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      The rise of pronatalism: why Musk, Vance and the right want women to have more babies

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      In his first address to the United States after becoming vice-president, JD Vance stood on stage and proclaimed: “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Weeks later, Donald Trump signed an executive order pledging support for in vitro fertilization, recognizing “the importance of family formation and that our nation’s public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children”.In late January, a Department of Transportation memo directed the agency to prioritize projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. And last week, it was reported that Elon Musk, the unelected head of the government-demolishing “department of governmental efficiency” and a man who has said that the “collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far”, had become a father of 14.Republicans have long heralded the importance of “family values”. But in these developments, many see mounting signs of a controversial ideology at work: pronatalism.Pronatalism is so contentious that people often struggle to agree on a definition. Pronatalism could be defined as the belief that having children is good. It could also be defined as the belief that having children is important to the greater good and that people should have babies on behalf of the state, because declining birth rates are a threat to its future. Perhaps most importantly, pronatalism could be defined as the belief that government policy should incentivize people to give birth.While people on the left might agree with some pronatalist priorities, pronatalism in the US is today ascendant on the right. It has become a key ideological plank in the bridge between tech bro rightwingers like Musk and more traditional, religious conservatives, like the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson – who once said in a House hearing that abortions were harming the economy by eliminating would-be workers.But there are plenty of widening cracks in that bridge and, by extension, Trump’s incoherent coalition.‘Hipster eugenicists’In the US, interest in pronatalism has historically coincided with growing anxiety over changing gender norms and demographics, according to Laura Lovett, a University of Pittsburgh history professor and the author of the book Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1930. In the 1920s, pronatalism’s prominence grew after women gained the right to vote, as people worried about women working and wielding power outside the home.“When Theodore Roosevelt uses the term ‘race suicide’, he actually blames women who are going to college for the first time for that eventual suicide of the right, white race. There’s this linkage between women’s educational and aspirational futures and the declining birth rate,” Lovett said. “There was this anxiety that white, native-born, middle-class women were having smaller families.”Historically, US pronatalism was also tied to an interest in eugenics – and some of the more tech-minded, modern-day pronatalists do want to use breeding to fashion a better human race. Malcolm and Simone Collins, parents of four who have become standard-bearers for the burgeoning popularity of pronatalism among Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have championed “no-holds-barred” medical research to engineer the “mass production of genetically selected humans”. They have joked to Business Insider about making business cards declaring themselves “hipster eugenicists” – although they have also rejected the idea that they are performing eugenics, stressing that they think racism is “so dumb” and that the only bloodlines they are altering are their own.The Collinses, who support Trump, have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on in vitro fertilization (IVF) and screening their embryos for IQ, risk of depression and other markers. (Scientists aren’t convinced that it is possible to screen embryos for IQ.) These kinds of practices – which the Collins have called “polygenics” – draw a wedge between the Silicon Valley pronatalists who back Trump and his more traditional pronatalist supporters. The anti-abortion movement, which was critical to getting Trump elected in 2016, has long opposed IVF, largely because it can lead to unused or discarded embryos.In signing his pro-IVF executive order, Trump appears to be siding with the “tech right” (and the broader electorate, among which IVF remains extremely popular). When Musk recently brought his son X Æ A-Xii to the Oval Office, Trump called the four-year-old a “high-IQ individual”.View image in fullscreen‘Restructuring society’While the Collinses are avatars for the emerging pronatalist tech right, Lyman Stone is one of the highest-profile pronatalists from a more traditionally conservative background.