Outbreeding the liberals
Eugenics by any other name
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In 2013, just days before the birth of my second child, a pastor friend of mine took me aside to tell me that he believed it was God’s calling for me to have more children.
Christians would outnumber everyone else if only Christian women were more faithful and had more children, he said, waving his hand toward my very swollen body.
I told him that sounded like eugenics and he laughed it off. It wasn’t eugenics; it was fulfilling a Biblical command. The womb was its own mission field, he said.
The concept wasn’t new to me. I was raised in the Quiverfull movement. Quiverfull is an ideology that encourages Christians to have multiple children and fulfill the commandment in the Bible to “be fruitful and multiply.” The term “Quiverfull” comes from Psalm 127:3–5, which refers to children as arrows in a quiver. My own parents, who had eight children, like to joke that they outdid the Biblical mandate.
By the time I was having children in a post-9/11 world, the idea had taken on a new meaning in churches, as a way of combating the spread of Islam.
But whether you call it Quiverfull or being fruitful and multiplying, the idea of having children to colonize a land or take over an ideology is always eugenics.
Eugenics is making an ideological comeback, not that it ever really left us. This month, Elon Musk, who has decided the world needs more of his genes and has thus far fathered 11 children, tweeted that it should be considered a national emergency to have children1. Far-right activist Chaiya Raichik replied that she believed conservatives should “outbreed the left.”
And it isn’t just shitposters talking like this. The ideology is evident in the posts of trad wives — women who, at least in their minds, eschew the trappings of modern womanhood and dedicate their lives to being wives and mothers, and posting about it nonstop on social media. Books and articles encouraging people to just get married and have kids and fetishistic profiles of atheist couples who are vowing to breed smart children seem to be everywhere. The religion-free rebrand, dubbed “pronatalism,” is really just eugenics dressed up with hipster glasses.
At the same time, reproductive choice is increasingly criminalized, gender is being policed, the United States has the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed nation, childcare is unaffordable and parents are losing their jobs because of childcare shortages.
As historian Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz writes in her book Homeland Maternity: Motherhood and Motherland in Contemporary America, “Reproduction has long been a site for negotiating cultural anxieties, most often at the expense of women.” She goes on to quote historian Rickie Solinger, who notes in their book Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America, “Official discussions about reproductive politics have rarely been women-centered. More often than not, debate and discussion about reproductive politics — where the power to manage women’s reproductive capacity should reside — have been part of the discussions about how to solve certain large social problems facing this country.”
Some of the most pressing social problems in this country, among many other things, are the unaffordability of childcare, the slowing population growth and our disinvestment in public schools. All of these problems can be ameliorated by forcing women from the workforce to care for children.
But which women are allowed to be mothers and which are not? That’s always the question. The women rewarded and celebrated for having multiple children are almost always white, cisgender and gender-conforming, and upper middle class.
Recent legislative efforts to protect IVF treatment underscores this concept. But reinforcing ideas of appropriate reproduction. Recall the response to Nadya Suleman, better known as “Octomom” who had 14 children, eight of them with IVF. Her racial ambiguity coupled with the fact that she was not well-off or married and she used public assistance, made her — and still makes her — a reviled cultural punchline. Compare her treatment with that of Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, a wealthy white mother of eight.
This isn’t just about supporting or forcing motherhood and reproduction, or (if you want to put a neoliberal spin on it) as valuing “care work.” It’s about reinforcing a eugenicist’s vision of nationalism, where only the educated and those deemed desirable are valued as breeders. And everyone else is criminalized. Mothers in America need help — which is different from getting a little lip service while we’re thrown off a cliff. We need to be able to make the choices; to determine the best outcomes for our lives ourselves.
One thing these movements always fail to consider is that children are their own people. They form their own ideas and make their own decisions. (Just ask Derek Black. Or Elon Musk’s daughter Vivian Wilson.)
America is awash in stories and memoirs from ex-vangelicals (I am one of them). We are the children of Quiverfull and other movements who looked at the vision of the life we were given and noped the hell out of there. It’s not a collective movement, per se — the only shared goal is criticizing and breaking apart the ideologies that we were born into that we were told gave us freedom, but which we ultimately saw for the cages they are.
Further reading:
Rebecca Traister published an insightful article on the inherent contradictions of the new Republican woman, noting:
The Republican women seeking to steer their party into the future are finding themselves in a series of constrictive binds: between upholding a conservative white patriarchy that has outlawed abortion and asserting their value as women; between projecting traditional notions of compliant, cheerful femininity and channeling the testosterone-driven rage of the conservative infotainment complex; and, above all, between trying to build independent political identities and slavishly following Donald Trump. That devotion has come at the cost of alienating suburban white women, who have been crucial to Republicans for decades but, since 2016, have been peeling away in response to Trump’s pussy-grabbing malevolence and his party’s ruthless campaign against reproductive rights.
NPR reporter Danielle Kurtzlebean has a really interesting analysis of virulently misogynistic Kamala Harris merchandise being sold at Trump rallies.
Editor’s note: Does he mean “a national mandate”? This phrasing is breaking my brain.
One of the many hilarious delusions of these people is the idea that simply breeding will result in more conservatives. I grew up in a big Catholic family, I WENT TO BAYLOR, I've lived in TX for nearly 30 years, and I know FAR more quivverfull children who eventually become raging liberals following their (nearly inevitable) deconstruction than who stayed "true" to their familes' beliefs. To my eye, they're simply creating more exvangelicals, a pretty potent progressive force imo, though I concede even they can do serious damage before they come to their senses.
And that doesn't even ADDRESS the statistical fact that some of these kids will simply be born not having it (or LGBTQ+, etc.).
My brothers are evangelicals with many kids (not nearly a Quiverfull, though) who homeschool their children (mostly daughters), send them to all the church classes, and teach them to hate "liberal" public education (including all non-Christian colleges and universities). They are not too ashamed to take advantage of state (publicly) funded enrichment programs and testing services that allow their children to have some fun, although as it works out they are able to schedule/arrange it so most of the kids in their sessions are fellow Christians. The fascinating wrinkle is that most of my brother's children are going to Christian universities to learn a special kind of Rhetoric - literally how to debate in defense of Evangelical beliefs. I've learned that it's a giant ecosystem of school courses, degrees, teachers, formal debate competition, and coaches. It's really one giant self-licking ice cream of Church propaganda but quite literally the only "higher studies" that my brothers and their churches are willing to "let" the kids study (at significant out-of-pocket tuition costs to my brothers, too). I would not have know about this educational sub-culture except for my family connections. This is not a rural corner in northern Idaho - this is California! I hope (against experience) that these kids will eventually rebel against the church and my brothers when they find out they've been intellectually armed for almost exactly nothing to survive (let alone thrive) in the real world.