The great baby boom at the White House last week brought the world yet another infant: Alec Neil Vance was born — the first child born to a sitting U.S. vice president since little Skyler Colfax III in 1870, Jemima Kelly writes in her column for the Financial Times.

If Alec Neil was not conceived by divine providence, he certainly seems to be the product of some pronatalist force from above — at least that is what J.D. Vance himself suggests in his new book, Communion (whose reviews, incidentally, are already out, and to put it mildly, they are far from glowing).

The vice president explains that although his wife Usha said after their third child that she had “had enough,” her view changed dramatically after the murder of their friend Charlie Kirk. Kirk’s widow, Erika, then admitted that she regretted not having more children with him.

“Something changed in Usha, and soon after we buried my friend, she became pregnant with our fourth child — a boy,” Vance writes. (If that strikes you as profoundly unsexy, perhaps you simply did not witness the chemistry the couple displayed during their joint appearance on the show Tales with the Second Lady.)

This is far from the only mention of childbearing in Vance’s book. In fact, babies are mentioned 33 times there — only slightly fewer than Donald Trump’s 40 mentions. Apparently, Communion is written less about what its subtitle promises — My Journey Back to Faith — than about the urgent need for America’s people to reproduce enthusiastically. (Needless to say, this does not apply to every newcomer; Usha, fortunately, is a second-generation immigrant.)

And Vance is far from the only member of the MAGA elite who has felt an acute obligation to produce offspring during Donald Trump’s second presidential term — a man who has proclaimed himself the “fertilization president” (ugh!) and the “father of fertility” (gross!). In May, press secretary Karoline Leavitt gave birth to her second child. In June, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and the chief architect of his anti-immigration agenda, Stephen Miller, and his wife Katie welcomed their fourth child, all under the age of six.

And frankly, thank God! Because, as we know, every third American family is “under-babied.” No, I do not mean that babies are not cuddled or spoiled enough (though that too); I am using the term in the sense that Mehmet “Dr.” Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has been trying very hard to popularize — meaning that families are having fewer children than they would like, or none at all.

Meanwhile, at the same Mother’s Day event where Dr. Oz once again used the phrase, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the microphone and started lamenting the decline in sperm counts among teenagers yet again. Other Trump allies keep straying into the same bizarre territory: Katie Miller has repeatedly lamented in public the drop in teenage pregnancy rates.

All of this looks rather creepy and inappropriate. Still, that does not mean these fanatics are not touching on a genuinely important issue. The demographic crisis does exist — not only in America, but across the world — and we should all be thinking about what to do about it. But because the issue has become so politicized and turned into an idée fixe of the American right, the opposing camp seems to refuse to see it as anything other than a purely economic question.

“Although U.S. birth rates have indeed fallen sharply over the past two decades, this is not happening because of a lack of desire,” the Population Reference Bureau said in response to Oz’s comments in May. “People are not rejecting parenthood — the conditions for it are simply becoming ever harder.”

I have seen plenty of similar claims from the left. But they do not want to face the truth. Although financial anxieties may play a role in the decision not to have children, they are not the main reason. After all, the countries with the lowest birth rates in the world (for example, South Korea) are also among the most affordable and comfortable places to raise children.

According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, the main reason cited by Americans under 50 who do not have children and are unlikely to plan for them was simple: they “just don’t want them.” The second most popular answer was the desire to “focus on other things,” and the third was concern about the future of the world.

The fact is that many women no longer believe that the professional, social, personal, and bodily sacrifices inevitably involved in having a child are worth it. And instead of pretending that this reality does not exist, we need to face it in order to find real solutions. Turning the issue of birth rates into a battlefield for partisan conflict, however, may lead to precisely the opposite result.