“Pronatalism has to be disciplined by a commitment to human liberty and human flourishing – and this is coming out of work on reproductive justice, basically. People have a right to have the families they want to have, and for some people, that means no family,” said Stone, a demographer who in 2024 established the Pronatalism Initiative at the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies. “The focus of pronatalism, in my view, generally is not and certainly should not be on family gigantism, and instead should be on helping young people overcome the barriers and obstacles to romantic and family success in their life.”In practice, Stone said, pronatalists should help people get married earlier in life so that they can start having children younger. That could mean, he said, everything from improving mental health services to creating better childcare programs. Stone’s frequent collaborator, Brad Wilcox – a University of Virginia sociology professor and author of the book Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization – pointed to several policies that he thinks would help strengthen “family formation”, such as expanding the child tax credit and converting federal land into affordable housing.“Pronatalism is not just a fiscal program. It’s a program of restructuring society in a way that treats family goals as worthy, worth supporting and socially important,” Stone said.Asked if he supports abortion rights, Stone clarified: “No, I would draw the line at destruction of human life.”Many of these policy proposals could comfortably fit into a left-leaning political platform – in fact, they may be more at home on such a platform than within today’s Republican party. Although Vance said on the campaign trail that he would like to expand the child tax credit, a move that could cost trillions of dollars in federal spending, Republicans have instead committed to slashing the government budget by at least $1.5tn.Instead, elected Republicans have tended to invoke pronatalist rhetoric in support of their top culture-war causes.They have repeatedly condemned gender-affirming healthcare for allegedly “sterilizing” people; in 2022, as Idaho weighed whether to ban kids from accessing the care, one Republican state legislator said: “We are not talking about the life of the child, but we are talking about the potential to give life to another generation.” When a Republican lawmaker from Michigan introduced a resolution to condemn same-sex marriage, he told reporters: “This is a biological necessity to preserve and grow our human race.” And last year, in a lawsuit to cut access to a common abortion pill, the Republican attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri argued that access to the pill had “lowered birth rates for teen mothers”, leading to a falling state populations, “diminishment of political representation and loss of federal funds”.In practice, pronatalism – especially when paired with anti-abortion policy – often overlooks the disproportionate effect that having more babies has on women, according to Elizabeth Gregory, director of women’s gender and sexuality studies at the University of Houston. Childbearing can reshape a woman’s entire future.“This idea that the child is the only person in the dyad loses a real understanding of how embedded and dependent children are on their mothers,” Gregory said. “Fertility affects many, many parts of culture and talking about it can’t be reduced to just a few soundbites.”Falling birth ratesBirth rates are, indeed, on the decline. To remain stable, populations must reproduce at a “replacement rate” of 2.1; in other words, each mother must have 2.1 babies. The US currently averages closer to 1.6. (South Korea, which maintains the world’s lowest fertility rate, had a rate of just 0.75 in 2024.)Experts are split over how to address this problem. The world’s population is at a record high, and immigration to rich countries could offset declines in fertility – but, as the medical journal the Lancet warned in a 2024 issue, “this approach will only work if there is a shift in current public and political attitudes towards immigration in many lower-fertility countries”. If countries remain hostile to immigration while their birth rates fall, they will probably end up with a shrunken labor force that is unable to support an ageing population.There is evidence that Americans would like to have more children. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 47% of Americans think an ideal family has one or two children, while only 2% said families should have zero. At the same time, a Pew poll that same year found that 47% of American adults under 50 say they are unlikely to ever have children. Of those, nearly 60% say they just don’t want kids. Nearly 40% said they couldn’t afford to have kids or that the “state of the world” had convinced them not to.“We’re living in a moment where – I would say, unfortunately – marriage and parenthood have become ideologically polarized,” Wilcox said. More

