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    I left behind an authoritarian state to move to the US. Now I see my new home falling to the same dark forces | Mona Eltahawy

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    “What’s he done now?” My parents live in Cairo and I’m in New York City. We FaceTime once a week and that question is like a game we play. My parents ask about Donald Trump and I ask about Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, whom Trump calls “my favourite dictator”. Aren’t we Egyptian-Americans lucky – a dictator for each side of our hyphen.Tellingly, the “he” my parents ask about has dominated our conversations lately.I moved to the United States from Egypt in 2000 and I have spent the past 25 years watching the US turn into Egypt – from encroaching state power to the increasingly unchecked role of religion in politics.After each travesty – the lies used to invade Iraq, the zealotry that destroyed abortion rights, the arming and financing of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza – I thought: “Any minute now, there’ll be a revolution, they’ll burn things down.”And here is Trump, finessing that state power into a regime that, as with the regime in Egypt, is targeting culture, education, media, judges, students and any group or entity that poses a threat or even the potential of dissent to the regime. And I’m still waiting for the revolution.I now know, having lived in the US for more than two decades, that most white people in this country would rather hear comparisons to Russia or Hungary than Egypt or a place led by Black or brown autocrats, because even autocracies are separated along racial lines.I joined an anti-Trump protest in NYC earlier this month, which along with others across the country, was said to be the largest single-day protest since Trump’s return to the White House. The signs mocking Trump and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk were clever and there were dogs dressed in coats that had “I bite fascists” written on them, but the rage had stayed at home. Revolutions need feet on the ground, yes. But they also need rage, and lots of it.White Americans are the largest voting bloc and the group most responsible for bringing Trump to power both times – and they are the least enraged. The privilege of whiteness means that for many in the US, the loss of rights only happens to people who aren’t white, far away somewhere, in places such as Egypt. Only Black and brown people in faraway countries end up with an authoritarian ruler. But, if anything, where the Trump regime is taking the US is infinitely worse than what is happening in Egypt, because Egypt’s footprint on the world is not nearly as damaging as that of the US. This is why I’m enraged at the lack of rage.White people in the US have a delusional amount of confidence in their government and institutions. They are childishly naive in believing that institutions will save them from autocratic power. That stubborn belief in their exceptionalism undergirds the refusal to see the fascism that Trump brought when he was first elected and that he is now cementing. Black and Indigenous people and people of colour have no such delusions. They do not expect institutions to protect them because they are so often hurt by those institutions. To people like me and others who have lived in and survived autocracies, white state power and its institutions have always functioned like a regime – so we are well versed in scepticism of anything that politicians say.No matter how often those of us from authoritarian countries, who know to be suspicious of state power, and those of us who have fought fascism – whether implemented through military rule or the rule of religious fundamentalists – warned and warned, white people in the US arrogantly shook their heads and said it couldn’t happen here. Because the US is like a teenager who is stubbornly determined in their own self-destruction.In Egypt, when I interviewed officials from the Muslim Brotherhood – political Islamists who were Egypt’s most powerful opposition to the regime – about their policies, their answer would invariably be “Islam is the solution”. Their goal was the establishment of an Islamic state. Though the group briefly ruled Egypt after the 2011 revolution before being overthrown by Sisi, never in its wildest dreams would the Muslim Brotherhood have imagined holding as much power as white Christian nationalists in the US, for whom Christianity is the professed solution and who are creating a white Christian state in the most powerful country in the world.If Pete “I want a crusade and I have enough Crusader crosses to earn it” Hegseth were a Muslim, the US would have invaded his country to save the “free world” from his jihad. It is easy to see theocracy when the theocrats and zealots don’t look like you.The US media have been able to report on the ways the Muslim Brotherhood politicised and weaponised religion. But they have failed to bring that same urgency to the politicisation of Christianity in the US, especially by the white Christian nationalists who have been instrumental in bringing Trump to power. White and Christian are considered default – the harmless norm – in the white-dominated newsrooms of the US.As a feminist, I am especially enraged at the inability of US media, as well as many white people generally, to see what religion has done to women in the US. During this term, Trump has so far rowed back any diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and blocked federal funding for abortion services. During his first term, he appointed three conservative supreme court judges, which led to the reversal of Roe v Wade and the removal of federal protection for abortion rights, meaning that individual states can ban abortions. These policies have been promoted by some white women, who serve as foot soldiers of the white supremacist Christian patriarchy. The women who helped destroy abortion rights, for example, are rarely analysed, examined and pathologised in the way that Muslim women are.Living in the US has radicalised me. Over the past 25 years my rage at the state-sponsored patriarchy in both of my countries has injected anarchism into my feminism. Anarcho-feminist conveys the “don’t mess with me” level of rage I’m at. And unless (perhaps until) the Trump regime targets naturalised citizens, NYC will remain my home.Two years before Trump was re-elected, I began strength training. I can now deadlift and squat more than my body weight. The timing had nothing to do with the occupant of the White House and more to do with my personal goals, but my journey feels apt. When fascism flexes its muscles, it’s time to make feminism dangerous again.The rage must come. It will come.

