New term for child-free women just dropped
"One in three Americans are under-babied," Dr. Oz said at an exceptionally creepy press conference at the White House today in which Trump called himself the "father of fertility."
I happened to start watching The Testaments on Hulu last night, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, after weeks of avoiding it. I’ve found it harder this time to mentally psych myself up for another show set in Gilead after a long day of the bleakest possible news about our real-life dystopia, but it turned out to be a really excellent and well-acted show. It’s less torture-porny than the original (praise be), and I binged a full four episodes last night before bed.
I only bring this up to say that with the world of Gilead still fresh on my mind today, I had an especially out-of-body experience watching Trump’s extremely bizarre press conference about why (white) women aren’t having more babies. The event was so unserious that it could’ve been an SNL skit, and at the same time it epitomized the whole pathology of this administration—which, to be fair, certainly might be affecting people’s will to reproduce.
‘Father of Fertility’
Trump opened the presser in front of a row of smiling zombie women led by Sen. Katie Britt, the Alabama Republican infamous for delivering that strange State of the Union rebuttal in whispers from her kitchen. Its purpose was to propose a new rule aimed at making it easier for employers to choose to offer some IVF coverage among other health insurance benefits, which falls well short of Trump’s campaign promise to make IVF free for all.
Looking bored and agitated at his desk, Trump declared himself “father of fertility”—a topic he says he learned about in “three to four minutes”—and then told the women behind him to make it quick because he had other things to do. “You’ll speak not too long because I am being waited on by a large group of generals,” he said. “That’s also important. Having to do with the absolutely country of ‘I-run.’ That’s the way they pronounce it.” Britt had to interrupt him to get the presser back on topic, and as she glazed him about his leadership, he winked and raised his eyebrows at onlookers and occasionally appeared to doze off.
‘Under-babied’ women
On Dr. Oz’s turn to speak (he’s somehow in charge of Medicare), he lamented that one in three Americans are “under-babied.”
“What does under-babied mean?” Oz explained. “It means that either you don’t have any children or you have less children than you would normally want to have. And to Katie’s point, we have a crisis that’s causing our fertility rate to drop below 1.5. The replacement rate is 2.1, so we’re way below what we need just to replace the people we have in America.”
The numbers Oz chose to cite here are telling, as June Sternbach noted, because they only refer to the white replacement rate in America. The overall U.S. replacement rate in 2025 was 1.79, and the rate for just white people was 1.5. He’s basically echoing neo-Nazi Elon Musk, who tweets constantly about the “Great Replacement” theory, or the fear that the white race is being replaced by Black and brown immigrants. (FWIW, in the Margaret Atwood novel, low fertility rates are offered as the justification for why Gilead was created in the first place, and Atwood’s Gilead was explicitly white supremacist.)
Oz added that the goal of this fertility initiative is “more Trump babies.”
RFK Jr. on teen boy sperm count
We also learned that Health Secretary Bobby Kennedy is taking a break from slicing off raccoon penises and chugging raw milk to turn his attention to the sperm count of young boys. “In 1970, men had twice the sperm count that our teenage boys have today,” he lamented.
You’ll be surprised to learn that that statistic is kinda bullshit and based on some cherry-picked scientific studies that can’t be applied very broadly. But, to the extent that men’s sperm count and quality are declining in specific geographical areas, we know they are caused by environmental factors that the Trump Administration is actively making worse by destroying the Environmental Protection Agency: air and water pollution, pesticides, microplastics, global warming, BPA. Toxins plus climate harms are likely hurting both men’s and women’s fertility, and the MAHA movement was a hypocritical scam that only enabled Trump to further sacrifice our environment and natural resources to corporate greed.
Other reasons women might be less inclined to have a baby right now:
Women are quite literally dying of miscarriages under the Trump administration because doctors in states with harsh abortion laws won’t treat them even in the worst health emergencies if their fetus still has a heartbeat.
Major American companies are cutting paid family leave and reducing support for working parents because the job market is so bad that there’s less competition for employees.
The cost of groceries and gas right now is insane and getting worse, and we’re facing a global recession on top of that.
Every day we’re hit with a new terrifying headline about the Atlantic ocean current collapsing within the century, or New Orleans being underwater within decades, or the world running out of fresh water and people having to duke it out for basic resources—and the current administration’s answer to that is to deny that any of it is happening and implement policies that only speed up the damage.
Instead of listening to women about anything that we actually want, men are inflating their balls with Surgilube and saline injections to try to make themselves more sexually attractive.
Some women just don’t want them, and that’s fine!
Republicans are trying to ban sending abortion pills by mail while legalizing sending handguns by mail, despite guns being the leading cause of death of children in the US.
The women trying to pressure other women to procreate, like Stephen Miller’s wife, literally had to have sex with a white supremacist vampire to do this???
Most women don’t want to be farmed like livestock, and today’s press conference started to make me feel a little bit like a goat. If this administration wants more babies, they should really start by giving a shit whether women live or die, and then maybe work up to understanding what kind of world people might want to bring a child into.
Wow - it sounds like Gilead. Truly frightening. As always, thank you Laura!