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    She compared motherhood in four countries. The US isn’t looking good

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    When Abigail Leonard saw the news that the Trump administration was considering handing out $5,000 “baby bonuses” to new mothers, she realized that she had already received one.A longtime international reporter, Leonard gave birth to three children while living in Japan, which offers a year of parental leave, publicly run daycare, and lump-sum grants to new parents that amount to thousands of US dollars. But it was not until moving back to the US in 2023 that Leonard grasped just how robust Japan’s social safety net for families is – and, in comparison, just how paltry the US net feels.Not only is the US the only rich country on the planet without any form of national paid leave, but an uncomplicated birth covered by private insurance tends to cost families about $3,000, which, Leonard discovered, is far more than in most other countries. The federal government also spends a fraction of what most other wealthy countries spend on early education and childcare, as federally subsidized childcare is primarily available only to the lowest earners. Middle-class families are iced out.View image in fullscreenLeonard traces the effects of policies and disparities like these in her new book, Four Mothers, which follows the pregnancy and early childrearing experiences of four urban, middle-class women living in Japan, Kenya, Finland and the US. Published earlier this month, Four Mothers provides a deeply personal window into how policy shapes parents’ lives. And it has emerged as an increasingly rightwing US seems poised to embrace the ideology of pronatalism and policies aimed at convincing people to have more kids.Pronatalism is deeply controversial, in no small part because its critics say pronatalists are more concerned with pushing women to have kids than with ensuring women have the support required to raise them.“Being ‘pronatal’ – designing policy to increase the birthrate – is not the same thing as being pro-woman,” Leonard notes in Four Mothers’ introduction. A $5,000 check would not have been enough to help any of the moms profiled in the book. Instead, the women relied on – or longed for, in the case of the US – extensive external support, such as affordable maternity care, parental leave and access to childcare.“The book is an implicit comparison of the rest of the world to the US, and parenthood is so much harder here in many ways,” Leonard said in a phone interview with the Guardian. “People are so accepting that things can be privatized and that government can be torn down and that there won’t be any repercussions to that. We don’t think about how integral government policy is to our lives, and for that reason can’t imagine how much more beneficial it could be.”View image in fullscreenIn the US, resistance to increasing government aid in childrearing has long gone hand in hand with a commitment to upholding a white, traditional view of the American family. At virtually every juncture, rightwing groups have been galvanized to stop sporadic efforts at expanding support. During the second world war, Congress allocated $20m to a universal childcare program that could help women work while men fought in the war effort. The program was so popular that people protested in the streets to keep it even after the war ended, according to Leonard. But the program was dismantled after political disputes over how to run the program, as southern states demanded that the daycares be segregated.In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have created a national system of federally subsidized daycare centers. Inflamed by the idea that the bill would encourage women to work outside the home, church groups organized letter-writing campaigns against the bill. Rightwing pundits, meanwhile, claimed the bill was “a plan to Sovietize our youth”. Richard Nixon ultimately vetoed the bill, calling it “the most radical piece of legislation” to ever cross his desk.Today, Leonard writes, corporations have an entrenched interest in keeping childcare from becoming a public good in the US. Private equity is heavily invested in childcare companies. Wealthy corporations, especially big tech companies, can also use their generous paid leave policies to lure in the best talent.“I talked to a congressman who was telling me he was trying to get some of these companies on board to back a national paid leave policy, and they were saying: ‘We don’t want to do paid leave because then we give up our own competitive advantage.’ It’s so cynical,” Leonard said. “These are companies that have been able to create this image around themselves of being feminist and pro-family. Like: ‘They’re great places to work for women. They help fund fertility treatments!’”She continued: “They’ve feminist-washed themselves. They’re working against a national policy that would benefit everyone and that ultimately would benefit our democracy, because you wouldn’t have this huge inequality of benefits and lifestyles.”‘A grind’The US has become far more accepting of women’s careerist ambitions over the last 50 years – especially as it has become more difficult for US families to sustain themselves on a single income – but balancing work and family life is still often treated as a matter of personal responsibility (or, frequently, as a personal failing).View image in fullscreenTo improve mothers’ lives, Leonard found, a commitment to flexible gender norms – in the home and at work – must be coupled with a robust social safety net.Each of the women in Four Mothers struggled with male partners who, in various ways and for assorted reasons, failed to provide as much childcare as the mothers. Sarah, a teacher in Utah, was married to an Amazon delivery driver who got zero parental leave. Sarah was entitled to three months of leave, at partial pay, but only because her union advocated for it. Although Sarah and her husband chose to leave the Mormon church, she found herself longing for the community that the church provided because it offered some form