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      The pink protest at Trump’s speech shows the Democrats aren’t coming to save us

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      Pretty (pathetic) in pinkHappy International Women’s Day (IWD), everyone! I’ve got some good news and some bad news to mark the occasion.The bad news is that a legally defined sexual predator is leading the most powerful country on earth and we’re seeing a global backlash against women’s rights. “[I]nstead of mainstreaming equal rights, we are seeing the mainstreaming of misogyny,” the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, said in his IWD message.The good news, for those of us in the US at least, is that the Democrats have a plan to deal with all this. Or rather, they have wardrobe concepts of a plan. On Tuesday night, Donald Trump addressed a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol. Some members from the Democratic Women’s Caucus (DWC), including Nancy Pelosi, decided to protest by … wait for it … wearing pink.“Pink is a color of power and protest,” the New Mexico representative Teresa Leger Fernández, chair of the DWC, told Time. “It’s time to rev up the opposition and come at Trump loud and clear.”The pink outfits may have been loud but the message the Democrats were sending was far from clear. They couldn’t even coordinate their colour-coordinating protest: some lawmakers turned up wearing pink while others wore blue and yellow to support Ukraine and others wore black because it was a somber occasion.Still, I’ll give the DWC their due: their embarrassing stunt seems to have garnered at least one – possibly two – fans. One MSNBC columnist, for example, wrote that the “embrace of such a traditionally feminine color [pink] by women with considerable political power makes a stunning example of subversive dressing”.For the most part, however, the general reaction appears to have been that this was yet another stunning example of how spineless and performative the Democrats are. Forget bringing a knife to a gunfight – these people are bringing pink blazers to a fight for democracy. To be fair, there were a few other attempts at protest beyond a pink palette: the Texas representative Al Green heckled the president (and was later censured by some of his colleagues for doing so) and a few Democrats left the room during Trump’s speech. Still, if this is the “opposition”, then we are all doomed.Not to mention: even the pink blazers seemed a little too extreme for certain factions of the Democratic party. House Democratic leadership reportedly urged members not to mount protests and to show restraint during Trump’s address. They also chose the Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin to give the Democratic response to Trump’s speech. While Slotkin tends to be described as a sensible centrist voice by a lot of the media, she’s very Trump-adjacent. Slotkin is one of the Democratic senators who has voted with Trump the most often and, last June, was one of the 42 Democrats to vote with the GOP to sanction the international criminal court (ICC) over its seeking of arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders for destroying Gaza. Human rights advocacy groups have warned that attacking the ICC like this undermines international law and the ability to prosecute or prevent human rights violations across the world. It speaks volumes about the US media and political class that a senator standing against international law can be called a centrist.This whole episode also speaks volumes about the Democrats’ plan for the future: it’s growing increasingly clear that, instead of actually growing a spine and fighting to improve people’s lives, the Democratic party seems to think the smartest thing to do is quietly move to the right and do nothing while the Trump administration implodes. I won’t caution against this strategy myself. Instead, I’ll let Harry Truman do it. Back in 1952, Truman said: “The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time.”Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that the Democrats are not coming to save us. We must save ourselves. That means organizing within our local communities and learning lessons from activists outside our communities. It means being careful not to normalize creeping authoritarianism and it means recognizing the urgency of the moment. The warning signs are flashing red: we need to respond with a hell of a lot more than a pink wardrobe.Make atomic bombings straight again!DEI Derangement Syndrome has reached such a fever-pitch in the US that a picture of the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan has been flagged for deletion at the Pentagon. Apparently, it only got the job because it was Gay.Can a clitoris be trained to read braille?The Vagina Museum addressed this very important question on Bluesky.One in eight women killed by men in the UK are over 70A landmark report by the Femicide Census looks at the deaths of 2,000 women killed by men in the UK over the last 15 years and found that the abuse of older women hasn’t had as much attention as it should. “We have to ask why we see the use of sexual and sustained violence against elderly women who are unknown to the much younger men who kill them,” the co-founder of the Femicide Census told the Guardian. “The misogynistic intent in these killings is clear.”Bacterial vaginosis (BV) may be sexually transmitted, research findsWhile this new study is small, its findings are a big deal because BV is super common – affecting up to a third of reproductive-aged women – and has long been considered as a “woman’s issue”. Treating a male partner for it, however, may reduce its recurrence.How astronaut Amanda Nguyen survived rape to fight for other victimsAfter being assaulted at age 22, Nguyen got a hospital bill for $4,863.79 for her rape kit and all the tests and medication that went along with it. She was also informed that it was standard practice for her rape kit to be destroyed after six months. “The statute of limitations is 15 years because it recognises that trauma takes time to process,” Nguyen told the Guardian in an interview. “It allows a victim to revisit that justice. But destroying the rape kit after six months prevents a survivor from being able to access vital evidence.” After her traumatic experience, Nguyen successfully fought for the right not to have your rape kit destroyed until the statute of limitations has expired, and the right not to have to pay for it to be carried out.Female doctors outnumber male peers in UK for first timeIt’s a significant milestone in what has traditionally been a male-dominated profession.There’s an Israeli TikTok trend mocking the suffering of Palestinian childrenThis is one of those things that would be front page of the New York Times if it were directed at Israelis but is getting relatively little attention because of how normalized the dehumanization of Palestinians is. It’s also just the latest in a series of social media trends mocking Palestinian suffering.Florida opens criminal investigation into Tate brothers“These guys have themselves publicly admitted to participating in what very much appears to be soliciting, trafficking, preying upon women around the world,” the state attorney general said.The week in pawtriarchyJane Fonda, a committed activist, has always fought the good fight. But she’s also apparently fought wildlife. The actor’s son recently told a Netflix podcast that Fonda once “pushed a bear out of her bedroom”. While that phrase may mean different things to different people, in this instance it was quite literal. Fonda apparently scared off a bear who had entered her grandson’s room and was sniffing the crib. Too bad nobody was there to snap a photo of the escapade – it would have been a real Kodiak moment. More

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      Even rightwingers are mocking the ‘Epstein files’ as a lot of redacted nothing

