MomLinks: Ballerina Content-Farm

An unsettling visit to the heart of a trad media empire, Silicon Valley's fertility tech dreams, and more in this week's link roundup.

This newsletter could be accused of having a pro-mom bias. I am not beating the allegations! But even considering the source, it feels like motherhood has dominated the headlines this week—especially in political coverage. Let’s do some Friday housekeeping before the news cycle runs away again.

Over the past two weeks, several trends I monitor here at MomLeft have come to a very quick boil: the delegitimization of women without children, the pro-natalist birth rate fanaticism, the rapid-fire erosion of abortion rights. This blog has a bunch of new subscribers (hi! thank you!), so if you’re trying to catch up, I recently published primers about J.D. Vance’s nightmare views on motherhood, and the right’s attempt to smear Vice President Kamala Harris over her lack of biological children.

I’m also putting the finishing touches on a breakdown of Project 2025’s grim vision for American families. That should be up Monday, barring any seismic new political events. Okay, let’s roll those MomLinks:

-If you’re online in mom circles, you’ve probably encountered Ballerina Farm, the social media empire run by mother-of-eight Hannah Neeleman. A new profile by London’s The Times visits Neeleman on her family’s sprawling cattle farm, where her pastoral, conservative-coded lifestyle has made her something like the archetypical trad wife. I’ve written before about the careful illusion of Neeleman’s channel; her father-in-law is the billionaire founder of JetBlue, and without that kind of money, Ballerina Farm fans might be sorely disappointed if they try to follow Neeleman into a life of highly aestheticized domestic work.

The Times undertakes a thoughtful exploration of that tension in Neeleman’s life, revealing the way her old dreams (a promising future as a ballerina) were winnowed by a march to motherhood by the evidently very pushy son of a billionaire who does not believe in hiring additional childcare for the family’s eight children (except on date nights). Seriously: when Neeleman was one of few dancers admitted to Juilliard, her now-husband unsuccessfully asked her out for six months, after which he called his JetBlue-founder dad to arrange a seat next to Neeleman on a five-hour flight, which constituted their first date. From the Times:

“‘Back then I thought we should date for a year [before marriage],’ she continues. ‘So I could finish school and whatever. And Daniel was, like, ‘It’s not going to work, we’ve got to get married now.’’ After a month they were engaged. Two months after that they were married, moving into an apartment Daniel rented on the Upper West Side. And three months after that she was pregnant, the first Juilliard undergraduate to be expecting ‘in modern history.’”

Maybe she’s genuinely happier as a full-time influencer and parent than she would be as a dancer. But I don’t imagine most readers of the Times profile would dream of the same pressures upending their own lives, especially not with ungodly sums of money to soften the blow.

-Speaking of men who expect women to produce many children for them: Elon Musk recently gave an interview to right-wing commentator Jordan Peterson, in which Musk lambasted his transgender daughter, calling her by a male name and claiming that “I lost my son, essentially,” adding that his 20-year-old is “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.” 

This is a horrid thing to say about one’s child for so many reasons: among them, that his daughter Vivian Wilson has very diplomatically avoided addressing Musk’s anti-trans remarks in the past, and because Musk’s first-born son tragically did die.

Wilson broke her silence to publicly refute Musk’s comments. In an interview with NBC News, Wilson said that her father had “relentlessly harassed [me] for my femininity and queerness” when she was a child. Wilson described gender-affirming care, which Musk now publicly opposes, as allowing her to survive and thrive. She also claimed Musk, a “pro-natalist” who has at least 12 children and derides birth control, was an absent father. 

“He was there, I want to say, maybe 10% of the time. That’s generous,” Wilson said. “He had half custody, and he fully was not there.” 

-Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, fertility-tech companies that allow prospective parents to screen and select embryos have attracted attention from power players in the right-wing pro-natalist world, the Information reports. While these companies can help families make informed health decisions, they’ve also reportedly made closed-door claims that they can help parents select for IQ. Experts remain skeptical that intelligence is predetermined in a way that can be measured in embryos. But the narrative of genetic predestination might be more dangerous than the technology.

“I don’t think the problem is that the rich will end up with superintelligent, superior children,” Katie Hasson, associate director of theCenter for Genetics and Society, told the Information. “But the belief that that’s what’s going on, I think, could be incredibly harmful in our society.…The danger is coming to believe that privileges come from genetics, that they’re written into their DNA in some way.”

-Where some on the pro-natalist right want to enable fertility tech, others oppose it for anti-choice reasons. J.D. Vance opposes in vitro fertilization, and also backs a measure that would allow police to access medical records of people who travel interstate for abortion services, the Lever reports. 

-With Kamala Harris re-energizing a lackluster Democratic presidential ticket, young voters will be watching to see whether her Palestine policies diverge from those of Joe Biden. The stakes of that decision are enormous, in the U.S. (where the majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s actions in Gaza) and in Palestine, where U.S. weapons are still aiding the slaughter of children. 

In Politico this month, doctors Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa provide a wrenching account of their recent work in a Gaza hospital, where young children in gutted hospitals are receiving treatment for unspeakable injuries, including gunshots to the head.

“We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head,” Perlmutter and Sidhwa write. “They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.”

-Texas’s attorney general sued the Biden administration this week over a policy that allows teenagers to obtain birth control without parental consent. The suit is an attack on teenagers’ bodily autonomy, and part of a broader campaign against reproductive choice in the state, which banned nearly all abortions in 2022. Since that ban, the state’s teen pregnancy rate increased for the first time in decades.

-Also in Texas, a police deputy has led a two-year campaign to charge librarians with felonies for stocking library books like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, NBC News reports. The deputy, who in 2020 tried launching a chapter of the far-right militia group the Oath Keepers, has argued that the library books constitute pornograpy.

-Could a President Harris create a better economy for caregivers? I really appreciated this piece in the 19th breaking down the potential of a “Momala economy,” and the promises Harris will have to uphold if she wants to pay more than “lip service” to working families.