Maga men have babies on the brain. They may not all be interested in changing diapers or hands-on parenting, but they’re very keen on population growth. “[W]e want more babies, to put it very nicely,” Donald Trump said last year.
Trump, who has called himself the “father of IVF” and joked that he will be known as the “fertilization president”, surrounds himself with people who profess a similar fondness for children. Only a few days after being sworn in as vice-president, JD Vance declared he wanted “more babies in the United States of America” and went on to make pronatalist policies a theme of his time in office.
Meanwhile, the administration’s favourite moneyman, Elon Musk, is doing his own part to increase the population. Ashley St Clair, the mother of one of his many offspring, has claimed he once told her he wanted to have “a legion of children before the civil war”. At least one of Musk’s kids has denounced him, so I’m not sure he’s considered that they might not all be fighting on the same side.
While the Trump administration may want a baby boom, it won’t shock you to hear that, when you take a closer look at their particular brand of pronatalism, they don’t actually seem to want “more babies”. What they really want, judging by the way in which pregnant immigrants are being treated, is more of the “right” type of baby.
A Guardian investigation published this week revealed that ICE is arresting a record number of pregnant women and teenagers. These detained women are reportedly not receiving the prenatal healthcare they need and, alarmingly, ICE does not seem to have records of how many of these women have suffered miscarriages.
“ICE recorded 18 miscarriages during the first nine months of the Trump administration,” the Guardian writes. “[B]ut the agency has no data on miscarriages after 3 October 2025.” Let me just reiterate that: we have no idea how many women in ICE detention have lost their babies over the past 11 months.
It’s very strange that ICE seems to have just stopped tracking miscarriage numbers; the agency, and the Trump administration, is normally very big on surveillance. Last year, the Guardian reported that pregnant immigrant women were turning up to hospitals to deliver their babies wearing location-tracking smartwatches as part of an ICE monitoring program. One of these women was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia, which can cause major swelling, and hospital staff were worried that the smartwatch would cut off her circulation. “She was in tears about [the idea of taking the surveillance device off],” a hospital staffer told the Guardian. “She had this deep fear that ICE was going to come to the hospital and take her baby.”
Surveillance also extends to the broader pregnant population. When Dr Erica Schwartz was confirmed by the US Senate as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) earlier this year, she emphasized: “Abortion surveillance is absolutely a critical component of what the CDC is currently doing.” While the CDC doesn’t require states to collect data on abortions, 44 states plus Washington DC have some sort of mandated abortion reporting, according to the Guttmacher Institute. This isn’t necessarily sinister but, following the overturning of Roe v Wade, there has been growing concern that this data might be weaponized to punish abortion patients and providers, who are increasingly being treated like criminals.
And that concern is hardly unfounded. In the first two years after Roe was overturned, prosecutors in 16 states charged more than 400 people with pregnancy-related crimes, a 2025 report by the group Pregnancy Justice found. The report also noted that there are likely far more cases of miscarriage criminalization than have made headlines.
Funny, isn’t it? If you suffer a miscarriage in ICE detention, possibly because of systemic medical neglect, the US government will apparently shrug and look the other way. But if you have a miscarriage in a state that has fetal personhood language in its abortion laws, you may find yourself facing a police investigation and criminal charges. Once again, there is nothing pro-life about this administration. They are solely pro-control.