of support and acknowledgment of motherhood.Finland perhaps fares the best in Leonard’s book. The country, which gives parents about a year of paid leave, invests heavily in its maternal care system and has some of the lowest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world; it even offers mothers prenatal counseling where they can discuss their own childhoods and how to break cycles of intergenerational trauma. (The US, by contrast, has the highest maternal mortality rate of any wealthy country.) Finland is also the only industrialized nation on the planet where fathers spend more time with their children than mothers do. (The difference is about eight minutes, “about as even as it can be”, Leonard wrote in Four Mothers.) Parents are also happier than non-parents in Finland – which is routinely ranked as the happiest country in the world – while the inverse is true in the US.View image in fullscreenStill, the birth rate is on the decline in Finland, just as it is in Japan and the US. It is not clear what kinds of pronatalist policies, if any, induce people to have kids. Nearly 60% of Americans under 50 who say they are unlikely to have children say that’s because “they just don’t want to”.“The pronatal argument here – that’s really focused on people who make the choice not to have children. That is not only cruel and mean, but it’s also ineffective, because people who don’t want to have kids probably aren’t going to have kids and none of this stuff is going to make a difference,” Leonard said.That said, had she been building her family in the US rather than Japan, Leonard doesn’t know if she would have had three children. Given the cost of US childcare, “it would have been more of a grind”.“I just think it’s harder and more expensive here. So it was somewhat easier to have that third child there,” Leonard said. “It’s not because they gave me a $5,000 baby bonus.” More

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      Republicans say they want more American babies – but which kind?

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      Some of the children were too young to stand on their own. Instead, they sat on their parents’ knees or in their parents’ arms, waving American flags. Many of them seemed confused about what, exactly, was even happening.But these kids were in the midst of making history: their families were among the first to take advantage of Donald Trump’s February executive order granting white South Africans refugee status in the United States, on the grounds that Afrikaner landowners – who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population yet, decades after the end of apartheid, control about half of its land – are facing persecution. While the doors to the US refugee program have been slammed shut to virtually everyone else, these Afrikaners showed up in the US earlier this week, their refugee status promising a path to US citizenship.Days later, the Trump administration took a far narrower view of who deserves access to the American polity. On Thursday morning, a lawyer for the Trump administration argued in front of the US supreme court that the 14th amendment does not guarantee citizenship to the American-born children of “illegal aliens” – a view contradicted by more than a century of legal precedent.This split screen raises a vital question: is the Trump administration really interested in helping children and families flourish – or only the “right” families?Over the last several months, the Trump administration’s policies on immigration, families, and children have been pockmarked by all kinds of contradictions. The administration is reportedly considering numerous policies to convince people to have more children, such as “baby bonuses” of $5,000 or medals for mothers who have six or more kids. The Department of Transportation has issued a memo directing the agency to “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. And JD Vance has proclaimed: “I want more babies in the United States of America.”These moves are, in part, fueled by the growing power of the pronatalism movement, which believes that the declining birthrate in the US is an existential threat to its workforce and its future.Why, then, does the government want to exclude an estimated 150,000 babies born every year?“It’s hard to look at any of these policies and not believe that they’re created for the purpose of satisfying a political base that was promised some sort of notions of recreating a nostalgia for a white Christian nationalist nation,” said P Deep Gulasekaram, a professor of immigration law at the University of Colorado Law School.If the fate of the US workforce is really of concern, experts say immigration could help grow it – but the Trump administration has taken a hardline stance against immigrants from the Global South and their children. The administration has not only reportedly turned the refugee agency responsible for caring for children who arrive in the US alone into an arm of Ice, but also slashed funding for legal representation of children in immigration proceedings. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are trying to block parents who lack Social Security Numbers – such as undocumented people – from benefiting from the child tax credit, even in cases where their children are US citizens.The Trump administration has also unveiled new screening protocols that make it far more difficult for undocumented people to “sponsor”, or take custody of, children who enter the US alone. Just last week, the National Center for Youth Law and the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward sued the Trump administration over the changes, which they say have forced kids to languish in government custody. Between December 2024 and March 2025, kids went from spending an average of two months in government custody to spending an average of six.“This administration has compromised the basic health and safety of immigrant children in egregious ways,” Neha Desai, managing director of children’s human rights and dignity at the National Center for Youth Law, said in an email.In March, KFF, a charity that conducts health policy research, conducted focus groups of Hispanic adults who are undocumented or likely living with someone who is undocumented. Many spoke of the effect that the Trump administration’s policies are having on their families and kids.