    Mona Eltahawy writes the FEMINIST GIANT newsletter. She is the author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls and Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution

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      How idea of charging women with murder infiltrated the anti-abortion movement

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      View image in fullscreenSo far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty.Once seen as politically toxic, this kind of legislation has become more popular in the years since Roe v Wade fell, erasing the national right to abortion. This likely comes as no surprise to Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law and one of the foremost commentators on the US abortion wars. The anti-abortion movement, she writes in her new book Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, has really “always been a fetal-personhood movement” – one that is so emboldened, it is increasingly unconcerned with public opinion or even democratic norms.Fetal personhood is the belief that embryos and fetuses deserve the legal rights and protections afforded to people. If taken to its logical conclusion in US law, this belief would not only totally outlaw abortion, but also risk pitting the rights of fetuses against the rights of the women carrying them in all kinds of circumstances. In the first year after the US supreme court overturned Roe, at least 200 people were prosecuted for conduct relating to their pregnancies. Most of these cases involved charges of child endangerment, abuse or neglect – language that treats fetuses as children.A Guggenheim fellow who has published seven books on reproduction and abortion, Ziegler has long seen the fight for fetal personhood as the throughline in the anti-abortion movement’s centuries-long history. In recent years, with Roe gone, she grew convinced that the movement was no longer willing to pull punches in that fight. “The trajectory has been more and more punitive, more focused on saying: ‘Justice for the fetus means punishing a larger group of people that encompasses not just doctors, but people who assist them, and potentially abortion seekers themselves,’” she said in an interview.View image in fullscreenPersonhood, which was released Tuesday, argues that the anti-abortion movement did not have to be so punitive. While anti-abortion activists have never agreed on how to best implement fetal personhood, they over time started to take more cues from Republican politicians, whose own veneration of “law and order” grew alongside its antagonism toward a social safety net. Those developments ultimately paved the way for the more extreme anti-abortion activists to grab more power within the movement.After Roe legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, anti-abortion activists organized in support of an amendment to the US constitution that would recognize embryos and fetuses as people. (The effort never gained the political traction it needed to become a serious possibility.) Around the same time, some activists broke with mainstream anti-abortion groups to push for policies that would offer more support for pregnant women, rather than just ban abortion.Yet the voices advocating for better daycare and housing for mothers faded away as the anti-abortion movement tightened its alliance with the Republican party. Anti-abortion activists understood that, by portraying fetuses as defenseless victims of the ultimate crime, they could energize conservative voters – and open their pockets.“The Republican party, from the Reagan era onward, has really equated a kind of justice and equality with punishing wrongdoers,” Ziegler said. “It’s a natural fit for the anti-abortion movement: the more its fortunes relied on Republican politicians, the more it framed things the same way.”State-level bans on abortion still do not technically punish abortion patients. (Instead, it’s abortion providers, long positioned by the movement as coercing or confusing women into the procedure, and sometimes the people who help them, who are at risk of criminal consequences.) But, over the last few years, self-described “abortion abolitionists” have slowly migrated out of the fringes of the anti-abortion movement and moved towards its center. Unlike mainstream “pro-lifers”, “abolitionists” believe that, if a fetus is a person and abortion is the murder of that person, women should be punished accordingly: as murderers.Neither “pro-lifers” nor “abolitionists” are particularly popular. After Roe’s collapse enabled states to make their own abortion laws, several states – including GOP strongholds like Ohio and Missouri – passed ballot measures to protect abortion rights. According to Gallup, 85% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or some circumstances, while a 2024 survey from the 19th News and SurveyMonkey found that 41% of Americans think “a fetus has rights starting at conception that should be protected by the government.”Even people who support fetal personhood can have tangled, even contradictory views on the matter. Only 9% of people think that the government should restrict access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, even though IVF as it is currently practiced frequently involves the destruction or abandonment of embryos.None of the bills that allow abortion patients to be charged with homicide are likely to pass this year, but Ziegler doesn’t think “abolitionists” are going anywhere, for two reasons. First, the anti-abortion movement maintains a strong grip in southern Republican-dominated state legislatures, where many of these bills have emerged. Second, Ziegler believes that the anti-abortion movement is embracing “a conviction that it matters less what voters think and more what judges think”.