America's Next Top Tradmoms
Can you rig a baby boom? Plus, my new podcast miniseries on the gender wars.
“Is it real, or is it a game?”
That’s the tagline from one of my favorite movies as a kid, a very 80s classic called WarGames. It’s about a high school boy played by SJP’s husband Matthew Broderick who thinks he’s hacked into a video game company, but is actually inside the U.S. military’s nuclear program... and almost starts World War 3. His love interest is a pre-Breakfast Club Ally Sheedy, aka my first celebrity doppelgänger. So, y’know, I could really see myself in the movie (not knowing I, too, would later spend many pointless teenage hours watching boys I liked play video games).
But I think it’s an imperfect kind of metaphor for the real versus perceived threats of today’s so-called gender war. The "games" may look harmless enough at first—soft girls, podcast bros, “natural” birth control influencers, whatever—but underneath it, there’s real-world infrastructure being weaponized. And just like in WarGames, by the time you realize folks on the other side of the screen aren't just playing, the damage is already being done.
That’s why I made Gender War Games—a four-part miniseries exploring how rebranded womanhood, weaponized femininity, and ideological echo chambers are colliding with offline gender polarization, feminist backlash and media meltdowns.
The first two episodes are out now on the Unladylike podcast feed, and you DON’T wanna miss Caro Claire Burke and Katie Gatti Tassen—the brilliant hosts of
—breaking down how all this commodified femininity ain’t a vibe. It’s a trap.America’s Next Top Tradmoms
FYI: I’d planned to pick back up with the question I posed at the end of last newsletter’s breakdown of where all this birthrate doomerism is coming from: What does this all mean for my fellow dinks and gwoks (grownups w/o kids) and aspirationally childfree girlies? But then some news dropped with implications for the childfree conversation, so I’m covering that first, and we’ll get back to no-babies next time.
I predict tradwives at the White House this Mother’s Day. Perhaps a moms’ beauty pageant, hosted by Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman, or an old school better babies contest. Or maybe we’ll see the first recipients of National Medals of Motherhood—a dead-end idea floating around the Oval to manifest a white American baby boom.
The embattled CDC just dropped preliminary 2024 birth rate stats, and the overall rate ticked up 1 percent from last year’s historic low. To pronatalists, the problem isn’t just fewer babies being born, it’s how long women are waiting to have them. More women are having babies in their 30s and even 40s, squandering their peak fertility on hookup culture and advanced degrees or whatever.
New York Times reporter Caroline Kitchener also confirmed what we already knew. The Trump administration has big plans that will be announced circa Mother’s Day to “help or convince women to have more babies.” And how might it pull that off while simultaneously axing funding for reproductive and maternal health, food assistance, childcare and early child education? Instead of actually supporting parents and families, the White House is brainstorming:
$5,000 “baby bonuses” for married straights
Per-child tax credits for married couples
Quotas for married-with-children Fulbright scholars
A National Medal of Motherhood for women with six or more kids
Federally funded fertility tracking courses (anti-birth control and Evie magazine approved!)
Lower-cost IVF
Project 2025 x MAHA quackery called “Restorative Reproductive Medicine” to delay or avoid IVF
These contradictory IVF stances—expanded access versus last resort—highlight a right-wing ideological rift. Conservative pro-lifers fret about "lost embryonic life" and polygenic screening, while pronatalists are all in on IVF and reproductive tech. Pro-lifers want bigger traditional families; pronatalists want bigger workforces. Why does it matter? In Abortion Every Day, Jessica Valenti rightly pointed out that this key tension is a strategic opening for Democrats, alongside other nonsensical pronatalist policies.
In February, for example, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy—and father of nine—directed the DOT to prioritize projects in communities with above-average marriage and birth rates. Civil servants remain baffled, but as Meg Kilgannon with the conservativbe tank Family Research Council told NPR at the time, it fits into a broader pronatalist strategy. “The pro-life movement are going to have to shift their thinking about why it is we're not having babies,” Kilgannon said. “It's not just because of abortion. They're not even being conceived.”
Well, if there’s one thing that’ll make America horny again, it’s roadwork. And Fulbright applications.
Right-wing baby fever isn't just rhetoric. It’s real, billionaire-backed and politically empowered. The goal? Reinforce a white, Christian, patriarchal hierarchy of American Worth. At least it’s so completely out of touch with our cultural, economic and medical realities that progressives have no choice but to reclaim “pro-family” for all of us, regardless of our marital, reproductive or breadwinning status.
reality checks:
If the White House were actually “pro-family,” Mahmoud Khalil would’ve been by his wife Dr. Noor Abdalla’s side for the birth of their son last week (Adrien Florido, NPR), and ICE wouldn’t be forcing US citizen children onto deportation planes and blaming it on their mothers. (Maanvi Singh, The Guardian)
And good luck conjuring a baby boom when pregnancy is becoming more dangerous in abortion banned (ie, conservative) states. (Shefali Luthra, The 19th*)
Yay? Gutting the Women’s Health Initiative enraged enough people, the NIH reversed course, and RFK Jr. is pretending it never happened. (Meredith Waldman, Jocelyn Kaiser, and Sarah Reardon, Science; X)
Wish we could do the same for LGBTQ youth support on the national suicide and crisis hotline. “The service for LGBTQ youth has received 1.3 million calls, texts, or chats since 2022. In February, the program received an average of 2,100 contacts per day.” (Julia Lurie, Mother Jones)
til next time…
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