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      The Epstein files fiascoDrum roll, please: the “most transparent administration in American history” is declassifying shocking new information about Jeffrey Epstein and his associates. After years of speculation that powerful people have been concealing information related to the late financier and convicted sex offender, the Trump administration said earlier this week that it would release unseen details about the case.“Breaking news right now, you’re going to see some Epstein information being released by my office,” Pam Bondi, the attorney general, told Fox News on Wednesday night. “This will make you sick.”Apparently intent on treating this “new” Epstein information like an album drop rather than a horrific sex-trafficking case involving the abuse of young girls, the White House gave a bunch of influencers a first look at the information. On Thursday, Bondi’s team handed out big white binders labelled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” and “The Most Transparent Administration in History” to a group of 15 rightwing activists and self-styled “citizen journalists” visiting the White House. Grinning gleefully, these influencers proceeded to pose for the press with the binders like they were trophies from a school sports day.So what was in those binders? A whole lot of heavily redacted nothing, basically. A bunch of people at Bondi’s office appear to have hastily printed out Epstein’s contact book, which was published by the (now shuttered) website Gawker a decade ago, along with other information that has been in the public domain for years. They then shoved 200 pages of printouts into binders and gave them to a handpicked collection of useful idiots. Being as they’re the most transparent administration in American history, the justice department also made the information available on its website later that day – along with a note acknowledging that there wasn’t actually much to see. “The first phase of declassified files largely contains documents that have been previously leaked but never released in a formal capacity by the U.S. Government,” the note said.“This isn’t a news story, it’s a publicity stunt,” the Palm Beach lawyer Spencer Kuvin, who has worked on the case since 2005, representing nine victims, told the Miami Herald. He added that he feared that the Trump administration was using Epstein’s victims for political purposes. But then what do you expect from Trump – a guy who, in 2002 said of Epstein: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It’s even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do. And many of them are on the younger side.”In short, this whole big “reveal” was an embarrassing flop – so much so that it was mocked by people on the right. Even Laura Loomer, a white nationalist conspiracy theorist, thought the stunt was distasteful.“I hate to say it, but the American people can’t trust the validity of the Epstein files released today. It was released in an unprofessional manner with paid, partisan social media influencers to curate their binders for us,” Loomer tweeted on Thursday. She later added: “Sorry I won’t celebrate dancing like a school girl with a binder full of pedophile names.” When even Loomer thinks you’ve gone low, you’ve gone very low indeed.Ultimately, however, while nothing new may have been revealed in Bondi’s “Epstein files”, this grotesque stunt was very revealing. It was yet another reminder that there is nothing – not even the sex trafficking of minors – that Donald Trump and his associates won’t cynically turn into a self-serving photo opportunity. Or, I should add, an opportunity to “Rickroll” people: midday Thursday, while people were waiting for the documents to be published online, the House judiciary GOP account on X posted in all-caps: “#BREAKING: EPSTEIN FILES RELEASED.” This then redirected users to the YouTube music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up. Classy.Also revealing was who the White House thought should get a first look at documents involving sex trafficking. Among the influencers assembled was Mike Cernovich. Who is he? Just a rightwing manosphere influencer who has said things like “rape via an alpha male is different from other forms of rape” and told men that women exist “for your sexual pleasure”.The reaction to the backlash over the Epstein files fiasco also shows how, when anything goes wrong, people in Trump’s orbit are quick to point fingers and turn on each other rather than take responsibility. Bondi, for example, responded to all the criticism by accusing the FBI of withholding information from her. Meanwhile, some of the conservative influencers who got the binders full of nothing accused the southern district of New York of hiding information.“These swamp creatures at SDNY deceived Bondi, Kash, and YOU,” the conservative media personality Liz Wheeler tweeted. “Be outraged that the binder is boring. You should be. Because the evil deep state LIED TO YOUR FACE.”Perhaps what is most revealing about this fiasco, however, is that it is a stark reminder of how justice still hasn’t been served when it comes to Epstein’s many victims. Apart from Ghislaine Maxwell, none of Epstein’s many enablers and associates have faced any real consequences. A lot of rich and powerful people have got away with disgraceful things. And that’s not a conspiracy theory; that’s just our legal system.Andrew Tate and brother land in US from Romania after travel ban liftedSpeaking of predators evading accountability, the Tate brothers, who are charged with human trafficking in Romania, landed in the US on Thursday. This comes after it was reported last week that the Trump administration had asked Romanian authorities to lift travel restrictions on the pair.View image in fullscreen‘Pro-lifers’ are demanding women face the death penaltySelf-described “abortion abolitionists” – who oppose all abortions without any exceptions and want to criminalize the procedure and ban IVF – used to be at the fringes of the anti-abortion movement. Now, people who believe that the death penalty should be considered for women who have abortions are slowly moving into the US mainstream. Mother Jones looks at how some of these abolitionist men have turned on women in the anti-abortion movement. “We need Christian men leading the fight against abortion, not feminist women,” one of those “TheoBros” recently wrote.At least six children die of hypothermia amid freezing conditions in GazaI haven’t heard any pro-lifers get upset about this.Jeff Bezos is sending Katy Perry to spaceLast year, Perry came out with Woman’s World, her first solo single in three years and, she said, “the first contribution I have given since becoming a mother and since feeling really connected to my feminine divine”. Unfortunately, her contribution was panned so mercilessly that Perry is now taking her feminine divine as far away from the world as possible: the singer will fly to space during Blue Origin’s next (all-female) crewed mission, the Jeff Bezos-owned space company has announced. Rumour has it that if you work at the Washington Post and have any opinions that have the temerity to clash with Bezos’s, then you’ll get shot into space, too.The pill hasn’t been improved in years – no wonder women are giving up on itMisinformation from wellness influencers along with a conservative backlash against birth control is causing more people to stop taking the pill. “But there’s another, underlying problem when it comes to contraception,” writes Martha Gill. “It needs to improve … It’s common for women to be using the same methods as their mothers – or even their grandmothers. Why aren’t contraceptives getting better?”The week in porktriarchyBig news for anyone with a small child: Peppa Pig’s mother (Mummy Pig) is having a new little piglet. Not sure how they can afford three children in this day and age but maybe Mummy Pig has been trading meme coins. While I’m sure Elon “have more babies” Musk is thrilled by the baby announcement, it is not clear how Cardi B feels. The rapper has been in a feud with Peppa since 2020, ever since her daughter started ruining her Uggs by jumping in muddy puddles. More

