in safe neighborhoods?

Are they exposed to violence?

Are they exposed to hazards?

You know, things like the reproductive justice movement are interested in many of the things that this administration has labeled woke or DEI.

And so we really worry about what's happening in this administration and how it actually is going to help people have

the families that they want.

And I want to make a point, which is we don't have a ton of evidence that suggests people don't want kids anymore or that they don't want to have two kids on average.

People still generally want to have kids, but they want to have kids if they know they have enough money to support themselves and their families.

And we don't make any of these things easy in the United States.

We don't have a good childcare system.

We don't have paid leave.

So there's a lot of reasons why people are thinking not now, not now.

So really what I think is driving low birth rates rates is people are looking around them and saying, yeah, maybe kids, but not now.

I got to wait till things are better.

And when will things get better?

I mean, that's a legit concern for today's young adults.

Yeah.

So I'm going to ask both of you to do something we love to do on Assimply Required, which is give us something to do next.

So from each of you, and I'll start with you, Sarah.

What can our audience do to learn more about and advocate for the policies that both you and Karen have recommended that we know actually do help families?

You know, I'm a journalist, so I'm biased in favor of good evidence-backed journalism.

And I would start there

and urge people to really sort of educate themselves on this topic.

You know, it's sort of unfair that the responsibility falls on them in this way, but given the sort of cuts that Karen was just talking about, that's sort of the situation we're dealing with.

So, by all means, educate yourself, you know, read about the research and then think carefully about, you know, the sort of life that you want to lead, the sort of family you want to create, but but also talk to your friends and family you know I've learned my mother's very conservative but I've still had some great conversations with her about you know her reproductive decisions and what she imagined for her family and

that's been a really important way for us to not only connect but also to think a little more critically about you know the sort of positions that you know people like my parents used to hold and the sort of effect they've had on public policy.

So you know start by researching but don't be afraid to have these conversations with your relatives, with your friends, with people in your community, and really encourage people to not only think about what they want, but have empathy and compassion for people who aren't them and, you know, are maybe facing barriers that they don't face.

Fantastic.

Karen?

Yeah, I mean, I would echo that, of course, is to have conversations.

I think what happens right now, we don't.

We don't have a lot of conversations with people we think view the world differently, but there's a lot of common ground in the sense of what people want for their families.

The other thing I would say is there are so many cuts happening at the federal level.

Find something that really speaks to you.

If you are really passionate about the cuts to

funding medical research, call your senators, call your elected officials, you know,

remind Congress that they have the power of the purse and they have a responsibility to do the things that make their constituents healthy and lead productive lives.

And so I tell people all the time, it's actually not that hard.

People are scared to call their elected officials.

I'm like, you can call.

There's even a million different websites or scripts and things that you can use that will help you do this.

But voice your concern over what's happening at the administration.

And I'm going to echo that by saying, and it works.

We have watched just this past week, the terrible, no good, tyrannical bill passed by one vote.

And that was due in large part to the actions of average citizens calling and demanding that their representatives actually do the right thing.

It still passed, but it barely passed.

and now we're in the Senate.

And so, do not think that because it has happened already, that it is a done deal, and never underestimate how important it is for your elected officials to hear from you.

Dr.

Karen Guzzo, Sarah Jones, thank you both so much for joining me today, for terrifying me a little bit more, and for giving us a bit of hope about what we can do.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

As always on Assembly Required, we're here to give you real, actionable tools to face today's biggest challenges.

Today, I want to talk about the Republicans' devastating new legislative package that recently passed the House.

As per usual, the official title of a big, beautiful bill has nothing to do with its content.

Instead, this no-good, terrible, devastating legislation is now barreling towards the Republican-controlled Senate.

The budget bill would add a staggering $3 trillion to the national debt and provide $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy at the expense of access to food, jobs, and health care for millions of working class, middle-class, and elderly Americans.

This bill takes direct aim at Medicaid, the largest health insurance program in the country, which covers children, the disabled, the working poor, and seniors in nursing homes.

It would require recipients to work at least 80 hours a month to keep their coverage, despite warnings from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that this change would kick 10.3 million people off of Medicaid by 2034.

The reason for the loss of coverage when work requirements are put in place has little to do with arguments of laziness or fraud and abuse.

It's instead the intentional attack of red tape.

By increasing reporting requirements while dismantling the very mechanisms for reporting, millions without regular access to technology or hours of free time to sit on the phone or navigate the complex rules that are now imposed, they will lose their coverage.

Much like opponents to voting rights, opponents of Medicaid intend to weaponize bureaucracy to achieve their ends.

We know that work requirements simply increase hardship and do not improve employment outcomes.

This isn't particularly pro-birth or pro-family.

Medicaid pays for 41% of births in this country.

This bill also cuts food assistance for nearly 11 million people and includes yet another Republican push to block Medicaid funds from going to Planned Parenthood, targeting reproductive health care access in the process.

There are other horrible policies buried in the bill, and we will unpack them as the legislation works its way through the Senate.

So in today's toolkit, we're encouraging you to take action.

As Karen and Sarah encouraged us, start by calling your representatives and senators in Congress, but don't stop there.

Check the ones out in your state legislature and then call your city council members, your county commissioners, call your school board members, because all of these local elected officials have power too, and they are all going to be impacted by the decisions made with this terrible no-good bill.

In fact, they have more power than sometimes they realize.

Head to commoncause.org to find your federal, state, and local representatives and let them know exactly how you feel about the bill and its attack on Medicaid.

You can also support organizations that are in the crosshairs of these proposed cuts, groups that provide vital health care to millions of Americans.

Planned Parenthood is one of them.

Go to plannedparenthood.org/slash get hyphen involved to donate and take a stand.

And as SNAP benefits are cut, more families and their children are going to struggle to access food.

Consider getting involved with your local food bank or mutual aid organization that provides food assistance.

Because when the stakes are this high, silence and inaction cannot be an option.

If you've learned something from this episode of Assembly Required or previous podcasts, tell a friend and share your favorite episode.

And wherever you go to find us, make sure you like and subscribe.

Look, in an age of algorithms, your voice helps others make their way to our feed.

If you like what you hear, rate the show and leave a comment.

And please continue to tell us what you've learned and solved or want to hear about next.

You can send an email to assemblyrequired at cricket.com or leave us a voicemail.

And you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

So this wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams, and I'll meet you here next week.

Assembly Required is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Lacey Roberts, and our associate producer is Farah Safari.

Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.

Our theme song is by Vasilis Photopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroote, Kyle Seglu, Tyler Boozer, Ben Hethcote, and Priyanka Muntha for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long and me, Stacey Abrams.

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