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The Great White House Baby Boom thrust forth another infant into the world last Sunday: one Alec Neel Vance, the first child born to a sitting vice-president since little baby Schuyler Colfax III in 1870.
If not quite divinely conceived, Alec Neel was certainly the product of some act of proto-natalist providence — at least according to JD Vance in his new book Communion (the reviews are in, and they are not great). The vice-president explains that, despite his wife Usha having declared she was “done” with babies after their third child, her mind was suddenly changed following the assassination of their friend Charlie Kirk, after which Kirk’s widow, Erika, said she regretted not having more babies with him.
“Something changed for Usha, and not long after we buried my friend, she became pregnant with our fourth child, a boy,” writes Vance. (If that sounds about as unsexy as it gets to you, you might not have seen the chemistry displayed between the pair during JD’s appearance on Storytime with the Second Lady.)
It’s not the only reference to baby-making Vance makes in the book; in fact, babies are reportedly mentioned 33 times (just shy of the 40 mentions of Donald Trump). Indeed, Communion seems to be less about what its subtitle suggests — “Finding My Way Back to Faith” — and more about the urgent need for people in America to procreate. (Not so much the newly arrived ones, of course; Usha is, thankfully, a second-generation immigrant.)
And Vance is not the only person in the top tiers of the Maga-verse who seems to have felt an obligation to produce spawn during the second presidency of the self-declared “fertilisation president” (ick) and “father of fertility” (vom), Donald Trump. In May, press secretary Karoline Leavitt gave birth to her second child. In June, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and the chief architect of his anti-immigration agenda, Stephen Miller, and his wife Katie, produced a fourth child under six.
And thank God, quite frankly, because as we know, one in three American families “are under-babied”. No, I don’t mean that they are not being coddled or cuddled enough (though surely that too); I use that term in the way that administrator of the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services Mehmet “Dr” Oz keeps trying to make happen, to mean that these families are either having fewer babies than they would like, or none at all.
Meanwhile, at the same Mother’s Day event where Dr Oz used the term most recently, health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr got up to the mic and once again bemoaned the decline of teenage sperm count. Others have similarly veered into this odd territory: Katie Miller has on more than one occasion lamented the collapse in teen pregnancies.
All of it feels a bit creepy and ill-judged. That is not to say that these fanatics are not getting at something important. There is, indeed, a fertility crisis not just in America, but across the world, and we should all be trying to figure out what to do about it. And yet because the matter has become so politicised, such an idée fixe for the American right, there seems to be a reluctance from the other side to acknowledge the issue as anything other than an economic one.
“While it’s true that US fertility rates have fallen sharply over the past two decades, it’s not because of a lack of desire,” asserted the Population Reference Bureau in a response to Oz’s comments in May. “People aren’t rejecting parenthood — the conditions for it keep getting harder.”
I’ve seen many other similar claims on the left. But they’re not really confronting the truth. While economic worries might be a factor in the decision not to have children, they are not in fact the primary one; indeed, the countries with the lowest birth rates in the world, like South Korea, are also among the most affordable places to have children. A 2024 Pew survey found the main reason given by Americans under 50 who don’t have children and are unlikely to ever have any was that they simply “don’t want them”. The second biggest reason was that they “want to focus on other things”; the third was concerns about the state of the world.
The fact is that many women no longer regard the professional, social, personal and bodily sacrifices that come with having a baby as worth it. Rather than pretending this is not the reality, we need to confront it so that we can come up with ways to do something about it. Turning fertility into a partisan issue might just have the opposite effect.
