America Isn't "Under-Babied." It's Motherless.

Dr. Oz wants us to make more babies. But a country that refuses to protect women shouldn't be surprised when women hesitate to raise children inside it.

Photo by Marisa Fahrner on Pexels. Image created by author.

Dr. Oz and the Trump administration would like us all to know America is “under-babied.”

And they’re (uncharacteristically) not wrong. Birth rates are down, with a total fertility rate of 1.6 children per woman, the lowest ever recorded, according to the Population Reference Bureau. Low birth rates threaten our long-term economic viability, as we lack able-bodied young people to replace our aging population.

So yes, it’s in the nation’s interest to maintain a healthy birth rate.

And yet, here we are. Teen pregnancy rates are down, and Republicans think it’s a bad thing. Young adults are delaying marriage and parenthood. And rather than asking why Americans might feel hesitant about bringing children into this particular moment in history, the pronatalist MAGA right has decided the problem is cultural decadence, feminism, career women, and ladies with too many cats.

Women need to log off Slack, put on prairie dresses, go full tradwife and start making babies again, I guess.

Except many young Americans are having the exact opposite reaction. And can you blame them? If you wanted to design a society specifically engineered to make people feel terrified of parenthood, you would probably build something pretty close to modern America.

A country increasingly incapable of nurturing the people already here.

I’m a GenX mom with two teen daughters. One of them is queer. I’ve spent years parenting through political whiplash, climate anxiety, the death of Roe v. Wade, economic instability, school shooting drills, healthcare fears, skyrocketing inflation, anti-trans legislation, online radicalization, and now the looming possibility AI may wipe out huge sectors of professional work before my high schoolers even graduate college.

I’m watching the Epstein files unfold in real time, atrocity after atrocity surfacing without consequence for the billionaire-class men involved.

I’m reading in horror about websites like Motherless hosting 20,000+ “sleep porn” videos of unconscious women being raped by their partners, while the news cycle barely blips.

So when I hear the official diagnosis is that younger people just need to chill out and make more babies?

Dr. Oz, my dude. That’s so not going to happen.

And it’s not because young people are too lazy, shallow, or liberal.

It’s because Americans—and especially women—no longer trust the country their children would inherit.

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Don’t believe me? I’ve got eight reasons that might convince you.

1. Women No Longer Need to Marry for Survival

For much of human history, marriage was motivated by economics. Women needed men because women were systematically denied access to money, credit, careers, property ownership, and independent stability. We only gained the right to our own mortgages and credit cards in 1974, and to business credit in 1988. That’s the year I graduated high school. This is not ancient history. All of this has happened within my lifespan.

What happened once we gave women access to credit?

Women now graduate college at higher rates than men. They build careers. They support themselves financially. They pay their own bills. Which means heterosexual relationships increasingly require something deeper than “find a guy with a paycheck.”

Meanwhile, large numbers of GenZ men are being radicalized online into grievance politics and manosphere resentment. Women are being told they should submit more, tolerate more, shrink more, and need less.

Many respond with a single coherent thought: No, thanks.

That’s not proof of societal collapse. It’s evidence women finally have the autonomy to reject bad deals.

2. Pregnancy Has Become More Dangerous in America

America already had one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world before Roe v. Wade fell.

Now it’s even riskier.

Restricting abortion access doesn’t only impact women who need abortions. The ripple effect is catastrophic across the full spectrum of reproductive health, and especially on pregnant women.

Women are now being denied miscarriage care. Doctors delay emergency treatment because hospital legal teams need to determine whether saving a woman’s life might violate abortion bans. OB-GYNs leave restrictive states entirely. Rural maternity wards are disappearing.

Women have been delayed or turned away at emergency rooms with potentially fatal conditions like ectopic pregnancies.

Nevaeh Crain. Josseli Barnica. Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick.

Women are dying.