“If you don’t worry about what you’re doing being unpopular, and you believe that ideological consistency, or even logical consistency, is paramount, you would be more inclined to go with an abolitionist argument, and you might worry less about that having political fallout in a politically uncompetitive state,” Ziegler said. “You don’t need to convince most Americans you’re right. You only need to convince five justices on the supreme court.”With abortion bans proving deeply unpopular in the US, circumventing popular will has become a necessity for an increasingly hardline movement. And by relying on the courts rather than voters, the anti-abortion movement can afford to ignore voters’ misgivings.The movement has abandoned its earlier goal of amending the US constitution to recognize fetal personhood; instead, the anti-abortion movement is now seeking to convince courts that the 14th amendment, which guarantees the right of due process and equal protection, already recognizes embryos and fetuses as people from the moment of conception. It is, according to Ziegler, yet another sign of the movement’s drift away from democratic norms.View image in fullscreenThis interest in the 14th amendment is also something of an about-face for the anti-abortion movement, which is predominantly white and has had a convoluted relationship with race for more than a century. At the time that the amendment passed, as part of a post-civil war effort to recognize Black people’s rights, anti-abortion leaders “didn’t want to talk about race because they weren’t sure that people of color were persons with rights”, Ziegler said. Over time, the anti-abortion movement began using the language of civil rights and affirmative action – but primarily to argue that fetuses are the greatest victim of discrimination.“I think that’s one of the reasons fetal personhood language has been resonant for so long,” Ziegler said of the movement’s co-option of civil rights rhetoric. “It gives people a way to talk about equality and a way to elevate somebody as a victim of discrimination in a way that makes sense to a largely white group of conservatives.”As Roe recedes further into the rearview mirror, Ziegler expects the movement to become even more committed to some of the most unpopular implications of fetal personhood, such as restrictions on IVF. Although Republican politicians have shied away from limiting access to the treatment, the anti-abortion movement has grown more strident on the topic. Some of its leaders even condemned Donald Trump for his recent executive order supporting IVF.“I think the anti-abortion movement is going to be still full steam ahead,” Ziegler said. “There’s an increasing sentiment in the movement that this is not about pleasing Republicans. This is not about pleasing voters. This is about the importance of this, ideologically, to the people involved.” More

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      US army to test enlisted men and women with same physical standards

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      The US army unveiled plans on Monday to require a fitness test with identical physical standards for men and women in combat positions after the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, ordered the elimination of gender-based fitness requirements in frontline roles.The revamped army fitness test, which replaces the combat fitness test, will be “sex-neutral” and force female soldiers in 21 combat specialties to meet the same benchmarks as men – a change expected to drastically cut the number of women qualifying for these positions.“The five-event AFT is designed to enhance Soldier fitness, improve warfighting readiness, and increase the lethality of the force,” the army said in a press release.Gone is the “standing power throw” or “ball yeet”, replaced with a streamlined assessment of deadlifts, push-ups, planks, a two-mile run and a sprint-drag-carry exercise. For younger women, the standards jump significantly – deadlifting 140lb instead of 120, and shaving nearly 90 seconds off required run times.The new policy appears to contradict findings from a 2017 study of US army soldiers that concluded “gaps in cardiorespiratory and muscular performances between men and women should be addressed through targeted physical training programs that aim to minimize physiological differences” rather than applying identical standards.A 2022 Rand Corporation study also found that women and older service members were failing the previous fitness test “at significantly higher rates than men and younger troops”, which raises questions about the feasibility of the new standardized requirements.Combat soldiers must now score “a minimum of 60 points per event and an overall minimum score of 350” under the sex-neutral standards, according to the army’s press release. Active-duty troops have until January 2026 to meet requirements, while national guard and reserve members have until June 2026.Hegseth has previously said that he does not think women should be allowed to serve in combat roles, though he later moderated his stance. The former Fox News host wrote in a recent book that “women cannot physically meet the same standards as men” and that mothers were needed “but not in the military, especially in combat units”.Soldiers who fail to meet the new standards twice consecutively face potential removal from the army or, according to Sgt Maj Christopher Mullinax, would be required to transfer to non-combat roles, which will continue using sex- and age-based scoring.The army will begin rolling out the changes on 1 June, with full implementation guidelines expected in May. More

