MomLinks: Inside a Mostly Male 'Natalism' Conference

A dispatch from a creepy birth-rate convention, an excerpt from a new book on school board culture wars, and other stories I'm reading around the parentsphere.

I’m having one of those weeks when my children seem to be growing very suddenly. My youngest is having a breakthrough in his speech, and with it, his personality. With more words to express himself, he’s revealing himself to be a really funny guy? My oldest has declared himself too big for his stuffed baby penguin, but he’s suddenly interested in learning where his food comes from. After accepting that the seeds he plucked off his multigrain toast and buried in the garden probably wouldn’t grow into bread, he helped me make a charmingly inedible loaf of focaccia. We’re both learning. I’m still tempted to throw some dinner rolls in the garden and pretend the bread tree yielded fruit. I’m listening to The National’s “Weird Goodbyes” and getting swept up in its notes of desperate sentimentalism (“memorize the bathwater, memorize the air/there'll come a time I'll wanna know I was here”). It’s the feeling that memory will fail these moments, but urgently trying to etch their minutiae into my head anyway.

Beyond focaccia recipes and National liner notes, here’s what I’ve been reading:

-In Politico, Gaby Del Valle reports from the first Natal Conference, where a motley coalition of far-right figures gathered to discuss how to raise birth rates. The issue is thorny, even when pursued with the greatest possible political neutrality. But as Del Valle found, this mostly male conference was less interested in supporting the conditions for parenthood, and more interested in outbreeding perceived political and racial rivals, while casting women from the workplace and ending policies like no-fault divorce and welfare that allow mothers greater autonomy. 

“[O]ver the course of the conference, the seemingly novel arguments for having children fade and give way to a different set of concerns. Throughout the day, speakers and participants hint at the other aspects of modern life that worried them about future generations in the U.S. and other parts of the West: divorce, gender integration, ‘wokeness,’ declining genetic ‘quality,’” Del Valley writes.

“Many of the speakers and attendees see natalism as a way of reversing these changes. As the speakers chart their roadmaps for raising birth rates, it becomes evident that for the most dedicated of them, the mission is to build an army of like-minded people, starting with their own children, who will reject a whole host of changes wrought by liberal democracy and who, perhaps one day, will amount to a population large enough to effect more lasting change.

-Modern school board battles over “woke”ness and “critical race theory” read almost identically to past decades’ battles over “secular humanism” in schools. In an Atlantic excerpt of his new book They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms, reporter Mike Hixenbaugh traces the history of conservative campaigns to install Christianity in classrooms, while purging books about race, history, science, and gender.

-Six years after the Trump administration began separating migrant families at the U.S. border, 1,400 children are still reported as separated from their parents. 

-Approximately half of the 1.2 million people sheltering in Rafah ahead of an expected Israeli ground assault are children, according to UNICEF. Gaza’s southernmost city, previously home to approximately 250,000 people, has ballooned in population after Israel ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza. Many current residents are sick, injured, or malnourished, with nowhere left to go if they evacuate the city. Ninety percent of children under the age of five are reportedly affected by “one or more infectious diseases.” Rafah’s main maternity hospital stopped admitting patients this week, with Reuters reporting that “it was not immediately clear where women in Rafah trying to deliver in a hospital would be able to do so.”

“Rafah is now a city of children, who have nowhere safe to go in Gaza,” Catherine Russell, UNICEF Executive Director said in a statement. “If large scale military operations start, not only will children be at risk from the violence, but also from chaos and panic, and at a time where their physical and mental states are already weakened.”

-Medical residents are beginning to avoid taking posts in states with abortion bans, according to data reviewed by NPR. Those medical students are responding to laws that risk impeding their education and restricting their ability to provide care. Because abortion is part of a suite of maternal health treatments, experts worry that a widening gulf of abortion expertise between states could leave some areas without adequate prenatal care.

-In The New Republic, Melissa Gira Grant details the weaponization of new anti-abortion laws by domestic abusers. “We have seen the threats from abusers become more specific,” the senior counsel of a reproductive justice helpline tells Gira Grant. “Some have threatened to call the police on family members who help them access abortion. Other abusers have falsely claimed it is a crime to leave the state, or [that] their victim has to have their consent to get an abortion. And abusers are weaponizing the rising abortion stigma against their victims, suggesting that their decision to get an abortion will harm them in unrelated court proceedings.”

-Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Gwen Moore introduced legislation this week that would extend Medicaid coverage to doula and midwife services. The bill, called the Mamas First Act, has previously been introduced in 2019 and 2022. Doula-assisted births are shown to result in significantly fewer cesarean deliveries, and parents are less likely to develop postpartum depression. 

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