ArcaMax

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Natalism. Elon Musk won’t stop posting about it. Vice President JD Vance won’t stop talking about it. Which is odd, because neither of them has a uterus. Or a clue.

Which is why we women on the right need to step in and help our brothers out with an intervention. Check yourselves before you wreck yourselves, guys.

“Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us,” Vance once told a crowd at a political event. “We want babies not just because they are economically useful. We want more babies because children are good. And we believe children are good, because we are not sociopaths.”

Noted, Captain Cycle Tracker. We’ll alert the uterus department.

Now second-in-command to Trump, he’s still at it: “I want more babies in the United States of America,” he declared, as though population growth can be summoned by sheer willpower or executive order.

He said this to actual Americans, no less. Imagine walking up to a stranger and announcing that. Most parents these days can’t even guilt their adult kids into calling home, let alone having kids when they’ve chosen to do other things with their lives. But Vance thinks the real problem is that people just aren’t babying hard enough.

Musk, meanwhile, is treating the declining birthrate like it’s a hostile corporate takeover. He’s constantly posting on social media about how there aren’t enough humans on Earth. Lest no one takes him seriously, he’s fathered at least 14 children personally, or maybe 100, depending on which tabloid happens to be doing the math.

It’s unclear whether this is his idea of philanthropy. In any case, the same guy known for being so hardcore that he slept on the floor of a Tesla factory, is now trying to bootstrap humanity itself.

But just because some men are in a panic about fertility doesn’t mean the rest of us are.

Some of my counterparts on the right love to chant about limited government — until it comes to people’s sex lives, bedrooms or uteruses. And now the Trump administration appears to be inching toward full-blown natalist micromanagement, egged on by lobbyists with dodgy delusions.

According to the New York Times, the administration is actively weighing policies to goose the birthrate. One idea? A $5,000 “push present” courtesy of Uncle Sam for women who give birth. When asked about it Trump said that it “sounds like a good idea to me.” Apparently redistributing wealth is cool when it’s for reproduction — literally just cash-for-kids.

Another brainstorm: a national honor for women who produce six or more offspring. Not just weird, it’s also recycled from the trash bin of authoritarian history.

In 1944, Stalin cooked up the Order of Maternal Glory to repopulate postwar Russia. But Hitler had already rolled out his “Mother’s Cross” to reward Aryan women with high birth counts.

Now, in 2025, is Trump seriously looking at those guys and going, “Hold my Diet Coke?” When your policy playbook overlaps with totalitarian breeding incentives, maybe that’s a clue that it’s not for the best.

Americans certainly don’t think that it is. A YouGov poll from last month shows 64 percent figure that the motherhood medal is a terrible idea. Another 59 percent aren’t even concerned about the declining birthrate. In other words, it’s safe to say that America didn’t vote for this.

Other proposals? Classic mansplaining — this time about how to conceive. Apparently, if you haven’t had kids, it’s not a choice, just a poor understanding of your own female body. So the idea would be to deploy teachers to assist.

But let’s be honest about the endgame here. We’re in an age of artificial intelligence, and increasingly so. Drones deliver groceries. Factories run on software. Human labor isn’t the bottleneck. The only crisis here is the one manufactured by wealthy donors and bored ideologues who reduce every uterus to footsoldier for a cause that they really ought to better explain for our own understanding, if not entertainment.

Specifically, the Washington-based Heritage Foundation is reportedly preparing a “how-to” guide for Trump on manufacturing more babies and marriages, the Times reports. It’s courtesy of their “DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family.” Three things that don’t exactly come to mind when one thinks of ruling by committee. It also sounds less like a think tank and more like a Netflix docuseries with a culty twist.

The DeVos family of Amway fame funded the initiative. Because if there’s one thing Americans love, it’s having billionaires micromanage their fertility.

I’ve seen this circus from the inside. Two decades ago, I was a director for a Beltway foundation in this same orbit. That is, until I refused to read a scripted anti-choice speech at a nationally televised event. That’s where I drew the line. Most women have one. And this agenda is crossing it.

Which brings us back to Trump. The man who now casually refers to himself as the “fertilization president.” He’s leaning into this natalist push, building on his denunciation of an Alabama court ruling against IVF access last year.

Suddenly, he supports federal guidance on the issue.

But abortion? That’s up to the states, he insists. Because the Supreme Court ruled on it. And there’s nothing that he can do about that, ladies. Unless, of course, those states contradict his agenda. Then it’s override time.

If Team Trump is really about freedom and not cycle-tracking, uterus surveillance or handing out birthing medals like they’re Olympic judges at a childbirth decathlon — 10 babies, one medal, zero rights — they have a weird way of showing it. Because nothing screams “limited government” like a top-down billionaire-backed breeding blueprint, promoted by lobbyists, backed by billionaires, and lifted from the Soviet playbook.