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      A soccer ball, a T-shirt: teachers scramble to say goodbye to students fleeing under Trump

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      A soccer ball covered in signatures from classmates. A handwritten letter telling a child of their worth. A T-shirt bearing a school emblem meant to remind a newcomer how much they were loved in a place they once called home.These are among the items teachers have given their multilingual learners – students who learn in more than one language – whose families fled their school districts rather than risk being detained by immigration agents.“One of my students told me last week that their family had decided to go back to Brazil because they were afraid of deportation,” said Philadelphia teacher Joanna Schwartz. “It was his last day here. I scrounged up a T-shirt with our school’s logo on it and a permanent marker and my student had all of his friends and teachers sign it.”She said she taught the fifth-grader for three years.“It’s nothing big, but it was a treasure to him to have the physical signatures of his dearest friends and teachers to take with him,” she said.Some immigrant students wrestling with the fear of deportation leave school with no warning. Other times, they give their teachers just a few hours’ notice to process the loss of a relationship that might have lasted for years.Such scenes are unfolding throughout the country as the Trump administration ratchets up immigration arrests and removals and opens schools to enforcement actions, striking terror in the hearts of undocumented people and their advocates.Faced with the fallout, teachers who have spent their entire careers advocating for immigrant students – fighting battles even within their own districts to ensure students have a robust education – are left fumbling for the right words to say or gift to give a child under extreme stress.Schwartz, who teaches multilingual learners in Philadelphia, uses her prior training as a therapist to help kids through these toughest of moments.She said she often gives children who are leaving “transitional objects”, something tangible to help them feel connected to their friends in the United States.View image in fullscreenSchwartz wrote her departing student a letter in which she “reminded him of his many strengths and told him how much he will be missed”, she said. She added drawings, stickers and her email address.Areli Rodriguez was devastated when, last winter, during her first year of teaching in Texas, one of her most promising and devoted young students left for another state. The boy’s family had been growing wary of the anti-immigrant policies of the governor, Greg Abbott, and headed to Oklahoma, where they hoped they’d be safer.“He was my first student who left for this reason,” Rodriguez said of the fifth-grader who had arrived in the United States from Mexico less than a year earlier. “It just broke my heart.”The family didn’t know Oklahoma would propose some of the harshest immigration restrictions in the nation, including a plan, just this week rejected by the governor, to require parents to report their own immigration status when enrolling their kids in school.Rodriguez is not sure where the child is today. As a parting gift, she gave him a soccer ball signed by all of his classmates.Moments before he left, the boy, who had been chosen as student of the week when he departed, led the class in a call-and-response chant by Rita F Pierson that the class had previously learned:I am somebody.I was somebody when I came.I’ll be a better somebody when I leave.I am powerful, and I am strong.… I have things to do, people to impress and places to go.The boy left his teacher one of his favorite toys, a Rubik’s Cube.In a diary entry, he wrote to Rodriguez and another beloved teacher: “To say goodbye to all of you, Ms Rodriguez and Ms [S], I want to tell you that you are my favorite teachers, and I’m sorry for any trouble I may have caused. Maybe I wasn’t the best student, but I am proud of myself for learning so much.”“I think about him all the time,” Rodriguez said, adding that he embodies what she loves most about multilingual learners. “For him, school was a gift, an opportunity, a privilege. He just worked so hard … His parents were so supportive – they looked at education as something they wanted to seize.”The Department of Homeland Security is urging undocumented people to leave the country immediately. This isn’t entirely new: Joe Biden deported some 4 million people in a single term, double that of Trump’s first four years in office. But many of those he turned away had been newly arrived at the border. Unlike Trump, Biden shied away from raids.Trump has also signed an executive order aimed at ending federal benefits for undocumented people. It’s unclear how this might affect education: schools receive federal money, particularly to help support children from low-income households, but they also cannot turn away students based on their immigration status, according to the 1982 supreme court decision Plyler v Doe.That landmark ruling, however, is under attack by conservative forces, most recently in Tennessee, where lawmakers this month introduced a bill saying schools can deny enrollment to undocumented students. The sponsors say it’s their intention to challenge Plyler.‘We hugged long and hard’Educators are also preparing more practical gifts meant to help children resume their educations elsewhere.Genoveva Winkler, the regional migrant education program coordinator in Idaho’s Nampa school district, said she’s given more than 100 immigrant families, who may have to suddenly return to their home countries, copies of their students’ transcripts in English and Spanish, along with textbooks supplied by the Mexican consulate to improve their Spanish.Indianapolis teacher Amy Halsall said four children from the same family, ranging in ages from 7 to 12, left her school system right after inauguration day, headed back to Mexico.View image in fullscreen“They didn’t specifically say that it was immigration related, but I would guess it was,” Halsall said. “This is a family that we have had in our school since their sixth-grader was in first grade. The kids were really upset that they had to leave.”The youngest and the eldest had told Halsall they wanted to be ESL (English as a second language) teachers when they grew up, she said. The two middle children hoped to become mechanics and one day open their own shop. Halsall gave them a notebook full of letters written by fellow students and pictures of their classmates.“We hugged long and hard. I told them if they ever came back to Indianapolis that they should call us or visit,” she said. “I told them if I was ever in Mexico, I would call them. I tried hard to keep things positive, but it was hard for all of us. Everyone had tears in their eyes.”The anxiety continues, Halsall said. Just last week, another child, age 8, told her he worried that “la migra” – ICE agents – would take his mother away while he was out.“I told him that he was safe at school and if he got home and no one was there to call me,” she said.Another teacher, in Virginia, said she has had two students leave school so far this academic year. One hailed from Guatemala and the other from Mexico. Both were in their mid-teens and had impeccable attendance, she said.Their teacher did not have a chance to say goodbye in either case. Their departure, she said, left her feeling “completely empty”.“I’ve loved watching them integrate in our school and seeing how they realized they can have this pathway [to further their education] if they choose,” she said. “Watching that choice ripped away by fear is devastating.”