“I have a six-year-old child. Honestly, I’m afraid to take him to the park, and he asks me, ‘Mom, why don’t we go to the park?’” one 49-year-old Costa Rican immigrant woman told KFF. “How do I tell him? I’m scared.”“Even the children worry. ‘Mom, did you get home safely?’ They’re already thinking that something is going to happen to us on the street,” added a 54-year-old Colombian immigrant woman. “So that also makes me very nervous, knowing that there might come a time when they could be left here alone.”The supreme court arguments on Thursday centered not on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, but on the legality of lower court orders in the case. Still, some of the justices expressed concerns about what the case could mean for children.Eliminating birthright citizenship, Justice Elena Kagan suggested, could render children stateless. The high court needed a way to act fast, she said.If the justices believe that a court order is wrong, she asked, “why should we permit those countless others to be subject to what we think is an unlawful executive action?”Both the historical and legal record make clear that the 14th Amendment encapsulates birthright citizenship, Gulasekaram said. But, he said, predicting the supreme court’s moves is a “fool’s errand”.“There’s really no way of getting around the the conclusion that this is a call to some form of racial threat and racial solidarity as a way of shoring up support from a particular part of the of the of the Trump base,” Gulasekaram said. “Citizenship and the acquisition of citizenship has always been racially motivated in the United States.” More

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      Having as many babies as possible is not the only way to show you love humanity | Zoe Williams

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      ‘Perpetuating humanity should be a cross-politics consensus,” read an article in the Atlantic last week, “but the left was mostly absent at a recent pronatalism conference.” It’s such a simple proposition – everyone loves babies and wants the species to perpetuate, right? – but pronatalism has provoked a ferocious battle on the American left. Should they be trying to engage meaningfully at a preposterous far-right conference? Or should the left stop self-flagellating and start organising?But what is pronatalism – and is it really borderline fascist? I don’t want to think about slippery, bad-faith, rightwing claptrap any more than you do, but in an era in which US politics can sneeze and the world catches encephalitis, we do, regrettably, have to think about bad-faith everything, all the time.The motivation of the pronatalists is that birthrates are in decline, in some places (such as South Korea) so precipitously that the nation will soon cease to meaningfully exist. It has been a bugbear of the right, particularly the alt-tech right, for almost a decade. In 2017, Elon Musk wrote on Twitter: “The world’s population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care.” That was before he owned the platform, so few people noticed or cared. It has also been a thematic staple of Viktor Orbán’s rhetoric in Hungary, reinforced in 2019 by a large-family tax-break policy that in February became an income tax exemption for mothers of two or three children.The ideas factories pushing birthrates have always been much more opaque about their politics; often, they frame their ideas to suit whomever they are talking to. When I interviewed Simone and Malcolm Collins, venture capitalists turned pronatal advocates, a couple of years ago, their line was that progressive politics needed higher birthrates. Political persuasion was “40% to 70% heritable”, Malcolm told me. “If you systematically delete everyone who cares about the environment from the gene pool, that means, within a couple of generations, you’re going to see a dramatic drop in the number of people who care about the climate, even as the collapse becomes more intense.”At the last count, the Collinses had four children, plus a number of frozen embryos, which Simone intends to incubate at 18-month intervals. “We’re going to keep going until physically I can no longer have kids – and that will be when they forcibly remove my uterus,” she said. It was a dystopian image with a number of obvious follow-ups, the first of which was: who are “they”? But I didn’t ask any of them, because her perception of force, authority, uteruses, children and the world seemed dark and personal, like a subconscious gaping open.Nor did I pursue whether Malcolm could possibly believe that you could sell to people who care about the environment the idea that only their biological children would be genetically capable of caring about the environment. It could be the child of someone who arrives on a small boat that solves our political malaise. What about the heritability of staunch determination? Did they ever think about that?But, all too often, ethnonationalism is implicit in the pronatalist narrative: a low birthrate can’t be offset by migration, because they are not talking about people in general. They are talking about the right kind of people.In the intervening years, Musk has had a bunch more children, often boasting of the example he is setting. Trump started saying: “You have good genes, you know that, right?” to his followers. Last week, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, floated the idea that “if you are healthy, it’s almost impossible for you to be killed by an infectious disease in modern times”, which medics rebutted because it’s not true. But we should all fear its drumbeat: good stock is different; anyone who succumbs to an infectious disease wasn’t “healthy” to begin with.These connections are often intellectually baggy – Musk’s desire to populate Mars with his own seed doesn’t map neatly on to RFK’s anti-vax agenda, while Orbán’s pronatalism sounds like socially conservative gender oppression, yet pronatalist forums tie themselves in knots trying to sound “woke”. But if this isn’t about ethnonationalism, then why aren’t the pronatalists crying out for countries with low birthrates to receive refugees with open arms? Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnistDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Trump administration eviscerates maternal and child health programs