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      Sci-fi Musk is brainstorming ways to breed his ‘legion’ more efficiently | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Elon Musk’s never-ending daddy issuesI regret to inform you that, once again, we are all being forced to think about Elon Musk’s gonads. Musk, who has had at least 14 children with four women, hasn’t officially launched a new mini-Musk for a while, but the Wall Street Journal has just dropped some disturbing details about the billionaire’s well-publicized breeding fetish.You’ll be familiar with some of these details already. By now we all know that Musk seems to think that the only way to save western civilization is if people like him have as many children as possible. And you’ve probably read the New York Times report which alleges that Musk, who likes preaching what he practices in regards to populating the world, has a habit of wandering around offering his sperm to strangers.What you might not know, however, is that Musk is so committed to this idea of himself as a superhero saving the universe that, even in private conversations, he apparently speaks like he is a character in a poorly written sci-fi novel. According to the Journal, Musk reportedly refers to his children as a “legion” and has been brainstorming ways to breed more efficiently.“To reach legion-level before the apocalypse we will need to use surrogates,” he reportedly said to Ashley St Clair, the mother of one of his children, in a text message seen by the newspaper.Surrogacy can often be a complex ethical issue. Not in this case. Musk appears to view women as nothing more than walking wombs he can use to further his own narcissistic agenda. Ethics aside for a moment, one has to wonder why a man who styles himself as a tech guru can’t figure out a faster way to pop out offspring than surrogacy. At the very least, I’m surprised that Musk hasn’t yet followed the lead of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who reportedly had visions of using his ranch in New Mexico as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and give birth to his babies. But that may come later I suppose. All the money that Doge, Musk’s pet government project, has cut from libraries and medical research might, at this very moment, be getting funneled into an Official Institute of Accelerated Insemination.While Musk may not have a birthing ranch (yet), he does own a very expensive social network which, according to the Journal, he’s been using to solicit more baby mamas. Musk has apparently been engaging with the cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong on X, sending so many followers her way that she earned $21,000 over a two-week period from the revenue-sharing programs for creators on the platform. Once she was enjoying how lucrative it was to be on his good side, the billionaire asked Fong if she was interested in birthing his child. You know, as you do. Fong politely declined and Musk swiftly unfollowed her, causing her X-related income to drop.We all know that Musk has very thin skin. How has he responded to the Journal’s embarrassing reporting? Honestly, in an unusually restrained fashion. Nobody has been sent to El Salvador (yet), no reporters have been doxed. Musk has just dismissed the piece as scurrilous gossip. On Tuesday he tweeted “TMZ > > WSJ”. And, in normal circumstances, Musk would be correct that, as long as all parties involved are consenting adults, his private life is no one else’s business. But Musk is not your run-of-the-mill rich guy, is he? I don’t think Donald Trump or JD Vance believe in very much other than their own advancement. But Musk is an ideologue: he’s inserted himself into the top levels of government and is busy rearranging the US according to his worldview. Understanding all the ins and outs of this worldview is now very much a matter of public interest.It’s also illuminating, I think, to look at the sort of coverage Musk’s shenanigans get, particularly in the conservative press. While people love gawking at Musk, he’s still widely seen as an eccentric genius. Even the headline of the Wall Street Journal piece: “The tactics Elon Musk uses to manage his ‘Legion’ of babies – and their mothers”, seemed to suggest admiration for his multitasking. I’ve offered up this thought experiment before, but just humor me again and imagine a world where a woman acted like Musk. You can’t, can you? She’d be eviscerated on Fox News. There’d be a million thought pieces about what a terrible mother she was. Absolutely nobody would consider her a genius and she certainly wouldn’t be advising the president. There is perhaps no better embodiment of gendered double standards than Musk. And now he’s set on exporting those double standards to Mars.Give Fatima Hassouna a ‘loud death’Being a journalist in Gaza is a death sentence, with Israel apparently set on ensuring a complete media blackout of the ongoing genocide. On Wednesday, days before her wedding, Fatima Hassouna, a young photojournalist who is the subject of a new documentary, became one of the latest journalists to be killed by Israel. A strike on her home killed her along with 10 members of her family, including her pregnant sister. “If I die, I want a loud death,” Hassouna had written on social media. “I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear.”This is what it means to be Palestinian: to have to beg the world to care about you. To have cowards avert your eyes as you are massacred. To have the architects of your annihilation trot around the world being treated as VIPs by countries that once pretended to care about human rights.Self-identifying ‘hot girls’ are mobilizing to elect a progressive as New York City mayorI fully endorse this.Young women now binge drink more than young menWhile gen Z may drink less than previous generations, the gender gap in risky drinking has been narrowing. A new study finds that women aged 18-25 are now actually drinking slightly more than men the same age.Sudan: two years of war and shameful international neglect“Last week, Amnesty International released a new investigation finding the Rapid Support Forces committed widespread sexual violence, including rape, gang rape and sexual slavery, amounting to possible crimes against humanity,” Amnesty International’s Erika Guevara Rosas said in a statement marking the two-year anniversary of the outbreak of Sudan’s civil war. “Despite these atrocities, the world has largely chosen to remain passive. Alarmingly, the UN Security Council has failed to implement a