It was only a matter of time.
The news this week in The New York Times that the Trump White House is searching for ways to “persuade” 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.
If you were shocked to hear this news, just wait until you see how far it emboldens conservative Christians to go even further. Their assault on sex has only just begun.
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It’s a dystopian unveiling of a pro-natalist agenda that social conservatives have been carefully constructing brick by brick, headline by headline led by Elon Musk, until now, when the facade has finally fallen and the truth stands exposed. And that truth is 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.
What’s next? A government birthing schedule? A state-sanctioned pregnancy quota? Or a ban on sex between two men or two women? Because the Christian right believes that sex should be only about having babies. Sex for love or pleasure is a damnable sin.
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.
I stopped watching the miniseries of The Handmaid’s Tale after the first season in 2017, and that is because I long felt that Donald Trump and the extreme right would someday try to mimic the plot of the show. That series scared the hell out of me. It didn’t come to fruition in the first term, but here we are, and I’m astounded and horrified to say I told you so.
As reported in the Times, officials are exploring how to “support” women in having more children, complete with cash payments, policy shifts, and a looming sense that your worth to the state may soon be measured in diapers and delivery dates.
It eerily echoes China’s recent expansion of its family planning allowance from two children to three, under the watchful eye of the Chinese Communist Party. We used to criticize authoritarian regimes for such population engineering. Now we imitate them. And we might be at war with China on tariffs, it seems we also want to compete with them on how many children our citizens have.
But make no mistake, this isn’t about economic growth, declining birth rates, or family values. This is about a radical right-wing movement, fueled by white nationalism, Christian domination, and toxic masculinity.
Trump and his ilk seek to rebuild America in their own image: white, straight, and male-dominated like a UFC championship fight, where men are men, and women are … well, just subservient women.
Pronatalism, as chillingly outlined in The Guardian, is the ideological backbone of this movement. It’s not just pro-birth, it’s anti-choice. Anti-freedom. Anti-you. And virulently anti-LGBTQ+.
In the pronatalist worldview, the womb is a tool for the state. Your sexual autonomy is negotiable. Your career, your goals, and your body are all secondary to your duty to reproduce. If that doesn’t scare you, you’re not paying attention, because you’re about to see The Handmaid’s Tale become reality.
And where this is heading is even darker. The same extremists behind this push to increase birth rates are the ones who celebrated the fall of Roe v. Wade. They’re the ones who now target IVF and contraception.
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.
If this administration truly cared about families, it would be investing in child care, paid family leave, affordable health care, and maternal mortality prevention. It would stop criminalizing abortion, banning books, and attacking LGBTQ+ parents. But they’re not doing any of that. Instead, they’re offering cash bounties for babies while stripping away every freedom that lets a woman choose her own life.
And eventually, freedom for two women or two men to have sex.
So when Trump’s advisers talk about “persuading” women to have more children, understand the code. This isn’t persuasion — it’s preparation for something much larger. For a future where choice is eradicated, where privacy is policed, and where the personal becomes punishable.
If you’re not terrified yet, you should be. Because this isn’t fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale anymore. It’s federal policy in the making. And it’s coming for all of us.
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