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      Multiple maternal and child health programs have been eliminated or hollowed out as part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) layoffs, prompting alarm and disbelief among advocates working to make Americans healthier.The fear and anxiety come as a full accounting of the cuts remains elusive. Federal health officials have released only broad descriptions of changes to be made, rather than a detailed accounting of the programs and departments being eviscerated.“Pediatricians, myself included, are losing sleep at night – worried about the health of the nation’s children,” said Dr Sue Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.“The one that stands out to me is the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. There is no way to make our country healthier by eliminating expertise where it all starts, and it all starts at maternal and child health.”The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, announced HHS would eliminate 10,000 jobs as part of a restructuring plan. Together with cuts already made by Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency”, HHS is likely to lose 20,000 workers – roughly one-quarter of its workforce.“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl,” Kennedy said. “We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic.”Piecemeal and crowd-sourced information, which has filled the vacuum left by a lack of information from the health department, appears to show maternal health programs slated for elimination, many without an indication of whether they will be reassigned. The Guardian asked HHS to comment on the cuts but did not receive a response.The picture of cuts was further muddied on Thursday when Kennedy told reporters, according to Politico: “We’re going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstalled, because we’ll make mistakes.”In the aftermath of the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s been much conservative criticism of public health agencies, particularly the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Pandemic policy continues to be an animating force within the Republican party, whose supporters are cynical about the value of federal public health programs following federal vaccine mandates.The cuts to maternal health programs may serve a second purpose for Republicans.Such programs have come under fire in some conservative states, in part because the experts involved investigate deaths that could have been prevented with abortion services – now illegal or severely restricted in nearly two dozen conservative states.As part of the restructuring, the administration announced 28 divisions would be folded into 15, including the creation of a new division, called the “Administration for a Healthy America”, or “AHA”.The administration argued the “centralization” would “improve coordination of health resources for low-income Americans and will focus on areas including, primary care, maternal and child Health, mental health, environmental health, HIV/Aids and workforce development”.Meanwhile, experts in HIV/Aids, worker health and safety, healthcare for society’s most vulnerable, and experts in maternal and child health have received “reduction in force” notices, a federal term for layoffs, or have been placed on administrative leave with the expectation of being eliminated.“It certainly appears there was a particular focus on parts of HHS that dealt with women’s or reproductive health,” said Sean Tipton, chief policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, about the cuts.He added: “How in the world you can justify the CDC eliminating the division of maternal mortality is beyond me.”Among the divisions hard-hit was the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), an operating division of HHS like the CDC, which housed the the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. HRSA lost as many as 600 workers.The CDC’s division of reproductive health, which studies maternal health, appeared to have been nearly eliminated, according to multiple reports, with some of the division’s portfolio also expected to be folded into AHA.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe entire staff of a gold-standard maternal mortality survey, a program that was called the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, was also put on leave, Stat reported. The epidemiologist in charge of the CDC survey, Jennifer Bombard, wrote to colleagues on Tuesday: “[T]he entire CDC PRAMS team, including myself, has received the Reduction in Force (RIF) notice from HHS today.”A HRSA hotline that had fielded calls from new moms seeking mental health support was also cut, Stat reported. Layoffs at the Administration for Children and Families have jolted providers of federally backed high-quality childcare for low-income families, a program called Head Start.The CDC’s only experts on infertility were laid off, just days after Trump described himself as the “fertilization president” at an event marking Women’s History Month. The team had collected congressionally mandated statistics on fertility clinics’ success rates. Without the workers, it is unclear who at the department will help fertility clinics comply with the law.“I’m astounded, sad, perplexed,” said Barbara Collura, president of Resolve: The National Infertility Association. “Infertility impacts one in six people globally, and now we don’t have anybody at the CDC who knows anything about infertility and IVF?”A division of the CDC called the National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention also appeared to be gutted, with the director Jonathan Mermin placed on administrative leave. Among the center’s many tasks, it worked to curb the spread of congenital syphilis, a debilitating disease that is on the rise in the US.The March of Dimes, an influential non-profit whose mission is to improve the health of mothers and babies, said the cuts “raise serious concerns” at a time when maternal mortality rates remain “alarmingly high”.