MAGA wants more teen births. It won’t work

There used to be a consensus on both the left and right that it was best to wait for adulthood to have kids. But some conservatives are rethinking this view, and Republicans are now drifting toward open complaints that teenage girls aren’t having enough babies.

On April 9 podcaster Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, lamented on X that teen births are down 72%, a statistic she blamed on hormonal birth control. “Our biological destiny is to have babies,” she wrote. That same day, Fox News medical analyst Marc Siegel called it a “problem” that the birth rate for girls aged 15-19 has plummeted in the past couple of decades. 

But it’s not just talk. The push to drive teenagers to have babies is showing up in policy. After a federal judge blocked the Trump administration in October from shuttering the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, the White House got more brazen, proposing a Health and Human Services budget that would eliminate it altogether. The administration is also demanding that federally-funded clinics serving low-income populations dissuade their patients, who are disproportionately young, from using contraception.

As Republicans continue to ramp up their efforts limiting the rights of women, these attacks on teen girls are likely to get worse. The good news, however, is that it’s unlikely to work. While public health efforts to reduce teen pregnancies have helped, the reasons for the huge drop in teen birth rates have largely been cultural. And it’s highly unlikely that anything Republicans do will convince young women to change their minds about waiting until they’re fully grown to have babies of their own.

The larger context for this drive is that Republicans have been panicking about declining birth rates for a few years now, and the party’s efforts have been bolstered by reporters and media outlets willing to go along with the moral panic without closely interrogating the anti-feminist leanings of those driving it. But after a few sustained cycles of apocalyptic coverage of this social trend, some major outlets have finally started to examine the real reasons why birth rates are dropping. Turns out, it’s not because of shallow “girlbosses” who are too worried about making Pilates class to have babies. The major reason is because teen girls are having fewer babies, which impacts the overall birth rate. While adult women still have about the same number of babies they used to, some are having them a little later in life than in the past.

Many conservatives are unwilling to be as blunt as Miller has been, but it’s unavoidable: Restoring the birth rate to previous levels would require teens to have more babies. And there are growing signals among the right that more teenage pregnancies are what needs to happen. Six weeks before his assassination in September, Charlie Kirk tweeted “More people should get married young and have more kids than they can afford.” His words have turned into a mantra typically employed by Republicans who, like Kirk himself, did not follow that advice. Girls are being heavily targeted by anti-contraception propaganda online, as Kylie Cheung documented last week at Substack newsletter Abortion, Every Day. 

In February, the New York Times published an article outlining why it’s a good thing teenagers and college-aged women are having fewer babies. The story noted that “many women talked about establishing themselves, getting a degree or a stable job,” and cited demographers who argued that this is what we should want, because stable adults do a better job at raising kids, on average, than those who don’t have this security. 

MAGA’s reaction to the article was furious — and telling. Libs of TikTok, the popular right-wing X account, raged at the story, with commenters insisting the changing demographics represented a plot to destroy white America and “replace” it with immigrants. Miller called it “the number one threat to Western Civilization.” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh said humans are in danger of becoming “an endangered species.” (Not quite: the world’s population is currently four times what it was 100 years ago.) The Washington Examiner warned it was “the end of the world.” According to the Federalist, the real problem is “an unwillingness to embrace adulthood along with its hardships and responsibilities.”

That’s not true, of course. As the New York Times article noted, teens and young women are waiting until they’re a little older because they do take adult responsibilities seriously. As Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the Times, “We spent decades shaming women for having kids under the wrong circumstances, for not having their ducks in a row.” Now, she said, they are “holding up their end of the bargain.”

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This embrace of responsibility is, I’d argue, actually why the right is upset. As journalist Jane Coaston argued on the Hysteria podcast, birth rate panic is rarely sincere. In reality, it’s a cover story people use to dress up views — like advocating teen pregnancy — they can’t argue for directly in public. What is actually scaring the right is that young women, by taking responsibility, are building real power in the world. The real concern is not that far from the surface. Right-wing coverage of falling birth rates frequently attacks women who work outside of the home by using insults like “girlboss” and “shrill.”

As their long-held opposition to sex education and birth control programs imply, Republicans have never really been all that opposed to teen pregnancy. Feigning opposition to young girls having babies provided a useful pose to justify abstinence-only programs and attacks on welfare spending. Now that more young women are gaining equality, the right is shedding even this token opposition to teen pregnancy.

But in the end, there is little Republicans can do to change teen and young women’s behavior. In-depth research suggests that much of what’s changed is young women themselves. More teen girls than ever before look to their future and feel they have a realistic shot at having a career and financial independence. They have significantly more social supports, from family to school to media representation, bolstering their views that they have bright futures, if they play their cards right. In the past, many girls felt that they didn’t have much to look forward to beyond marriage and children. Now that they do have a reason to wait, many more are choosing to do so.

Katie Miller can whine all she wants, but I have a feeling the kids aren’t listening.