“I want a baby boom,” Trump has said. His administration is indeed exploring a range of approaches to boost the birth rate, including baby bonuses and classes on natural fertility. Yet his focus is entirely on the production of babies. When it comes to keeping these babies alive, this administration is leaving parents on their own, facing some horrifying and unprecedented challenges.
It’s common for right-wing American governments, whether at the state or federal level, to be only half-heartedly natalist: restricting abortion, birth control, and sex education, while also failing to embrace any policy that makes it easier to raise a family, like universal childcare, robust public education, school lunch, cash supports for parents, or paid family leave. But the Trump-Vance government has taken this paradox to a new level, with natalist rhetoric far surpassing that of other recent administrations, while real live children are treated with more depraved, life-threatening indifference than in any American government in at least a century.
Due to brutal cuts at the Food and Drug Administration, where 20,000 employees have been fired, the administration has suspended one of its quality-control programs for milk, Reuters reported this week. Milk is iconically associated with child health, and this is not a mere storybook whimsy: Most pediatricians regard it as critical for young children’s developing brains and bones. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends two cups a day for babies between 1 and 2 years old. While some experts—and of course the administration—are downplaying the change, emphasizing that milk will still be regulated, a bird flu epidemic hardly seems like the right time to be cutting corners. A government so focused on making more babies shouldn’t be so indifferent to risks to our nation’s toddlers.
This reckless approach to child safety is not limited to food. Also this week, The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency was canceling tens of millions of dollars in grants for research on environmental hazards to children in rural America. These hazards include pesticides, wildfire smoke, and forever chemicals, and the grants supported research toward solutions to such problems. Many focused on improving child health in red states like Oklahoma.
Children are much more vulnerable than adults to the health problems that can stem from exposure to toxins. That makes Trump’s policies, for all his baby-friendly chatter, seem pathologically misopedic; he is reversing bans on so-called “forever chemicals” and repealing limits set by the Biden administration on lead exposure, all of which will have devastating effects on children’s mental and physical development.
And of course there’s RFK Jr.’s crazy campaign against vaccines. This week, the health secretary said he was considering removing the Covid-19 vaccine from the list of vaccines the government recommends for children, even though to win Senate confirmation, he had agreed not to alter the childhood vaccine schedule. Even worse, RFK Jr. has used his office to promote disinformation about extensively debunked links between vaccines and autism, while praising unproven “treatments” for measles as an outbreak that has afflicted more than 600 people and killed at least three continues to spread. Trump’s public health cuts are meanwhile imperiling a program that gives free vaccines to children.
So far, I haven’t even mentioned children outside the United States. Trump has not only continued Biden’s policy of mass infanticide in Gaza—at least 100 children there have been killed or injured every week by Israeli forces since the dissolution of the ceasefire in March—he has vastly surpassed that shameful record by dismantling USAID. (The Supreme Court demanded that the government restore some of the funding to the already-contracted programs, but it’s unclear what the results of that ruling will be.) Children across the globe will starve to death due to this policy. The cuts to nutrition funding alone, researchers estimate, will kill some 369,000 children who could otherwise have lived. That’s not even counting all the other children’s lives imperiled by USAID funding cuts to vaccines, health services, and maternal care, or the children who will go unprotected now that Trump has cut 69 programs dedicated to tracking child labor, forced labor, and human trafficking.
Natalist or exterminationist? Pro-child or rabidly infanticidal? It’s tempting to dismiss such extreme contradictions within the Trump administration as merely chaotic and incoherent. But the situation is worse than that.
Trying to boost births while actively making the world less safe for children is creepy—but not in a new way. The contradiction is baked into the eugenicist tradition that Vance and Trump openly embrace. Vance said at an anti-abortion rally in January that he wanted “more babies in the United States of America.” Vance also said he wanted “more beautiful young men and women” to have children. Notice he doesn’t just say “more babies”: the qualifiers are significant. Vance was implying that he wanted the right people to have babies: American, white, able-bodied, “beautiful” people with robust genetics. Children dying because of USAID cuts aren’t part of this vision, presumably, because those children are not American or white. As for infected milk, environmental toxins, or measles—here too, it’s hard not to hear social Darwinist overtones: In a far-right eugenicist worldview, children killed by those things likely aren’t fit for survival. In a more chaotic and dangerous environment, this extremely outdated logic goes, natural selection will ensure that the strongest survive.
It’s also worth noting that this way of thinking originates in—and many of these Trump administration policies aim to return us to—an earlier era, when people of all ages, but especially children, were simply poisoned by industrial pollution, unvaccinated for diseases, and unprotected from industrial accidents. In such an unsafe world for children, people had many more of them; the world was such a dangerous place to raise kids that families expected to lose a few.
That all-too-recent period is the unspoken context for natalist and eugenicist visions. That’s the world Trump and Vance seem to be nostalgic for, one in which women were constantly pregnant and in labor, and children were constantly dying horrible deaths. Doesn’t that sound pleasant for everyone?
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