      This story was produced by the 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in the US More

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      Climate researchers should play the Trump card | Brief letters

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      The obvious solution to American researchers having grants withdrawn for projects containing the word “climate” (Outcry as Trump withdraws support for research that mentions ‘climate’, 21 February) is to rename climate heating “Trump”. We could be amazed that “Trump makes seas rise”, “Trump makes Greenland a green land again” and “Trump makes summer warmer and longer”. Who would oppose that?Mark DavisFrome, Somerset My friend always said that you should never leave a small child and a dog of any size together as it is equivalent to leaving two toddlers together and giving one of them a pair of sharp scissors (The rise of the cane corso: should this popular status dog be banned in the UK?, 19 February).Vanessa RickettGreat Missenden, Buckinghamshire Aged 14, I received an otherwise good school report (Letters, 20 February) that included an observation made by Mrs Tinlin, my art teacher: “Steven is too easily satisfied by a mediocre standard of work.” Her acid comment provided me with the lifelong motivation to pursue a scientific career.Prof Steve ArmesUniversity of Sheffield When I worked in mainstream schools, pupils’ feedback on their teachers was all the rage. One favourite comment: “I hate RE with Mr Grieve as he occasionally manages to teach me something.” Ian GrieveGordon Bennett, Llangollen canal Re the Duchess of Sussex’s latest rebranding effort “As Ever” (Emma Brockes, 19 February), I couldn’t help feeling it was a little too close to “Whatever”.Sarah HallLeamington Spa, Warwickshire More

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      Elon Musk keeps bringing his kids to work – and the reasons aren’t cute at all | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Welcome to the White House, where every day seems to be bring-your-kid-to-work-day if you’re Elon Musk. The tech billionaire, fascist-salute-enthusiast, and de facto president of the US hasn’t just moved himself into government digs – he has seemingly moved in a selection of his kids as well. Over the last couple of weeks, mini-Musks have been popping up at high-profile political events, generating a steady stream of memes, headlines and analysis.Three of Musk’s young children were at a meeting with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi last Thursday, for example. Why were Musk and Modi meeting? Good question. Even Trump doesn’t seem to know, but told reporters he assumed Musk “wants to do business in India”. Which, considering Musk has burrowed his way deep into the US government, sounds a teeny bit like a conflict of interest. But let’s not focus on that, eh? Let’s focus on Musk’s parenting instead! Don’t ask any difficult questions, just look at the cute pictures – disseminated widely – of Modi showering Musk’s kids with gifts. Adorbs.Musk’s four-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii (often called “X”), is something of a seasoned statesman now. Just a few days before the Modi meeting, X joined Musk and Trump for a press conference in the Oval Office. While Musk rambled about democracy and walked back a despicable lie about $50 million’s worth of condoms going to Gaza, X looked as if he would rather watch Paw Patrol. At one point he appeared to say – perhaps to Trump – “I want you to shush your mouth”. (Where did he hear that, one wonders?) And, at another point, X (who Musk once described as his “emotional support human”) seemed to pick his nose and then wipe the results on Trump’s desk. The nose-picking is very normal for a little kid. The standing by the president of the US, while your dad, who seems to think he is king of the world, makes outlandish claims? Not so much.Musk’s recent spate of in-your-face parenting has divided public opinion. His acolytes seem to think it’s super-cute and a sign that the billionaire isn’t just the saviour of America and human civilisation, but also the world’s best dad – gallantly putting his pronatalist views into practice. Other people (normal people) seem to think it’s a cynical and exploitative PR strategy designed to humanise Musk and distract from all his meddling in democracy. After all, having a kid on your shoulders makes you seem less like a robber baron with a weird breeding fetish and more like a fun dad.No prizes for guessing which camp I’m in: I don’t think there is anything cute about Musk parading his poor children in front of the cameras. Rather, it feels completely self-serving. Bringing your kids to work so you can spend more time with them amid your busy schedule is one thing. Carrying them around like props for photo opportunities, as Musk seems to be doing, is quite another.To be clear: I’m not saying politicians should always keep their kids hidden away. Having leaders parent in public can send a powerful message. In 2018, for example, the former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern became the first world leader to attend the UN general assembly meeting with her baby in tow. Ardern was broadly praised for showing people that a woman can be a mother and a leader.What Musk is doing, however, feels very different. Not least because Grimes, who has three children with Musk, including X, has said multiple times that her young son “should not be in public like this” (or variations on the theme). Grimes also claimed she didn’t see one of her kids for five months while she and Musk were engaged in a battle for parenting rights and said her own “Instagram posts and modelling” were weaponised as reasons she shouldn’t have care of her children. Last year, Grimes’s mother similarly accused Musk of withholding her grandchildren’s passports so they couldn’t visit their dying great-grandmother. There are plenty of phrases that seem to describe what Musk is doing here and “dad of the year” is not one of them.Anyway, I have to wrap this up now because I brought my kid to work today, too. That’s not for PR points, to be clear. It’s because I work in the living room and the child is off school. She hasn’t been wiping her nose on my desk but she has put Play-Doh in my socks. More