“As an OB-GYN and public health leader, I can’t overstate the value these resources and programs – and our partners across CDC, HRSA, and NIH – have brought to families and frontline providers,” said Dr Amanda Williams, the interim chief medical Officer at the March of Dimes.“We rely on the data, research, clinical tools and partnerships built by the Division of Reproductive Health (DRH) and HRSA to protect maternal and infant health – especially in communities hit hardest.”Heads of National Institutes of Health (NIH) centers were also forced out – and, apparently, offered reassignment to the Indian Health Service to be stationed in Alaska, Montana or Oklahoma, the journal Nature reported. Such large-scale reassignments are unprecedented, according to Stat.Among those to be placed on leave was one of the federal government’s pre-eminent leaders of research, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr Jeanne Marrazzo. Marrazzo had expertise in sexually transmitted infections and women’s reproductive tract infections – a background that gave health advocates hope of curbing the US’s sky-high STD rates. Dr Diana Bianchi, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was also forced out.“These cuts are significant,” Kressly said. “And the policy and program changes that are made because the cuts impact real people in real communities, and I’m not just talking about the people who lost their jobs.” More

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      I lost my job at USAid. It’s devastating – but I still have hope | Christian Smith

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      When we rang in the New Year, I wasn’t remotely expecting politics to collide with my career, my family and me. In a matter of weeks, I had lost my job, my father and, I felt, my country.I spent a dozen years as a program officer for USAid, serving in countries in South America, Africa and Asia with my family. I loved my job working with governments and NGOs to improve the lives of those in need. Doing good and doing well, we said. I was helping to build an information system to improve aid transparency and efficiency when sudden news arrived.At 5pm on a Friday, we received an email saying our particular contract had been shut down. In all, 10,000 professionals were dismissed from their jobs, while Elon Musk called us a criminal organization and its staff – me included – a “ball of worms”. The wrecking had begun.At USAid headquarters, administrative assistants were ordered to take down all the pictures of the many people the agency helps around the world, as if it had been something shameful. Only clocks were left on the walls. More cravenly, the administration blocked access to the wall of names honoring those who had given their lives to the cause. Trump officials canceled USAid’s building contract and handed it over to US Customs and Border Protection.The same clocks on the walls that had once marked time over Americans helping people in need overseas may now mark time over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents deporting people to those countries and others.The Trump administration is abandoning millions of people around the world and cutting off life-saving services. We are losing goodwill and influence – diplomatic, economic and moral. A good sign that closing USAid was a mistake: China is already moving in to fill the void, and strongly rightwing leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán are applauding.The destruction is also almost certainly unconstitutional in a number of ways, and aspects continue to be reviewed, blocked or upheld by courts lagging behind the speed at which laws are being broken. A showdown on the reach of executive power has begun.These changes hit me very close to home. A significant number of my family are conservatives who voted for Trump, fueled by two decades of misinformation promoting hate and anger. Despite this, in the interests of our family integrity, we have learned to talk to one another respectfully. We avoid topics related to politics and focus on our love for each other, jigsaw puzzles and American football (until even that became “woke”).Blindsided at work, I was next blindsided at home. Two days after USAid was lost, my father died unexpectedly. Thankfully, my dad and I had been able to say we loved each other before he died. The kids and I flew out and we spent a beautiful week together with the family grieving his loss.However, in a strange moment at the end of the week, my mother told me that I shouldn’t talk about USAid because I didn’t know what I was talking about (as if I had no idea about the organization where I had spent my career). Armed with details from her trusted websites, she informed me that USAid was performing sex changes on children and funding terrorist groups. We defused the moment, but it demonstrated how unchecked deception fomented by wealthy interests so gravely distorts people’s views.Obviously, all of these sudden losses have given me pause to reflect.Despite some people’s attempts to reshape the US and its place in the world, we have not seen the end of American generosity. Humans are successful because we cooperate. We have obligations to each other as living beings. We also know that we can’t make ideas go away, and the best ones – like kindness and caring for others – are actually what bind us.The dismantling of USAid as an institution does not mean that the US’s generosity of spirit has also been eradicated. USAid was a longstanding independent agency established by John F Kennedy, receiving consistent bipartisan support because it advanced America’s foreign policy objectives by helping others.Such values have not disappeared. We can be certain that, in one form or another, US aid will return.

