Single cat ladies vs. tradwives: Is motherhood right wing?

Babies ! President Donald Trump, the father of five, is looking for ways to encourage marriage and child-bearing, perhaps with a $5,000 payment to married mothers, cash on delivery. Vice President J.D. Vance, the father of three, wants "more babies." Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and his wife have nine children, one of whom has Down's Syndrome. The slogan is: "Make America Mate Again."

"Humanity is dying," said Trump advisor Elon Musk, the father of 14 or more children with multiple women, in a Fox interview. "The birth rate is very low in almost every country. And so unless that changes, civilization will disappear."

The U.S. fertility rate fell below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman in 2007, and is now at 1.6 births per woman, near its record low set two years ago. Many countries in Europe and Asia are even lower.

Hungary, Italy, Greece, South Korea and others have tried policies to raise the birth rate with little success.

Madeleine Kearns reported on the pro-baby Natal Conference in Austin while visibly pregnant, she writes in The Free Press. A gaggle of masked protesters called her a "Nazi," charging that pro-natalism is a "neo-Nazi, eugenic racist" movement. Baby-making is now seen as right wing, at least by those on the left, Kearns writes.

NatalCon bills itself as nonpartisan with "no political or ideological goal other than a world in which our children can have grandchildren," the website declares.

Attendees "disagreed on everything from family structure and gender roles to abortion and IVF, Kearns writes. But most of the speakers are right of center. And three-quarters of speaker and attendees are male.

"In certain corners of the right, it’s a choice between childless cat ladies and tradwives" (traditional wives)," she writes.

Liberal commentators see pro-natalism as "a nationalist project to outbreed people from other parents of the world," a "racist or eugenicist plot to yield more white, genetically perfect babies."

The push for big families goes against "environmentalism, which . . . posits that the population is too high already, and feminism," father-of-four Bryan Caplan told Kearns. He's the author of Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids.

One of the few female speakers, Catherine Pakaluk, is the  author of Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.

It's not surprising that feminists dislike the message that women should have more babies, she said. Women bear most of the burden of pregnancy and child-raising. “You are definitely asking women to spend a little bit less time doing the thing that they trained to do, feel quite good at, maybe feel deeply fulfilled doing.”

Pakaluk earned a Harvard degree, and married a widower with seven children when she was 23. She went on to have eight children of her own. She completed a PhD in economics and got her first full-time, paying job when she was 40, and pregnant with her final child. She recommends starting a family early, then launching a career.

She "is skeptical that policies aimed at expanding maternity leave, or making childcare more affordable, would make much difference, because they won’t change the fact that many women experience motherhood as a constant pull in two different directions," writes Kearns.

"Intensive parenting" has made it even harder on women who try to juggle a career (or a job) with child raising. It's not enough to keep kids fed, clothed and away from the bleach. Parents -- usually the mother -- must nurture, enrich, educate, motivate and transport each child. "Go out and play, but be home for dinner," doesn't cut it any more.

If I had advice for young couples it would be: Live near your parents, grandparents or siblings. You don't get along that great with your mother-in-law? You will when she offers free babysitting.