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      Parents are desperate to protect kids on social media. Why did the US let a safety bill die?

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      When Congress adjourned for the holidays in December, a landmark bill meant to overhaul how tech companies protect their youngest users had officially failed to pass. Introduced in 2022, the Kids Online Safety act (Kosa) was meant to be a huge reckoning for big tech. Instead, despite sailing through the Senate with a 91-to-3 vote in July, the bill languished and died in the House.Kosa had been passionately championed by families who said their children had fallen victim to the harmful policies of social media platforms and advocates who said a bill reining in the unchecked power of big tech was long overdue. They are bitterly disappointed that a strong chance to check big tech failed because of congressional apathy. But human rights organizations had argued that the legislation could have led to unintended consequences affecting freedom of speech online.What is the Kids Online Safety act?Kosa was introduced nearly three years ago in the aftermath of bombshell revelations by the former Facebook employee Frances Haugen about the scope and severity of social media platforms’ effects on young users. It would have mandated that platforms like Instagram and TikTok address online dangers affecting children through design changes and allowing young users to opt out of algorithmic recommendations.“This is a basic product-liability bill,” said Alix Fraser, director of Issue One’s Council for Responsible Social Media. “It’s complicated, because the internet is complicated and social media is complicated, but it is essentially just an effort to create a basic product-liability standard for these companies.”A central – and controversial – component of the bill was its “duty of care” clause, which declared that companies have “a duty to act in the best interests of minors using their platforms” and would be open to interpretation by regulators. It also would have required that platforms implement measures to reduce harm by establishing “safeguards for minors”.Critics argued that a lack of clear guidance on what constitutes harmful content might prompt companies to filter content more aggressively, leading to unintended consequences for freedom of speech. Sensitive but important topics such as gun violence and racial justice could be viewed as potentially harmful and subsequently be filtered out by the companies themselves. These censorship concerns were particularly pronounced for the LGBTQ+ community, which, opponents of Kosa said, could be disproportionately affected by conservative regulators, reducing access to vital resources.“With Kosa, we saw a really well-intentioned but ultimately vague bill requiring online services to take unspecified action to keep kids safe, which was going to lead to several bad outcomes for children, and all marginalized users,” said Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, which opposed the legislation and which receives money from tech donors including Amazon, Google and Microsoft.Kosa’s complicated historyWhen the bill was first introduced, more than 90 human rights organizations signed a letter in opposition, underscoring these and other concerns. In response to such criticism, the bill’s authors issued revisions in February 2024 – most notably, shifting the enforcement of its “duty of care” provision from state attorneys general to the Federal Trade Commission. Following these changes, a number of organizations including Glaad, the Human Rights Campaign and the Trevor Project withdrew opposition, stating that the revisions “significantly mitigate the risk of [Kosa] being misused to suppress LGBTQ+ resources or stifle young people’s access to online communities”.But other civil rights groups maintained their opposition, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the ACLU and Fight for the Future, calling Kosa a “censorship bill” that would harm vulnerable users and freedom of speech at large. They argued the duty-of-care provision could just as easily be weaponized by a conservative FTC chair against LGBTQ+ youth as by state attorneys general. These concerns have been reflected in Trump’s FTC chair appointment of the Republican Andrew Ferguson, who said in leaked statements he planned to use his role to “fight back against the trans agenda”.Concerns around how Ferguson will manage online content is “exactly what LGBTQ youth in this fight have written and called Congress about hundreds of times over the last couple of years”, said Sarah Philips of Fight for the Future. “The situation that they were fearful of has come to fruition, and anyone ignoring that is really just putting their heads in the sand.”Opponents say that even with Kosa’s failure to pass, a chilling effect has already materialized with regards to what content is available on certain platforms. A recent report in User Mag found that hashtags for LGBTQ+-related topics were being categorized as “sensitive content” and restricted from search. Legislation like Kosa does not take into account the complexities of the online landscape, said Bhatia, of the Center for Democracy and Technology, and is likely to lead platforms to pre-emptively censor content to avoid litigation.“Children’s safety occupies an interesting paradoxical positioning in tech policy, where at once children are vulnerable actors on the internet, but also at the same time benefit greatly from the internet,” she said. “Using the blunt instrument of policy to protect them can often lead to outcomes that don’t really take this into account.”Proponents attribute the backlash to Kosa to aggressive lobbying from the tech industry, though two of the top opponents – Fight for the Future and EFF – are not supported by large tech donors. Meanwhile, major tech companies are split on Kosa, with X, Snap, Microsoft and Pinterest outwardly supporting the bill and Meta and Google quietly opposing it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Kosa was an extremely robust piece of legislation, but what is more robust is the power of big tech,” Fraser said, of Issue One. “They hired every lobbyist in town to take it down, and they were successful in that.”Fraser added that advocates were disappointed in Kosa failing to pass but “won’t rest until federal legislation is passed to protect kids online and the tech sector is held accountable for its actions”.Kosa’s potential revivalAside from Ferguson as FTC chair, it is unclear what exactly the new Trump administration and the shifting makeup of Congress mean for the future of Kosa. Though Trump has not directly indicated his views on Kosa, several people in his close circle have expressed support following last-minute amendments to the bill in 2024 facilitated by Elon Musk’s X.The congressional death of Kosa may seem like the end of a winding and controversial path, but advocates on both sides of the fight say it’s too soon to write the legislation’s obituary.“We should not expect Kosa to disappear quietly,” said Prem M Trivedi, policy director at the Open Technology Institute, which opposes Kosa. “Whether we are going to see it introduced again or different incarnations of it, more broadly the focus on kid’s online safety is going to continue.”Richard Blumenthal, the senator who co-authored the bill with Senator Marsha Blackburn, has promised to reintroduce it in the upcoming congressional session, and other advocates for the bill also say they will not give up.“I’ve worked with a lot of these parents who have been willing to recount the worst day of their lives time and time again, in front of lawmakers, in front of staffers, in front of the press, because they know that something has to change,” said Fraser. “They’re not going to stop.” More

