You Can't Pay Us to Have More Kids
  April 22, 2025 Greetings, Meteor readers, It’s Earth Day! And also, it’s Taurus season! May we all feel some stabilizing, comforting energy over the next few weeks because boy, do we need it. In today’s newsletter, Nona Willis Aronowitz explains what’s behind the administration’s “make more babies” plan. Plus, we bid farewell to the pope. Bulls up, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONBaby bust: Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the pro-natalist Trump administration, concerned about the U.S.’s falling birth rate, has been brainstorming ways to get American women to have more children. Some of their ideas include five-thousand-dollar baby bonuses, menstrual-cycle education, and a National Medal of Motherhood (a tactic you might recognize from the Nazis). Notably missing: plans to subsidize childcare, parental leave, or any other crucial improvements actual families have been requesting for generations. Lots of incredulous reactions across the internet made that exact point: “How can you expect us to have more babies without a strong social safety net?” As someone who yearns for free daycare and paid maternity leave, I’m tempted to say the same. Yes, it’s darkly ironic that the Trump administration is calling for more babies even as it has made deep cuts to maternal and child health and opposed any repair of the U.S.’s woefully inadequate family policies. But the thing is, offering benefits to families doesn’t actually boost birth rates. In fact, many countries that provide robust support for parents, like Finland, Norway, and Germany, have birth rates below ours. There’s no evidence that Trump’s proposed policies would work, either. “Even the richest, savviest, most committed governments” are stumped, a history professor told Vox in 2023. “If such policies were discoverable, I think someone would have discovered them.” So the question you’re probably wondering is: What’s so bad about the birth rate falling? Most countries in the world are now below the “replacement rate” of 2.1, and the trend is most pronounced in the richest nations; the United States is at about 1.6, a drop of more than 20 percent in the last decade. Seen one way, fewer babies is a success story of women truly having control over their own lives, and—thanks to contraception access, education, and career opportunities—being able to make choices that may or may not involve children. Maybe those decisions “shouldn’t scare us,” writes feminist writer Jill Filipovic, “but should inform us that when women have more options and opportunities, women’s desires become far more varied.” Still, experts across the political spectrum agree that a shrinking population with more old people than young presents huge economic and humanitarian challenges. An aging society means fewer workers to keep society functioning—to grow our food, to build our houses, to care for the elderly. For many, the story of South Korea, which has the lowest birth rate in the world, provides a disconcerting glimpse of what happens when so few babies are born: 1 in 5 people in South Korea are over 65, and nearly 40 percent of those elders live in poverty. But no matter how valid these concerns are, Trump’s “solutions” are both demeaning (ugh, that medal) and historically familiar: The one way governments have temporarily bumped up birth rates throughout history is by oppressing women. Think Nazi Germany and its Lebensborn program, which used women as incubators for 20,000 “Aryan” babies. Or Ceausescu's Romania, which severely restricted abortion and birth control access to devastating effect. Even our own “baby boom” in the repressive 1950s partially relied on pushing women into domesticity. This brand of pro-natalism—promoted by people like J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk—often goes hand-in-hand with racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. While immigration is often touted as a short-term solution to the U.S.’s low birth rate, the Trump administration’s cocktail of natalism and xenophobia makes clear that they don’t want more babies of all kinds, just white, Christian babies in heterosexual nuclear families. So, yes, I agree that we should seriously grapple with how to reshape society in the face of population decline. I just don’t trust this administration—with its blatant disregard for families and basic human decency—to do it. —Nona Willis Aronowitz AND:
 POPE FRANCIS DELIVERED HIS FINAL EASTER SERMON AT THE VATICAN THE DAY BEFORE HE DIED. VIA GETTY IMAGES
 COLUMBIA STUDENTS AND ALUMNI CHAINED THEMSELVES TO THE UNIVERSITY'S MAIN GATE LAST WEEK TO PROTEST THE DETENTION OF STUDENTS. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
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The Secret War on Birth Control
  April 15, 2025 Hello, sweet Meteor readers, Happy Tax Day! This year I learned about the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, which sounded heavenly given that my family spent fully $15,000 on daycare last year. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that the maximum credit you can claim is 20% of $3,000…i.e. $600. Womp womp. (And Republicans have contemplated dropping even this piddling credit.) The state of childcare in this country is enraging. Today, we’re tracking the sneaky, scary erosion of birth control rights in America. Plus, Harvey Weinstein is back in court, and the “broligarchy” gets a dressing-down. Nona Willis Aronowitz  WHAT'S GOING ONThe secret war on birth control: From the moment the high court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, one Supreme Court justice signaled that birth control access was in danger. In a concurring opinion back then, Justice Clarence Thomas urged the court to re-examine “demonstrably erroneous decisions” like Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 ruling which granted Americans a constitutional right to birth control. So what’s happened to birth control since that fateful ruling? Last week, the National Women’s Law Center released a report addressing that question, and it finds that our right to contraception is indeed eroding. Since 2022, some lawmakers have wasted no time proposing or musing about bans on some forms of birth control; a nominee for Michigan attorney general compared emergency contraception to fentanyl. But there’s one big obstacle in their way: Birth control is incredibly popular. Upward of 90% of Americans believe it should be legal. So policymakers have turned to less obvious tactics to restrict contraception.  