comprehensive arms embargo on Sudan to halt the constant flow of weapons fueling these heinous crimes.”A crack in the manosphere: Joe Rogan’s guests are revoltingI chuckled a lot at this headline.Everyone is making fun of Katy Perry for her little space trip, even Wendy’sThe fast-food chain is refusing to apologize to the singer for a tweet suggesting she should be sent back to space. The Blue Origin flight has been widely panned, with the model and actor Emily Ratajkowski saying she was “disgusted” by the 11-minute space flight. “That’s end time shit,” Ratajkowski said. “Like, this is beyond parody.”The week in pawtriarchyRemember when Trump got attacked by an angry bald eagle during a photoshoot in 2015? Unfortunately, the bird kingdom did not properly organize to stop his presidency back then but it seems that some of our feathered friends have decided to fight the Maga powers that be. Last Friday a pigeon landed on Fox News’s Peter Doocy’s head while the White House correspondent was wrapping up a segment on tariffs. Not the first time that a Fox News correspondent has looked bird-brained.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      ‘We are failing’: doctors and students in the US look to Mexico for basic abortion training

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      On paper, it should not be difficult for Dr Sebastian Ramos to learn to perform abortions. As a family medicine doctor, Ramos works in a specialty that frequently provides the procedure. He lives in deep-blue California, where it is still allowed. And the administrators running Ramos’s residency program – a kind of apprenticeship that US doctors must undergo to become full-fledged physicians – support Ramos’s desire to learn how to do it.But over the course of his three-year-long residency, Ramos is guaranteed just three days’ worth of training at Planned Parenthood. Residents get to participate in only a handful of abortions.“That’s just not enough if you want to practice abortion care,” said Ramos, who asked to go by a shortened version of his last name to protect his privacy. “I knew that if I wanted to do this, I needed more experience.”That’s why, earlier this month, Ramos traveled to a clinic in Mexico City for two weeks’ worth of training in abortion provision. During his first week at the clinic, which is run by the global organization MSI Reproductive Choices and its Mexican arm Fundación MSI, Ramos performed roughly 60 abortions.In the years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, paving the way for more than a dozen states to ban virtually all abortions, a small but growing number of would-be abortion providers have begun to leave the country in search of an education. In 2023, MSI trained nine American doctors to perform abortions at clinics in Mexico. In 2024, it trained 27. So far this year, it is on track to double that number.View image in fullscreen“On one hand, it’s a tremendous relief to know that medical students and residents aren’t going to have to forego this very important part of their training in their education,” said Pamela Merritt, executive director of Medical Students for Choice. Last year, Merritt’s organization helped eight medical students and residents receive abortion training in Mexico and the UK.Merritt continued: “It’s also incredibly sad that in the United States, we are failing to train people even to the standard of care indicated by abortion bans.”Every abortion ban in the US permits abortions to save a patient’s life. But without adequate training, doctors may not be skilled enough to perform abortions even in those dire circumstances.‘It’s a shame’Medical schools and residency programs are run by massive hospitals that are heavily dependent on public funding; such institutions tend to be, by nature, leery of anything as controversial as abortion. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has required OB-GYN residencies to teach doctors how to perform abortions since the 1990s, but rather than offer training in-house, hospitals have often farmed their residents out to freestanding abortion clinics for training.Even before Roe fell, this system was faulty: a 2019 study found that, despite the ACGME requirement, just 64% of OB-GYN residency programs offered “routine training with dedicated time” for abortions. Family medicine residents who want to learn to perform abortions face a greater disadvantage, since the ACGME does not require their residency programs to offer any kind of abortion training.View image in fullscreenEven most OB-GYN residents, program directors reported in the 2019 study, did not achieve what doctors call “competency” when it came to abortion. Without competency – a qualification that’s measured through a melange of doctors’ knowledge, skills and attitudes – doctors may not be able to safely perform abortions on their own.Abortion training and competency is now even harder to come by. Since Roe’s collapse, more than 100 abortion clinics have closed. Those that are left are often besieged by patients fleeing abortion bans, leaving them without the time and space to teach everybody who wants to learn.If an OB-GYN residency program is located in a state that bans abortion, ACGME rules currently dictate that the residency “must provide access to this clinical experience in a different jurisdiction where it is lawful”. The ACGME declined to respond to a request for information about how many residency programs are currently compliant with its abortion-training requirement, although records show that no OB-GYN programs have lost their accreditation status in the last year. Patricia Lohr serves as the director of research and innovation for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas), a UK non-profit that provides abortions up until about 24 weeks of pregnancy. Lohr trained to become an OB-GYN in the US. “Having been a resident and a medical student in the United States, I could really see the importance of having access to abortion education that wasn’t entirely reliant on what was being delivered within academic training programs,” Lohr said. “Because often, abortions weren’t being provided in those academic hospitals.”View image in fullscreenWhen Lohr moved to the UK, she quickly moved to create a two-week training program at Bpas where medical students could learn about abortions and observe – but not perform – the procedure. In the years since Roe fell, that training program has received a surge of applications from American medical students and residents.