It's all bullshit.
That's precisely the point.
We are living in an upside-down world, friends. Dr. Oz, who is basically the physician equivalent of a WebMD rabbit hole – frankly that may be giving him more credit than he deserves – stood up in the Oval Office this week and proclaimed that Americans are underbabied.” No, I did not pull this from an Onion article, but I cannot wait to watch the SNL clips.
This was to announce the White House’s new website — moms.gov (it’s real, I swear) — on Mother’s Day. But wait, not all moms. Just those who are experiencing “difficult or unexpected pregnancies.” So, what they really published is an anti-abortion website, doubling down on their efforts to ensure women have zero control over their bodies or their decisions on when and how to start or grow their family. The first resource (second to federally qualified health centers, ya know: legitimate healthcare facilities) they list are pregnancy centers, also known as crisis pregnancy centers —- also known as NOT REAL MEDICAL FACILITIES THAT ARE NOT EVEN REQUIRED TO HIRE MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS AND WHO DO NOT ACTUALLY PROVIDE COMPREHENSIVE HEALTHCARE. Because nothing says ‘we care about mothers’ like sending them to a storefront staffed by rent-a-fake-nurses trained to delay, deceive, and disappear once the baby arrives.
The website is not just about referring women to fraudulent providers. The site also funnels pregnant women to Option Line, one of the tools used by Heartbeat International to collect copious amounts of data on pregnant women.
Then they go on to tell the pregnant woman what to eat. Sure, I guess that’s generally helpful information except for the fact that they have literally stripped food assistance away from millions of Americans. We know a leading reason to seek an abortion is financial insecurity and that for many who were denied an abortion, years later they were unable to meet their basic needs like food and housing.
And yet…the prescription is more babies — to be delivered into a country that has systematically stripped away school lunches, maternal healthcare, and the legal right to survive the pregnancy itself. Not only are women dying from sepsis because they cannot get medical care while pregnant. Not only are they being criminalized for seeking abortions or for how they have disposed of their fetal tissue after miscarrying. Not only is Louisiana on a rampage to stop the sale of one of the safest drugs on the market, mifepristone, again. But now, they are deputizing child welfare agencies – or I will call them what they are, family policing institutions — to separate children (read: children who have become pregnant) from their parents because they tried to seek necessary medical care. They took the daughter without a court order. All because a single mother took her daughter across state lines to seek a legal abortion.
Remember, they want teens to be having babies and RFK Jr. stepped out of his sauna to diagnose the reason why they are not: teens these days just don’t have as much sperm as they used to.
You could call the gap between the imperative to produce life and the disinvestment in sustaining it cognitive dissonance. You could call it hypocrisy. But cognitive dissonance implies they haven’t noticed the contradiction — and yet, they have. This is the whole damn point.
The hyperfocus has been on reproductive healthcare, abortion access, and bodily autonomy – rightfully so given the expedited attacks since Roe was overturned. Anti-abortion activists hug their bibles and preach moral clarity. Organizations tout their visions of saving the children. But guys, it’s all utter bullshit.
These policy actions and their disastrous and sometimes fatal impacts are pawns in the political game to dismantle our democracy. You see, if you can’t access food, you’re not spending your time reading the news or being civically engaged, you’re trying to figure out where your next meal is coming from. If you can’t get adequate, safe, and quality healthcare from actual professionals, you are not tuning into the latest press conference or showing up to your local city council meeting. When you are living paycheck to paycheck or do not have one at all, you’re spinning your wheels trying to navigate bureaucratic systems that were built to exhaust you, not support you.
And when you are Black in America, you are being teleported back to the Jim Crow era as you watch your elected officials redraw maps to strip away your power to be represented.
Because the reality is that exhausted people don’t organize. Hungry people don’t lobby. Criminalized people don’t vote. This is the architecture that is dismantling our democracy.
As I wrote before, we cannot separate gender justice work from the work to save our democracy and moreso, we absolutely cannot separate racial and gender equity work from the work needed to build a multiracial democracy. These are not parallel fights. They are the same fight, and we will lose ground until we treat them that way. Garrett Bucks, organizer, activist and potluck host extraordinaire, recently wrote about how we are winning and his fear of losing that momentum. I will argue until I am blue in the face that we will gain momentum and continue to win indefinitely if we join these fights with true, authentic collaboration. We are experiencing the Civil Rights Movement of our time.
So yes, Dr. Oz thinks we need more babies. What they actually need is more people too beaten down, too broke, and too surveilled to notice what’s being taken from them. The prescription was never about babies. It was always about control.
And the Karoline Leavitts of the world cheerleading this agenda will eventually reckon with an uncomfortable truth: the control was never only for the women they were told to attack. It was for them too. When that day comes, the question won’t be whether we were right. It will be whether we built something strong enough to catch them and everyone else they left behind.