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Teenagers these days, eh? Instead of having unprotected sex and popping out babies, they’re wasting their time on TikTok, or something. According to a recent report, the teenage birth rate in the US fell by 7% in 2025. While this might seem like a positive development, it has been a cause of dismay among the Maga-adjacent crowd.
Take Fox News, which ran a segment framing the drop in teen pregnancies as alarming. “We still have 3.6 million births a year,” noted the medical analyst Marc Siegel. “But the problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15 to 19, the fertility rate is down 7%, and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation.” I’m sorry, that’s a problem?
The podcaster and Maga bigwig Katie Miller was also aghast. “Hormonal birth control isn’t just poison for women’s minds and bodies – it’s killing population growth,” she lamented on X. “Our biological destiny is to have babies – not slave behind desks chasing careers while our civilization dies.”
Miller isn’t just a random commentator. Her husband, Stephen Miller, who seems to have gone into hiding, is the White House’s deputy chief of staff for policy and one of the most influential people in Donald Trump’s administration. While she likes to promote the tradwife life, Miller has built quite a career for herself. She worked her way up in political communications before leaving the White House to work for Elon Musk and then start a podcast that she has insinuated is a tool to try to recruit more women into Maga. By demonising birth control, she is toeing the Project 2025 line. Republicans aren’t just content with overturning the right to a safe and legal abortion; they’re also quietly undercutting access to contraception.
What’s next? The party of “family values” rallying behind child marriage? Oh, wait, they’ve already ticked that one off. In recent years, several Republican lawmakers have argued that banning child marriage (which is legal in many states) is undesirable because it could increase abortion and reduce pregnancies. In 2024, for example, the New Hampshire state representative Jess Edwards said 16- and 17-year-olds were people of “a ripe, fertile age” who should be able to get married and have kids. Just don’t expect the government to help look after those kids. As Trump said recently, there’s no money for daycare – the US has some very expensive wars to fight.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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