Why Did Democrats Ever Stop Calling These Natalist Freaks Weird?

The same memo also calls on the department to prioritize “family-specific difficulties” like “accessibility of transportation to families with young children.” And that’s important! But the obsession with higher “marriage and birth rates” isn’t just bizarre and dehumanizing—it’s innately invasive. Plus, all the travel-related accommodations in the world are hardly likely to incentivize more people to crank out kids when everything is only getting more expensive—tariffs are unlikely to help!—and, instead of child care or any real social safety net, we’re all just subsidizing Trump’s billionaire friends.

The creepy memo follows Vance’s remarks at the largest anti-abortion rally in the nation on Saturday, where he declared, “I want more babies in the United States of America. I want more happy children in our country, and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.” Unfortunately for Vance, the idea of the vice president visualizing and fantasizing about us having sex and procreating is perhaps the most effective form of birth control.

Some might argue DOT’s memo isn’t that insane because what’s wrong with incentivizing having kids??? But the people running this administration aren’t sneaky about their primary goal, which is to force pregnancy and childbirth, and try to punish people who don’t have kids. In 2021, Vance literally said adults who don’t have children should lose their voting rights, arguing they shouldn’t be accorded “nearly the same voice” in democracy. “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children,” he added in the same podcast episode. On the campaign trail, resurfaced clips of Vance salivating over women’s fertility and smearing childless adults as “sociopathic,” “psychotic,” and “deranged” dropped on a near-daily basis.

Elon Musk, the father of at least 12 known children, who not so long ago threatened to impregnate Taylor Swift, also holds way too much power in this administration, and has similarly suggested as recently as 2022 that childless adults should lose voting rights. Ironically, of course, not only is Musk a veritably shitty parent, but he’s played an active role in making it hard if not impossible for his employees to have kids, and has lobbied against federally subsidized child care. 

The same DOT memo says the department should “prohibit” recipients of its funding from “imposing vaccine and mask mandates”—a mandate that endangers children’s lives—and require “compliance or cooperation” with ICE, which is a driving force in separating immigrant families. So, to be clear, DOT’s preferential treatment is reserved for some families—white families—but not others. As the Daily Beast and social media users have pointed out, the memo is effectively calling for “DEI” for tradwives, while the administration simultaneously executes a witch hunt against pro-diversity programs, real or imagined.

The memo is jarring in how overt it is, but it’s part-and-parcel of what conservatives have been fighting for via policies and sneering dog whistles for years. Abortion bans, defunding family planning, forcing employees to move to abortion-banned states, attacking accommodations for pregnant workers and working mothers, and now prioritizing communities with “birth rates higher than the national average”—it’s obvious what’s going on here.