Once upon a time, Senator John F. Kennedy celebrated his 1960 victory. He was surrounded by a very pregnant Jackie, who had a baby shortly thereafter. The media coverage was about how beautiful Jackie looked in her maternity dress. His brother Robert was assassinated in 1968, and Robert’s pregnant wife Ethel was carrying a baby at his funeral. I remember a teacher that summer commenting on how sad it was that the baby would never meet his father.
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I guess those were different days because today The New York Times is writing about a pregnant Mrs. Vance, and some of the other pregnancies in The White House. It feels like the writer has a problem with women having babies. Check this out:
As a promo for the first public pregnancy of a vice-presidential family since Ellen Colfax, the wife of Schuyler Colfax, in 1870, it doesn’t get any clearer than that. And it follows the equally public pregnancies of the Trump world figures Karoline Leavitt and Katie Miller. Leavitt, the White House press secretary, gave birth to her second child on May 1 (and has just returned from maternity leave). Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, had their fourth child on June 3.
That three such prominent women in the MAGA movement were pregnant at pretty much the same time was, indubitably, a coincidence.
A coincidence that they got pregnant? So the Orange Man sent a secret memo calling on All The President’s Men to get their women pregnant? How about a different explanation? Maybe these three ladies just wanted another baby, and had no political purpose.
Incredibly, The NY Times called it “the fertility platform”:
Together, the women have created a notably consistent, and somewhat paradigm-shifting, picture of the White House’s family and fertility platform.
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If the bare-chested, muscled mixed martial arts fighters of the U.F.C. match that President Trump hosted on Flag Day were the poster guys for MAGA’s image of masculinity, then the pregnant women of Trump world are one half of their feminine counterparts. Along with the sheath-clad, lip-filled, pageant-haired Mar-a-Lago set, they offer an image of idealized womanhood that gives literal shape to the pronatalist movement.
Idealized womanhood and the image of masculinity? The pronatalist movement? Who talks like that? Have you ever heard someone say that your family having babies is part of a pronatalist movement?
Let me remind everyone that babies are how we create a future. You need them to preserve your family name, and keep your culture going. A future without babies is a country getting old and a population disappearing, e.g. Japan, and some of our NATO allies.
I understand that pregnancy is a personal decision and I respect whatever people decide, but we shouldn’t be talking this way about women having babies. In fact, we need more women having babies, or our civilization is going to run into a demographic wall.
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Last, but not least, Mrs. Vance does look great in her maternity dress.
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Image generated by ChatGPT.