“It’s a shame that people would have to travel to learn a basic part of women’s health care,” Lohr said. “There are many trainees out there at the moment who would like to obtain abortion skills, but cannot get it locally, and so they get diverted into doing something else.”Lauren Wiener, a New Jersey medical student, had originally planned to travel to Arizona in summer 2022 to learn how to provide abortions. But when Roe’s fall led Arizona abortion providers to temporarily stop working, Wiener had to cancel her trip. Instead, she ended up undergoing a week-long training at Bpas last fall.“It is something that you need to know how to do, because there are emergency situations,” Wiener said of abortions. “You might not want to electively perform an abortion at 24 weeks, but if someone comes in and they’re miscarrying, you need to know how to evacuate that uterus. It’s a skill you need to have to save a life.”‘We will be there’While training in the US dwindles, the country’s increasingly conservative approach to abortion has also put it at odds with much of the rest of the world. Only four countries – including the US – have tightened their abortion laws over the last 30 years, while more than 60 countries and territories have loosened theirs, according to a tally by the Center for Reproductive Rights.Mexico is one of them. In 2023, its supreme court decriminalized abortion nationwide; the procedure is now available in about half of all Mexican states. And providers aren’t the only people taking advantage of Mexico’s liberalized abortion laws: last year, Fundación MSI provided first-trimester abortions to 62 women from the United States.“Training, training, training – it is key, to have less danger for actual patients,” said Araceli López-Nava, managing director of MSI Latin America. “We understand how difficult the situation is becoming in the US, so we’re happy to help.”The organization has the capacity to train up to 300 doctors a year to perform abortions, López-Nava estimated.View image in fullscreenMSI is not, however, a solution for everybody. Would-be trainees need to speak Spanish. And although the organization has in past years trained medical students, MSI’s Mexico clinics have started focusing on teaching residents who have already performed 20 abortions. Because residents have already chosen their specialties and secured berths in residency programs – which can be highly competitive – they are more likely to become abortion providers.Training in Mexico can also be pricey, especially since the program does not pay for travel and lodging. Ramos’s entire trip cost about $5,000, although a scholarship helped him cover most of the costs.“It’s a way, at least for me, to be exposed to a different medical system, learn from different providers from a different country, exchange knowledge,” Ramos said. “I feel like I’m being adequately prepared to meet the needs of my patients in the US.” More

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      Melania Trump’s secret to getting through hard times? Love (actually)

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      Melania’s guide to getting through hard timesLet’s take a quick break from the increasingly dreadful news for a little check-in, shall we? So … how are you holding up right now? How are those stress levels?Mine aren’t great, to be honest. I’m pickling in my own cortisol as I write this. But I’m not here to moan. I am here to share some helpful advice, courtesy of our inspiring first lady Melania Trump, about how to get through these challenging times.Now, I know what you may be thinking: what on earth does Melania Trump know about adversity? The woman divides her time between a gold penthouse in Manhattan and a mansion in Florida, occasionally dropping into the White House to wave at commoners. She’s not exactly worrying about the price of eggs or the balance of her 401(k).But let’s not be too quick to judge. Money doesn’t insulate you from everything, and I’m sure Melania has her own problems. I mean, the poor woman is probably forced to regularly socialize with Elon Musk – which would drain the lifeblood from anyone. Then there’s the fact her husband has taken to using the stomach-turning nickname the “fertilization president”.Melania’s also not just lounging around in luxury: I am sure she is working extremely hard for the millions of dollars Amazon has thrown at her for the privilege of making a sycophantic documentary about her life. And then there’s all the annoying first lady admin; her office has just had to reschedule the White House spring garden tours – which Melania is not expected to actually attend – because of some pesky protesters.So how does our first lady navigate these very stressful challenges? While presenting the state department’s 19th International Women of Courage awards, which honored eight women from around the world, Melania shared her secret trick for getting through hard times. It’s … wait for it … love.