Republicans Are Trying To Push Women To Have More Babies, And It Looks Disturbingly Familiar

You wrote in that same article: “In Nazi Germany, improved economic conditions led to an increased birth rate. But pro-natalist policies helped to encourage this rise, particularly the laws prohibiting abortion and allowing for the prosecution of those performing and receiving abortions.”

It’s hard not to think of what’s happening in the US when I read that. The fall of federal abortion protections in 2022 has led to nearly half the country criminalizing care, and physicians are being prosecuted, and pregnant people are dying. 

The Dobbs decision [overturning Roe v. Wade] was a pro-natalist policy. I like the language of the current movement, the language of forced birth policies, because by banning abortion, they really do take away women’s autonomy. 

One of the problems in the United States is that not only are we limiting access to abortion and birth control, but we have forced birth policies in a country that has aggressively rejected things like maternity leave, Medicare for all, adequate prenatal and postnatal care, and affordable childcare. These things have not been remedied even when Roe was in place. 

One of the arguments behind pro-natalism is that the state needs people to do labor — right now we are heading toward a demographic cliff with an aging population and fewer younger people to do the work needed for society and to take care of the aged. Of course, this could be solved by immigration and creating pathways to citizenship, but the very same people committed to pro-natalism take hardline stances against immigration. This just further demonstrates that pro-natalism’s primary goal is to enforce second-class citizenship on women. 

Are there any pro-natalist policies from Nazi Germany or other fascist regimes you’ve studied that stand out or are similar to the ones that the Trump administration is entertaining?

I was having a conversation with one of my colleagues the other day about the proposed $5,000 allowance for someone who has a child. That reminded me of the loans that Nazi Germany afforded to white Aryan families. That is very similar. It’s also a joke — $5,000 isn’t going to do much. 

Under Nazi Germany’s racial hygiene laws, they gave out loans to families, specifically to the husband, that promised you could reduce your payback amount with every subsequent child. One of the big things that the women I studied — and they talked about it well into the Cold War — is the fascist triple K: Kinder, Küche, Kirche, which means “children, kitchen, church.” This pro-natalist ideology sought to confine women, essentially, to second-class citizenship.

I keep thinking about the idea to award a “National Medal of Motherhood” to women who have six kids and the similarity to Nazi Germany’s motherhood medals.

It really reduces women to breeders. It ignores the deep complexity of childbirth. You have a uterus and ovaries, but that doesn’t mean you have the ability to have children. But if you can’t have children and you have a uterus and ovaries, do you no longer have status in your own country? It marginalizes fathers and fatherhood. There’s so many layers of issues.