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      The Guardian view on supporting vaccines: humans can work miracles – so why wouldn’t we? | Editorial

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      It is easy to become so used to scientific and social advances that we take them for granted. But sometimes we should pause to celebrate – to feel genuine awe – at the wonders that we have seen. Amid all the wars, the disasters and the crimes of the last half century, we have witnessed nothing short of a miracle.Vaccination, in addition to clean water, sanitation and improved nutrition, has been one of the greatest contributors to global health. It is responsible for much of the astounding fall in child mortality, which plummeted by 59% between 1990 and 2022. It has saved more than 150 million lives, mostly of infants, since the Expanded Programme on Immunisation was launched by the World Health Organization in 1974. Initially designed to protect children against diseases including smallpox, tuberculosis, polio and measles, the scheme has since been extended to cover more pathogens. Then, in 2000, came the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi), a public-private organisation that provides financial and technical support for vaccination in poorer countries and negotiates with manufacturers to lower costs.The results have been remarkable. Prevention is better – and cheaper and easier – than cure. Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980. Almost all the world is now polio-free. Cases of many other diseases have been slashed. Much more can be done: an estimated 5 million children have been protected against malaria since routine vaccinations were launched a year ago. And from a scientific perspective, we are entering a golden age of vaccines.Yet this is a dangerous moment in other ways. The climate crisis is spurring disease outbreaks. Conflict has dramatically increased the number of unprotected children. Vaccine scepticism has grown. Now cuts to funding threaten to turn the clock back. The trashing of USAid will hinder delivery and has halted a groundbreaking programme to create new malaria vaccines. Robert F Kennedy Jr – who once claimed that “no vaccine is safe and effective” and who tried to persuade the US government to rescind authorisation for the coronavirus vaccine at the height of the pandemic – was confirmed this week as health secretary.Now the UK, one of Gavi’s founding donors and the country which has given most to its core programme, is considering a significant cut to its support. This would be a grave error. While some aspects of Gavi’s approach have faced sensible scrutiny in the past, it has vaccinated over 1 billion children and done so cost-effectively: 97 pence in every pound it is given goes on vaccine programmes. Its success is also evident in the number of countries which have graduated from being beneficiaries to paying their own way; some, including Indonesia, are becoming donors in turn. And Gavi’s stockpiles help to keep people safe in wealthier countries too, as well as ensuring that poorer nations are healthier and more stable.For all these reasons, Gavi has long enjoyed bipartisan support in the UK, which has given it more than £2bn over the last four years. Now, more than ever, its funding must be sustained. The world is full of apparently intractable conflicts and complex moral dilemmas. Few decisions are truly simple for governments. But this one is a no-brainer. It should astonish us that we can so easily save lives. It should be self-evident that we must continue to seize that opportunity. More