And even outside catastrophic pregnancy scenarios, healthcare itself feels increasingly unstable. Millions of Americans are one layoff away from losing insurance coverage. ACA premiums have increased ~30%, with approximately 1.2 million families dropping their benefits due to costs. Younger adults are staring at a healthcare system where remaining insured feels financially precarious at best.

Pregnancy is always an act of vulnerability. But America has transformed it into an act of medical roulette.

Can we blame prospective parents for taking a pass?

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3. We’re All Watching the Government Target LGBTQ+ Kids

Nearly 30% of GenZ adults identify as LGBTQ — and 2.8% identify as transgender.

Threats toward marriage equality and trans safety aren’t abstract for younger generations. Even people who aren’t queer themselves know the odds are good that someone they love—a friend, sibling, partner, or future child—might be.

And now we’re watching politicians escalate rhetoric around trans people from disagreement into something far darker.

The White House recently rolled out a so-called U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy referencing “radical transgender ideology” as part of broader extremism concerns. The document concludes with the line: “We will find you and we will kill you.”

The administration would argue that line refers to terrorists broadly. But when you place “radical transgender ideology” inside a counterterrorism framework and then end with language like that, parents of queer and trans kids aren’t irrational for hearing a threat.

My own daughter spent a few months identifying as trans when she was 11 years old. To call her a terrorist is laughably absurd.

But I’m not laughing.

To imagine her, or any child, folded into rhetoric about extremism and terrorism is grotesque.

And to imagine your own future child growing up inside that political climate?

That kind of rhetoric doesn’t make people want to build families. It makes them terrified of what their families would inherit.

4. The Future Looks Increasingly Dystopian and Uninhabitable

This week brought a headline warning that we should start evacuating New Orleans now, as it’s reached the “point of no return” due to rising sea levels and will be underwater within decades. It barely made a splash in the news.

Meanwhile, wildfires scorch entire towns. Water shortages reshape the American West. Insurance companies are fleeing climate-vulnerable states because the math no longer works. Summers keep getting hotter. Storms keep getting stronger.

Scientists keep warning we’re running out of time to meaningfully slow this down. It’s dire, it’s deadly, and it’s dystopian AF.

Are young adults supposed to ignore this urgent situation and just carry on? What would be the psychologically healthy response to watching governments knowingly fail to protect the literal habitability of the planet?

I won’t likely live to fully witness the devastation.

But my kids will.

If I’d known how untenable the climate change crisis would become so quickly, I might’ve made different choices.

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5. AI Is Making the Future of Work Unknowable

Even people with stable careers increasingly feel one corporate RIF away from professional extinction.

I work in tech. Every day I quietly wonder whether I have another year left before some executive decides AI can do enough of my job badly enough that replacing humans no longer matters.

But I say that as someone with savings, home equity, and decades of work history behind me.

Imagine being 27.

Imagine trying to commit to eighteen years of raising a child while the CEO of Microsoft AI casually predicts that all white-collar work will be automatable by AI in the next 18 months. The social contract underneath adulthood is collapsing in real time.

People aren’t hesitating because they’re selfish. They’re hesitating because the ground beneath them no longer feels stable.

6. Childcare, Healthcare, and College Have Become Financially Absurd

If America wanted more babies, it could start by supporting the families already here.

The United States remains the only OECD country without a national paid parental leave policy. More than 35% of U.S. counties are maternity care deserts, affecting more than 2.3 million women of reproductive age. For those lucky enough to have employer-sponsored family health insurance, out-of-pocket costs went up 6% in 2025 and now average nearly $7,000 a year.

And childcare? For many families, it’s a second housing payment. This was true with my children back in 2012, and costs have gone up 40% in the past decade.

And then there’s college.

Public university tuition has increased more than 175% over the past two decades, dramatically outpacing wage growth and inflation. Millennials and GenZ came of age watching older siblings and peers emerge from college carrying tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, into an economy that no longer guarantees stability in return.

Previous generations largely viewed college as a pathway into the middle class. Younger Americans increasingly view it as a financial gamble—with the odds stacked for the house, not them.