“Throughout my life, I have harnessed the power of love as a source of strength during challenging times,” Melania said. “Love has inspired me to embrace forgiveness, nurture empathy and exhibit bravery in the face of unforeseen obstacles.”Melania noted that the award recipients – which included women from Yemen, South Sudan, Israel and the Philippines – “came from diverse backgrounds and regions, yet love transcends boundaries and territories”. She further added that she was inspired by “the women who are driven to speak out for justice, even though their voices are trembling”.The first lady deserves an award of her own for that speech because I have absolutely no idea how she managed to say all that with a straight face. I mean, seriously, is she trolling us? How can she talk about love while her husband’s hate-filled administration is deporting everyone they can? Having the wrong tattoo – or just a stroke of bad luck – can now get you sent to a prison in El Salvador. (The secretary of state Marco Rubio, by the way, who is presiding proudly over these deportations, also made a speech at the International Women of Courage awards.)How can Melania talk about justice when the Trump administration is currently doing their best to deport or imprison anyone who speaks out for justice for Palestinians? And how dare she talk about diversity and women’s rights, when the Trump administration is erasing women from government websites as part of their crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion.But, look, I don’t want to completely dismiss Melania’s advice. Perhaps she has a point. Perhaps, in these challenging times, we should all just channel Melania and reach for the power of love. So: if you happen to get into trouble with any US border guards because you’ve indulged in a little wrongthink online, just remind them of Melania’s words. Remind them that love transcends borders and territories. And then sit back, and enjoy your free trip to El Salvador.Katy Perry says she is ‘going to put the “ass” in astronaut’Please don’t, Katy. For more cringeworthy quotes on how “space is finally going to be glam”, read this feature in Elle. It profiles the all-women crew that has been chosen to joyride around space on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket. They’re all going to be glammed up with lash extensions, folks! It’s gonna be one giant leap for womankind.Women in the US are dying preventable deaths because of abortion bansNew research details how three critically ill patients in the US could have survived if they’d been able to access abortions.How Taliban male-escort rules are killing mothers and babiesEven before the Taliban took power, Afghanistan had a maternal mortality rate three times higher than the global average. Now draconian policies, including guardianship rules that mean a woman can’t travel to hospital without being accompanied by a man, are contributing to an increase in maternal deaths in Afghanistan.House revolts over Republican bid to stop new parents from voting by proxyA small group of Republicans joined forces with Democrats to stop the GOP from blocking consideration of a measure that would allow new parents to temporarily designate someone else to vote in their place. “I think that today is a pretty historical day for the entire conference. It’s showing that the body has decided that parents deserve a voice in Washington,” the Republican Anna Paulina Luna said.The US woman with the world’s longest tongueImagine people screaming in shock every time you stick your tongue out. Such is the life of Chanel Tapper, a California woman who holds the Guinness World Record for woman with the globe’s longest tongue.US anti-abortion group expands campaign in UKA rightwing US group has been trying to export abortion extremism to the UK, lobbying heavily against the introduction of buffer zones around reproductive health clinics.Russell Brand charged with rape and sexual assault“Nation Could Have Sworn Russell Brand Was Already Convicted Sex Offender”, reads an Onion headline from 2023.At least 322 children killed since Israel’s new Gaza offensive, Unicef saysUnicef said “relentless and indiscriminate bombardments” had resulted in 100 children killed or maimed every day in the 10 days to 31 March.How Gina Rinehart is pushing the Maga message in AustraliaSome fascinating details in this Guardian series about Rinehart, who has been described as a “female Donald Trump” and is Australia’s richest person. Money clearly can’t buy taste because Rinehart is renovating her company headquarters to include a sculpture of Peanut the squirrel, Maga’s favourite rodent, and etchings of inspirational Elon Musk quotes.The week in pawtriarchyTrump’s tariffs are so far-reaching that they’ve even been imposed on the Heard and McDonald islands near Antarctica, inhabited only by penguins. (And a few seals.) I am sure the penguins, already suited up for an emergency meeting on the tariffs, are not too happy about this development – but the rest of us have been gifted some brrrrilliant memes. 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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      ‘A slap in the face’: activists reel as Trump administration removes crucial missing Indigenous peoples report

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      Since January, Donald Trump’s presidency has been marked by a series of radical changes. Of note is the way troves of previously publicly available information on government websites such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or National Institutes of Health (NIH) have quietly gone dark.One such page is the Not Invisible Act Commission’s final report from November 2023. The Not Invisible Act Commission was mandated by bipartisan legislation and signed into law by Trump himself. The report was a collaboration between the justice department and the interior department to address, document and respond to the missing and murdered Indigenous peoples (MMIP) crisis, in which Indigenous communities experience disproportionate rates of abduction, assault and murder. Accurate statistics about the MMIP and missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) crises can be limited and dated, but, as of 2019, homicide was the third most common cause of death for Indigenous girls aged 15 to 19 and Indigenous women aged 20 to 24.The Not Invisible Act Commission’s final report was a culmination of seven in-person field hearings held across the country and a one-day virtual national