Under-Babied
The Oval Office spent Mother's Day weekend telling American women they are a resource shortfall.
“Motherhood is becoming a new form of involuntary servitude.” — Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women (1983)
Every authoritarian movement eventually seeks control of reproduction because control of women secures control of the future. The photograph endures because the face reveals the cost beneath forced birth politics: exhaustion, dependency, and sacrifice absorbed by women long after the slogans disappear. Art Credit: Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother (1936), gelatin silver photograph.
On May 11, 2026, the day before Mother’s Day, the Oval Office hosted what was billed as a maternal health press event. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that American women are walking around in a “toxic soup.” Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz said one in three Americans are “under-babied.”
Over the past eight months, a remarkably small number of Founding and annual subscribers have sustained this publication and protected the independence allowing Glass Empires to remain uncompromising in both depth and analysis. Consider upgrading. Annual is the best value.
A new federal website, moms.gov, launched. Senator Katie Britt attended. The president appeared to nod off, surrounded by children, while his health secretary explained that today’s teenage boys produce half the sperm of the men of 1970.
This was not a press conference. This was a liturgy.
Beneath the framing, the executive branch declared American women’s bodies in a phase of national underperformance. “Under-babied” is bureaucratese so cold the term nearly rhymes with “underutilized.” The construction treats women as productive units measured against a target.
The target is 2.1. The current output is 1.57. The shortfall must be addressed. Trump, said Oz, will produce “a lot of Trump babies.” The babies are owed to the president. The babies bear his name.
This story is not new. Earlier versions appear in Ceaușescu’s Romania, Nazi Germany’s Lebensborn program, Stalin’s motherhood medals, Orbán’s tax discounts for the fertile. Margaret Atwood put “handmaid” on the map. Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies offers the precise antecedent.
Theweleit examined the diaries, novels, and letters of the Freikorps, the German paramilitary veterans of the First World War who became the storm troopers of the Nazi state.
He found a recurring horror of feminine fluidity, a dread of engulfment by what he called the Red Flood: the dirty water, the seeping and dissolving feminine body. For the fascist male, Theweleit argued, the female body threatens his armored coherence. The political project: cleanse women’s bodies, control them, or both at once.
RFK Jr.’s “toxic soup” is the Red Flood in contemporary American translation. Kennedy described American women as polluted liquid threatening masculine integrity. The soup must be cleaned. The fertile body must be conscripted. Theweleit identified this register fifty years ago.
The pronatalist turn arrives in the idiom of public health for a reason. The same administration that staged this weekend’s event has gutted rural Medicaid. The same administration’s tax bill stripped the social programs that mothers most need. The same administration has spent a year dismantling federal maternal health protections.
Oz praised the president for “saving Medicaid” even as the program he administers is hollowed out beneath his feet. He cited rural maternal healthcare investment the same week rural hospitals continued closing for lack of funds. The contradiction is not an oversight. The contradiction is the policy.
By Tuesday the contradiction had a number. Mediaite calculated: the $50 billion Oz cited for rural healthcare equals 37 percent of last year’s Medicaid cuts, spread over the next decade. The other 63 percent is gone. The arithmetic that names women a national resource is foreclosing the maternity care they need over the same decade.
The Theweleit framework explains the apparent contradiction. The fascist imagination does not require healthy women. The fascist imagination requires available women. The body is conscripted not because the regime values that body but because the regime values its product.
The website, the fertility benefit, and the IVF coupon are the gentle end of an apparatus whose other end criminalizes miscarriage, prosecutes women who manage their own abortions, and surveils pregnant bodies at every stage. Americans are already living at the other end.
Ask the women in Texas. Ask Kate Cox, 31, a Dallas mother of two, denied an emergency abortion by the Texas Supreme Court in December 2023 despite carrying a fetus with fatal trisomy 18 (Cox v. Texas, No. 23-0994). She fled Texas to end the pregnancy doctors said threatened her life and future fertility. The women without her means did not.
Ask the women in Oklahoma. Ask Jaci Statton, 25, a stay-at-home mother of three near Shawnee, whose molar pregnancy turned cancerous and could be fatal. Oklahoma Children’s Hospital told her husband to wait in the parking lot until she was “crashing” or near a heart attack. Statton drove to Wichita and later had her fallopian tubes closed, concluding pregnancy in Oklahoma is too dangerous.
Ask the women who flew to Illinois.
In the days that followed, RFK Jr.’s framing of moms.gov as “a huge win for the MAHA movement and the pro-life movement” was the line that traveled. The pronatalist apparatus and the antiabortion movement are not adjacent. They are one operation.
The Theweleit framework has a corollary the administration enacts daily. If women are valued only as birthing receptacles, any body refusing the assignment threatens the entire system. Trans existence is the most explicit refusal. A trans woman cannot be conscripted as a vessel. A trans man has stepped out of the inventory. The armored fascist imagination cannot accommodate either possibility.