BIRTH CONTROL PILLS SHOULD BE AS CONTROVERSIAL AS DANGLY EARRINGS. VIA GETTY IMAGESLawmakers “know that they can’t attack birth control publicly or on paper, so they’re doing it secretly,” said Kimi Chernoby, senior counsel for reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center and the primary author of the report. Chernoby pointed to an innocuous-sounding bill called the Medical Ethics Defense Act, passed just last week in the Tennessee Senate that has a good chance of passing the House, given that a subcommittee already approved it. Not once does it mention birth control. But the legislator who sponsored the bill later said in an interview that the law would allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control. This sneakiness can reach the point of absurdity: Texas senator Bryan Hughes, the guy who crafted the state’s abortion ban, just presented a bill that would test wastewater for abortion medication and hormones found in birth control, because of the supposed health risk it poses “especially for pregnant women and children.” Oh, the irony. And to avoid political blowback, birth control opponents are also going after people on the margins, namely teens (by introducing parental consent laws for birth control) and low-income people (by restricting Title X and Medicaid recipients’ access to contraception). It’s a strategy the report calls “the anti-abortion playbook” because it mirrors anti-abortion activists’ journey from Roe to Dobbs: Start by targeting people who hold less political clout, and inch toward the mainstream from there. They’re also focusing on certain kinds of birth control like emergency contraception, which has been endlessly (and erroneously) attacked by rightwing lawmakers and institutions as a form of abortion, despite the FDA’s explicit clarification in 2022. “Some people are making a conscious decision not to listen to science,” Chernoby said.  CONGRESS TRYING (AND FAILING) TO PROTECT THE RIGHT TO CONTRACEPTION IN 2022. VIA GETTY IMAGESSo what can you do? Since this erosion is mostly on the local and state level for now, Chernoby suggests reaching out to state legislators urging them to codify protections to birth control, which a handful of states have done in the wake of Roe’s fall (and Thomas’ warning). Be sure to call your representatives if you live in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin—all states that have blocked attempts to pass a Right to Contraception Act in the past. And if lawmakers don’t listen, make your outrage known. Chernoby said that when these issues get widespread coverage, restrictions often get reversed. For instance, in 2023, Iowa’s attorney general paused payments to hundreds of sexual assault victims for the emergency contraceptive Plan B. But she backed down after an outcry from Democrats and reproductive rights advocates, who pointed out that paying for pregnancy prevention should be the last thing survivors have to worry about. “When these attacks start happening more in the open,” Chernoby said (and she thinks they eventually will), “I predict there will be a lot of resistance.” Let’s make sure she’s right. AND:
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Death By 10,000 Layoffs
  April 8, 2025 Greetings, Meteor readers, Congratulations to newly crowned NCAA champions the Florida Gators and UConn Huskies. But more importantly, congratulations to me for winning my first bracket pool ever! It only took three years 🥴. In today’s newsletter, we look at the woman-specific impact of layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Plus, we’re all still thinking about The White Lotus. Shannon Melero 🏆  WHAT'S GOING ONDeath by (ten) thousand layoffs: Last week the Trump administration decimated the Department of Health and Human Services; in the words of one former employee, “shitshow is an understatement.” As a result, the organizations housed under HHS—the Center for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid— lost 10,000 staff members, effectively shuttering a number of departments. But not just any departments; the cuts will roll back decades of hard-won progress on women’s health research. Just take a look at what we’ve lost: Most of the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health was laid off, including the team responsible for updating contraception guidelines and groups researching IVF and fertility clinics’ success rates (despite Trump’s promises to make the procedure more accessible). Three of the four branches of the Division of Violence Prevention were also eliminated. The division, established three decades ago, was crucial to framing violence as a public health problem, and yet last week, on the first day of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, all of the staff working on intimate partner violence prevention and sexual assault prevention programs were dismissed. The administration also fired all of the CDC scientists researching drug-resistant STIs. As is usually the case, these cuts will disproportionately impact Black, Latine, and lower-income women. The entire team working on the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a project started in 1987 to reduce infant morbidity and mortality by offering maternal health guidance through the entire birth process, was laid off last week. “Black women in America are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women,” one expert told Rolling Stone, and “we know this in large part because of the data collected and analyzed by the CDC.” And the timing of the system’s shutdown couldn’t be worse, a public health professor explained to Mother Jones: It “jeopardizes women and infants’ health at a time when maternal mortality rates in the US have been rising and access to maternity care is increasingly difficult.” So what happens next and how can you help? Lawyers contend that many of the layoffs are on “shaky legal ground”; some state attorneys general have sued to block them. If your state hasn’t joined the lawsuit, file a complaint with your AG’s office online and ask them to fight back against these layoffs. If there is a local domestic violence shelter or rape crisis center in your area, it’s a great time to call them and ask exactly what they need. The government may not care, but we still can. AND:
 MY CHILD'S FAVORITE COUPLE, MS. RACHEL AND HER HUSBAND MR. ARON. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
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