It’s common for right-wing American governments, whether at the state or federal level, to be only half-heartedly natalist: restricting abortion, birth control, and sex education, while also failing to embrace any policy that makes it easier to raise a family, like universal childcare, robust public education, school lunch, cash supports for parents, or paid family leave. But the Trump-Vance government has taken this paradox to a new level, with natalist rhetoric far surpassing that of other recent administrations, while real live children are treated with more depraved, life-threatening indifference than in any American government in at least a century.
This reckless approach to child safety is not limited to food. Also this week, The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency was canceling tens of millions of dollars in grants for research on environmental hazards to children in rural America. These hazards include pesticides, wildfire smoke, and forever chemicals, and the grants supported research toward solutions to such problems. Many focused on improving child health in red states like Oklahoma.
And of course there’s RFK Jr.’s crazy campaign against vaccines. This week, the health secretary said he was considering removing the Covid-19 vaccine from the list of vaccines the government recommends for children, even though to win Senate confirmation, he had agreed not to alter the childhood vaccine schedule. Even worse, RFK Jr. has used his office to promote disinformation about extensively debunked links between vaccines and autism, while praising unproven “treatments” for measles as an outbreak that has afflicted more than 600 people and killed at least three continues to spread. Trump’s public health cuts are meanwhile imperiling a program that gives free vaccines to children.
Natalist or exterminationist? Pro-child or rabidly infanticidal? It’s tempting to dismiss such extreme contradictions within the Trump administration as merely chaotic and incoherent. But the situation is worse than that.
It’s also worth noting that this way of thinking originates in—and many of these Trump administration policies aim to return us to—an earlier era, when people of all ages, but especially children, were simply poisoned by industrial pollution, unvaccinated for diseases, and unprotected from industrial accidents. In such an unsafe world for children, people had many more of them; the world was such a dangerous place to raise kids that families expected to lose a few.
That all-too-recent period is the unspoken context for natalist and eugenicist visions. That’s the world Trump and Vance seem to be nostalgic for, one in which women were constantly pregnant and in labor, and children were constantly dying horrible deaths. Doesn’t that sound pleasant for everyone?
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