The same administration has accordingly stripped trans healthcare access, banned trans athletes, purged trans service members from the military, and redefined sex by reproductive function alone. The war on trans people is not a side front. The war on trans people is the pronatalist project itself, fought on its most exposed terrain.
By Wednesday Catholic publications had broken with the IVF rule on doctrinal grounds. The pronatalism is not traditional opposition to abortion. The project is about births.
What was new on Monday was the explicitness. The administration said the quiet part with a graphics package and a Senate cosponsor. The rule itself was not yet in force; Labor, HHS, and Treasury had published it on May 10 and 11 as a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, awaiting public comment. The performance preceded the policy. In the President’s house on Mother’s Day eve, American women were told their reproductive output is a national security concern and the state has a number in mind.
The number is 2.1. The current output is 1.57. Kennedy will be in touch about your toxic soup.
History is the warning. Regimes that talk this way do not stop at websites. They never have. They build the architecture in public, in daylight, while the country argues over whether “under-babied” is really such a bad word.
“Under-babied” is the language of a state that has decided women are inventory.
"We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices." — Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
Over the past eight months, a remarkably small number of Founding and annual subscribers have sustained this publication and protected the independence allowing Glass Empires to remain uncompromising in both depth and analysis. If you value context rather than hot takes, will you consider becoming a paying subscriber today?
Glass Empires is providing resources for communities. Sustaining independent investigative work of this depth depends upon readers willing to support it with a coffee or double espresso at Buy Me a Coffee for Glass Empires
Please also download free materials and share widely.
Sources
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. McClelland and Stewart, 1985.
Cox v. Texas, No. 23-0994 (Tex. Dec. 11, 2023). Center for Reproductive Rights case file. Texas Tribune coverage by Eleanor Klibanoff.
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. U.S. fertility rate analysis, 2024.
Levine, Hagai and Shanna Swan. “Temporal Trends in Sperm Count: A Systematic Review and Meta-Regression Analysis of Samples Collected Globally in the 20th and 21st Centuries.” Human Reproduction Update, 2022.
Mediaite. “Dr. Oz Tells the Country It’s Not Procreating Enough: ‘Americans Are Under-Babied.’” May 12, 2026.
Statton EMTALA Complaint. Filed September 2023; denied by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, January 2024. NPR and Oklahoma Voice coverage.
Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. University of Minnesota Press, 1987 and 1989.
U.S. Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Treasury. Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Fertility Benefits as Limited Excepted Benefits. May 10 and 11, 2026.
I’d like to say I have no words, but that’s not quite true. I have plenty. I’m just having trouble getting them past the rage long enough to be useful.
Wendy has done something careful and important here. She found Klaus Theweleit, dusted him off, and held him up against the Oval Office like a mirror. The reflection is ugly enough that most writers would’ve stopped there, named the historical echo, and called it a warning. She almost does. But a warning implies there’s still time to heed it.
There isn’t. That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.
Kate Cox isn’t a cautionary tale. She’s a data point in a system that’s already running. Jaci Statton isn’t proof that things could get bad. She drove to Wichita because bad was the only thing on offer in Oklahoma, and then she had her tubes closed because she’d correctly concluded that pregnancy in her home state had become a medical liability. That’s not the future arriving. That’s Tuesday.
The Theweleit framework Wendy cites says the fascist project requires available women, not healthy ones. The Medicaid arithmetic makes that concrete: 63 percent of last year’s cuts don’t come back, spread over the same decade they’re promising to fix maternal healthcare. You don’t build that math by accident. You build it when the body matters and the woman carrying it doesn’t.
And the men in that room. My god. Three of them, one nodding off, diagnosing the American female body as a production shortfall. Oz explaining sperm counts. Kennedy explaining contamination. A president whose subordinate announced, in the White House, that the nation’s reproductive output belongs to the president personally. The babies bear his name. Think about that construction for more than a second, because it deserves to be looked at directly rather than absorbed and filed. A sitting cabinet official told the country that American births are owed to the man in the Oval Office. While he slept in his chair, surrounded by children, the apparatus got its ribbon cut. The website’s live. The number’s posted. Kennedy will be in touch.
The "toxic soup" is an environment trashed and made hostile to human health by widespread pesticides applied to crops during growth and after harvesting, EMF frequencies that harm sensitive people, industrial pollutants in the air and water, blue light from laptop and phone screens, and many other contaminants. Not to mention utterly unhealthy ultra processed foods that form the diet of the majority of Americans. And yes, male sperm count has fallen over the past five decades or so. I am not arguing that the Trump regime is kowtowing to religious fundies who want to shove women and minorities back to the 1850s. I just hate that this repressive movement is tied to a genuine concern about how unhealthy modern industry and life are to human beings and nature.