      Christian Smith is an American citizen and former USAid officer who lives between Dublin and Spain 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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      He has already fathered many children. Now Musk wants all of the US to embrace extreme breeding | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Is Elon Musk the dinner party guest from hell? It sure seems that way. Not only is the man desperate for people to laugh at his crass jokes, he reportedly has a weird habit of trying to donate his sperm at every opportunity – including, according to an October New York Times report, an incident where he offered some spermatozoa, as casually as you might pass the salt, to a married couple “he had met socially only a handful of times” during a Silicon Valley dinner party.Musk has denied offering sperm to strangers over supper. But it would be in keeping with his creepy breeding fetish: Musk is desperate for people in developed countries to have more children and has himself fathered at least 12 children with three women. (One of the children has since sadly died.) He’s become one of the most famous faces of a growing pro-natalist movement – one with an unsettling overlap with eugenics and deeply misogynistic ideas.Musk is obviously entitled to his obsessions. The problem is, now that he’s Donald Trump’s BFF, he actually has the opportunity to embed his obsessions into policy. While much has been said about Musk’s role in the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, it seems likely that the billionaire wants influence over more than just budgets. He seems to want a say in Americans’ sex lives as well. On Sunday, Musk replied to a tweet about declining birthrates by tweeting: “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness.”What sort of lessons would that entail? Teaching people that while a woman dies every two minutes due to pregnancy or childbirth – and maternal mortality rates are increasing in the US – it’s childlessness you should be afraid of? It’s easy for Musk, who will never have to carry any of the children he’s so keen on having, to be blase about pregnancy risks: he can outsource them all. Still, you’d think he might be more sensitive to the issue considering the musician Grimes, with whom he shares three children, almost died during her pregnancy with son X Æ A-12. That led Grimes and Musk to use a surrogate for their next child.What else would Musk tell young people to instil a fear of childlessness? That, should they choose not to procreate, they’ll be saddled with more disposable income than they might otherwise have? And they won’t have to fret about the fact the US is the only industrialised country without a national paid parental leave policy? Or should he really put the fear of God in them and explain that they’ll miss out on being woken up at 5am and having to listen to the Frozen soundtrack for the millionth time? Look, I love my child (I’ve even grown to love the Frozen soundtrack), but parenthood can be difficult and it’s not for everyone. There are plenty of ways to live a fulfilling life that don’t involve raising a mini-me.I’ll tell you one lesson that I wish Musk would learn: being a sperm donor is very different from being a parent. While Musk has been parading various children of his through Mar-a-Lago for photo opportunities recently, he seems to leave most of the hard work of parenting to others. I mean, come on, he has six children under the age of six, runs a bunch of major companies and spends all his time hobnobbing with politicians: it’s logistically impossible for him to be an involved father to all his children. He’s also estranged from his transgender daughter Vivian Wilson, and has publicly declared – on at least two occasions – that she is “dead – killed by the woke mind virus”.But Musk’s parenting skills aren’t the real issue here. The real issue is that the billionaire, and his breeding obsession, are part of an incoming administration that wants to roll back reproductive rights and usher in a world where women are forced to give birth. It would be nice to be able to ignore every stupid thing that Musk tweets, but we don’t have that luxury any more. He seems intent on worming his way into our wombs. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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