Baby Gloom

A few months ago, a friend and I went to see Wicked at SIFF Downtown. We were in good spirits, as only two former theater kids about to see three hours of musical theater can be. We crammed chocolate popcorn into our maws and joked that the directive to silence our phones did not specify no singing, but the mood was somewhat soured by what followed: an ad for Kaiser Permanente, featuring a woman talking about her positive birth experience. It seemed like an oddly sunny framing coming from Kaiser, which is shutting down its midwifery practice as part of an all too common national trend away from pregnancy care.

“It makes me not ever want to have a baby,” I said. “Me neither,” my friend replied.

I’m rarely one to make pronouncements like this. Like Carrie Bradshaw in the latter seasons of Sex and the City, the dominant feeling I have about the idea of parenthood is a deep-seated ambivalence. I have plenty of children in my life, and I adore them, but having borrowed one now and again, I have experienced firsthand the beaming, patriarchal approval perceived motherhood bestows on women. It felt weird, a jarringly saccharine response to something that also guarantees exhaustion, chaos, and the risk of bodily injury!

Equally unrelatable is the self-righteous glee with which many a childfree Redditor complains about the breeders, as if they are Parker Posey in an independent film from 1996. Both choices seem hard and complicated! That’s true of most decisions that shift our lives in extreme ways we can’t really predict when we make them.

But as more and more labor and delivery units shutter and the fallout from losing Roe v. Wade becomes clear, compounding the existing risks that already accompany every single pregnancy, for those of us on the fence—or even parents who once hoped to have large families—the idea of having a baby is becoming less and less appealing. The choice to have a child should be a personal one. But now, it’s one that policy has begun to shape—and not in the way the Trump administration seems to have intended.

Trump crony Elon Musk once described America’s falling birth rate as “the biggest danger civilization faces, by far.” But the anti-abortion policies the right has espoused aren’t doing anything to incentivize more births. By making pregnancy less safe than it once was—and in the process complicating it even for people who want to grow their families—they’re ensuring the birth rate falls even further.

This is especially true in states with abortion bans. In February, Kelcie Moseley-Morris reported in The Idaho Capital Sun that women she’d interviewed in states with abortion bans “cited those policies as part of or the primary reason for their fertility decisions.” Two of the women in the story had wanted more children. Because of Republican policies, they aren’t going to.

In states with protective abortion policies, you’d expect to see the opposite dynamic. But even when abortion access is protected, people are approaching pregnancy and birth with intensified reluctance.

In a state like Washington, protective laws mean that if you have a miscarriage or pregnancy complication, you should be able to get appropriate care—which, to be clear, is often an abortion—and if it happens in an emergency, it should be available even if you find yourself in an institution that typically bans the procedure.

But access is always more complicated than that.

A woman who lives in Maine and has one child told me she had wanted “desperately” to have a second baby, but has disabilities that make pregnancy particularly dangerous. “Yes, I could still try for a pregnancy with the strict medical guidance, and purely hoping for the best, but now with no protection for IF something should go terribly wrong I will not,” she said. Despite Maine’s protective policies, provider shortages and high demand mean reproductive health care in general can be hard to access, she said.

A friend who lives in Seattle, the parent of a toddler, said she was concerned that if something went wrong with a future pregnancy, “my partner could die instead of receiving medical care she needs.”

Last year, JD Vance, then running for vice president, drew online ire and ridicule for telling perma-scowler Tucker Carlson that “we are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too. It’s just a basic fact.”

This was not a fact at all, but a grim, narrow opinion of what it means to be a person; A gloomy worldview that suggests parenthood is the only way to find true meaning in life, and an odd statement coming from someone who seems to derive plenty of meaning from having written a bad-faith book to launch a bad-faith political career.

And all too often, the reality is that people are choosing not to have children not because of any innate selfishness, but because of the policies Vance himself has espoused. Making abortion inaccessible is what disincentivizes pregnancy, not some shady cabal of single cat people with too much time on their hands. In a political climate that devalues pregnant people’s survival, avoiding pregnancy isn’t a reflection of misery; it’s a perfectly reasonable attempt to avoid it.

Meanwhile, Musk’s toddler appears prop-like in videos from the Oval Office, as the Trump administration moves to defund programs like HeadStart, which are actually the kinds of things that make having a kid accessible for people who might otherwise opt out. If you’re really so obsessed with the birth rate, why not start there?

In the era of DOGE, it’s important to remember that a choice made under duress isn’t really a choice at all. When even people who wanted bigger families are suddenly changing their minds about having more kids, they’re making a decision out of care for their children who are already here. Another child is not worth the risk of death for a pregnant person or their baby.

And we know what the alternative is. New research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that the implementation of abortion bans increased infant mortality, with 478 more infant deaths reported in 14 states that banned abortion between September 2021 and August 2022.

“These findings suggest that restrictive abortion policies may be reversing decades of progress in reducing infant deaths in the US,” said co-lead author Alison Gemmill of the findings. At Tulane, researchers reported that states with restrictive abortion policies also had higher rates of maternal mortality.

The danger to civilization, of course, has never been a low birthrate. That’s a smokescreen, and a typically ghoulish one. The real danger is that people are dying from these supposedly pronatalist policies. The GOP is obsessed with America’s falling birthrate, but by alienating people who want to be parents—and denigrating those who don’t—they’re transforming their fear into a self-fulfilling prophecy.