This means many prospective parents aren’t just calculating the cost of diapers and daycare. They’re staring down the future cost of educating a child in a system that feels punitive at nearly every stage of life.

The United States simply isn’t a pro-family country. It’s a country that talks endlessly about family while making family life logistically, medically, and financially brutal.

Paid leave. Affordable childcare. Public education. Maternal healthcare. Elder care. Community infrastructure. School safety. These aren’t luxuries. They’re the conditions under which families can function.

Instead, caregiving labor is treated as invisible work, largely dumped onto women until they disappear beneath the weight of it. We claim to worship family while structurally abandoning caregivers at every level.

It’s difficult to take America’s family rhetoric seriously when the people doing the caregiving are drowning, and the expenses are staggering.

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7. Parenting Has Become Isolating and Unsupported

Modern parenting increasingly happens without villages, extended family support, neighborhood connection, affordable housing near relatives, or trusted institutions. Many parents are raising children while simultaneously caring for aging parents, working full-time, and trying to survive economically in cities where community itself has become fragmented and transient.

Previous generations often had built-in support systems, even imperfect ones. Today, many families are privately white-knuckling modern life behind closed doors, wondering why everything feels so impossibly hard.

You cannot keep stripping communities for parts and then act surprised when people hesitate to create more vulnerable humans inside them.

8. The People Demanding More Babies Seem to Deeply Dislike Women

Possibly the strangest part of the pronatalist panic is how many of the loudest voices demanding more babies also seem openly contemptuous of the people expected to produce them.

The rhetoric isn’t subtle. It’s overt vitriol.

Megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll referred to women as “penis homes,” reducing women to vessels for male desire and reproduction. Nick Fuentes declared, “Your body, my choice,” called women “the number one political enemy in America,” and joked—was it even a joke?—about “breeding gulags” for women. Republican lawmakers openly debate rolling back no-fault divorce while simultaneously stripping abortion rights and restricting reproductive healthcare. Even our voting rights are up for public debate.

Women are paying attention.

The message underneath it all feels unmistakable: your body belongs first to the state, the church, the nation, the husband, the baby — and only distantly to you.

The modern MAGA pronatalist movement keeps demanding more babies while simultaneously trying to make women less safe, less autonomous, and more economically dependent. Then it acts outraged when women withdraw.

Some women hear their hatred and feel outright terror. Others may not consciously frame it that way, but respond instinctively by delaying motherhood, rejecting marriage, or opting out entirely.

This is an entirely rational response.

Because if your version of “pro-family” begins with stripping women of rights, mocking our independence, and reducing us to reproductive infrastructure, then a lot of women are going to hear that message and think:

Abso-fucking-lutely not.

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So maybe America isn’t “under-babied.”

Maybe Americans are under-supported.

Maybe younger women aren’t rejecting motherhood because they’re selfish, shallow, decadent, or too attached to their careers or cats.

Maybe they’re responding rationally to a country that increasingly feels unstable, unaffordable, hostile to vulnerability, and openly contemptuous of the people expected to hold families together.

Because if women are being told to have more babies while simultaneously losing rights, losing autonomy, losing economic security, losing healthcare access, and listening to powerful men openly describe us as breeding infrastructure?

Of course many of us are recoiling.

Many women stopped interpreting all of this as isolated hypocrisy and started recognizing something deeper: the United States hates women.

Or at a minimum, it’s profoundly indifferent to our suffering.

The solution isn’t demanding more babies from overwhelmed, world-wary woman.

The solution is building a country where raising one feels safe, sustainable, and possible. But that requires becoming a country capable of caring about women in the first place.

Right now: we are motherless.

And until that changes, I wouldn’t expect America’s “under-babied” problem to improve anytime soon.

{The essay originally appeared on Blue Amp Media on May 27, 2026.}

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Thanks for reading.

I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest—and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show. Through memoir writing, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semi-colons make my heart happy.

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