hearing. Nearly 600 people attended the hearings and 260 people, including survivors, victims, family members, advocates and law enforcement gave testimony to the commission. As a result of those hearings, the commission issued its final report of recommendations to address the crisis.Having a resource like the Not Invisible Act Commission’s final report provided Indigenous people and governments, as well as federal, state and local branches of the US government, with data and suggestions on how to reduce the crises. The act itself was historic, not only because it shed light on an issue that Indian Country has faced for decades, but also because it was the first bill that was introduced and passed by four Indigenous US congressional members.Despite the report no longer being available online, advocates say the fight to bring light to and end the MMIP and MMIW crises continues.Tracking numbersCharolette Gonzales, the policy and advocacy director of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women (CSVANW) said that she and other staffers were shocked when the Not Invisible Act Commission’s report was removed from the federal website.“They were like, ‘What does this mean for the future of other information that supports our work?’” said Gonzales, who is Diné and San Ildefonso Pueblo. “[We] make sure that our communities are informed. What does that mean for them?”The coalition focuses on preventive work, or trying to stop violence against Indigenous women before it happens.“When doing this education, we are better able to equip them with the ability to advocate for themselves, and that work is really important as we move forward, especially with these unprecedented times of this current presidential administration,” she said.Karrisa Newkirk, of the Oklahoma-based MMIW Chahta, an organization that supports affected families through financial assistance, provides training opportunities for law enforcement agencies, and works with victims to help them heal after experiencing violence, said that the work doesn’t stop just because of a decision made in Washington.“When it comes to our work and what we do, I don’t feel like we’ve missed a step,” she said. “We’re going to continue to serve our families exactly how we should and always have. When it comes to other MMIWs across the United States, I truly feel like it kind of puts us back in time a little bit, where people aren’t going to see what a real crisis it is.”Newkirk said that after the commission collected the data, it should have been used to make tangible changes. Still, having a national database that tracked MMIW cases was vital.“Even though there were great strides in the last couple years, them removing that was like a slap in the face. It was a huge step back.” she said. “It felt like we were being heard and recognized, and then all of a sudden it felt like that was no longer what it was any more … When you think about that as someone that’s in the work and you know how many people already don’t know about it, and then it’s removed from the United States website, it’s definitely disheartening.”The CSVANW has begun discussing creating a database of its own, one built with information that the organization has collected over the years, including documents and reports that the Department of Justice previously issued. This method of ensuring that vital documents and resources are stored somewhere other than on government agencies’ websites is something that some advocates have been pushing for since the website purges began.The National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, Inc (NIWRC), a non-profit organization that works to end violence against Native women, children and communities, for example, has a version of the Not Invisible Act Commission’s report that is still accessible.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We’re taking it upon ourselves to collect as much information as we can as it slowly becomes unavailable to us on purpose,” Gonzales said. “I think the censorship is a really hard hit to our communities, especially to our work. We already have limited resources as not only just a Native organization and survivor-led organization, but also as tribal people who live in these pueblos and work with our people.”MMIW Chahta also tracks its own numbers, and is trying to overcome racial misclassification by law enforcement.Tribal communities are also concerned about whether treaties, agreements made between sovereign nations, will be upheld by the US government, Gonzales said. The US has had a long history of violating treaties even before Trump’s election.Since he was sworn in, Trump and Elon Musk have called on the General Services Administration to terminate the leases of roughly 7,500 federal offices, including 25 regional offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. On Friday, Trump rescinded a Biden-era executive order, which aimed to strengthen tribal sovereignty for the 574 federally recognized tribes in the nation.Following the removal of the Not Invisible Act Commission’s final report page, federal agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid, including, “indigenous community”, “tribal”, and “Native American”. Defense department websites removed pages about Indigenous code talkers, whose usage of Choctaw and Navajo languages to communicate messages were vital for winning the first and second world wars.Of the extreme changes being made by the administration and their implications for Indigenous people, Gonzales said: “A lot of community members, along with our staff, are emotionally exhausted every day we hear about new executive orders coming out.“Our survivors and our resources truly help decrease the violence that happens in our communities … And so, once we heard this, I think our mind instantly went to the fact that Native women will die if we don’t have federal funding. That’s just a fact.” More

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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