Meet the Maga moms inspired to have children for Trump

Telegraph

11-05-2025

Los Angeles-born and Ivy League-educated, Peachy Keenan isn't the typical picture of a pro-natalist.
Yet the married, mother of five is part of a growing movement of mostly Catholic, well-educated women in deep blue California inspired by Donald Trump 's calls to have more children.
'To save the country, we need to get out and push the babies out, and to do it in mass scale,' she said.
Ms Keenan, who gave up her job to raise her children, aged eight to 19, added: 'When did raising your own baby become this political taboo?'
On the campaign trail, Mr Trump pledged to bring about a 'baby boom' to tackle America's ailing birth rate and has since proposed a slew of policies to encourage women to have more children, including paying them.
National fertility rates sat at 1.63 per cent last year, slightly higher than a record low set in 2023, but far below the rate needed for a generation to replace itself.
The fertility drive has been taken up with abandon by members of Mr Trump's cabinet, with Sean Duffy, the transport secretary and a father of nine, suggesting grants be funnelled into communities with higher marriage and birth rates.
His comments echo an agenda pushed by senior Trump allies Elon Musk, a father of 14, and vice-president JD Vance.
Whether it's Mr Musk's six-year-old son, X, sitting on his father's shoulder, or Mr Vance's child patting his parents on the head during the inauguration, the second Trump administration has set a new standard for making children a visible part of day-to-day operations.
When she's not blasting reporters in the briefing room, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also occasionally brings her nine-month-old son to the office.
'I am deeply proud to support a president and administration so keenly aware of the attack waged against the family in the West today and doing what they can to combat it,' said Isabel Brown, 27, who captioned a picture of herself on social media, cradling her bump with ' Project 2025 '.
The married content creator and author gave birth to her first child in recent weeks – the first of several, she hopes.
'The Trump administration has started some powerful conversations here in the United States about our fertility crisis,' she said.
'I can tell you that almost all of my friends are currently getting married, are pregnant, or just had their first babies.
'It's an incredibly exciting time to be at the forefront of this fight for the family.'
The goal to supercharge birth rates has created an 'unholy alliance' between two wings of the movement, according to Catherine Pakulak, an economist at the Catholic University of America, who is a mother of eight herself.
On one hand, there are pro-family voices such as Mr Vance, who has said he wants 'more babies in America', 'not just because they are economically useful. We want more babies because children are good'.
Then there is the pro-natalist wing, led by Mr Musk, who has warned 'civilisation is going to crumble' if fertility rates do not climb.
'You talk about it because it excites part of your base. It's clearly the pro-family and pro-life part of the Republican party,' explained Ms Pakulak.
Despite their shared objectives, the two factions' means of achieving their aims could not be more different.
Flag-bearers of the pro-natalist movement Simone and Malcolm Collins, a Pennsylvania former tech-industry couple who have four children through IVF, have grabbed headlines by using genetic screening to select desirable characteristics in their offspring.
Mr Musk has sparked fascination and outrage in equal measure through his efforts to breed a 'legion' of offspring, in part by recruiting potential mothers on X, according to The Wall Street Journal.
For many on the pro-natalist wing, the desire to boost the fertility rate is driven by economic concerns.
America's birth rate has been in decline since the early 1970s, and that has accelerated since the 2008 recession and the pandemic.
According to Ms Pakulak, the author of Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, the long-term decline is fuelled by a range of factors, including economic growth and mechanisation, whereby children are no longer needed in the workforce; and improved social security, meaning parents no longer need to rely on their children to take care of them in old age.
The other driving forces are effective contraception, giving women the ability to select when and how many children they want to have; and economic uncertainty.
'When there is uncertainty and distress, people postpone having children, and some fraction of people who postpone will never have that baby,' she explained.
If left unchecked, there are fears the country could end up in a similar position to South Korea or Japan, where a perfect storm of increased life expectancy and a precipitous decline in birth rates to as low as 0.78 has led to economic stagnation, with the shrinking workforce propping up a growing population of retirees.
However, discourse around the issue is often coloured by a more contentious vision: one tainted by ethno-nationalism and fears over immigration.
A $10,000-a-ticket pro-natalist conference in Austin, Texas, last month featured speakers promoting conspiracy theories and, allegedly, eugenics, according to The Daily Wire.
Ms Keenan, who attended this same conference, dismissed these views as belonging to a 'tiny fringe' who are not representative of her community.
'The women I know who are deciding to have kids have literally no idea about population decline,' she said.
'They're not thinking about it in racial terms. They would find that lens super gross and super offensive.'
Ms Pakulak said: 'What seems very difficult is to get people to have kids who don't want them.'
Birth rates aside, many pro-family Trump supporters are chiefly concerned with the decline in family values and view the single-parenting birth factory goals of Mr Musk as anathema to their own.
'I am incredibly sceptical of any proposal that makes children a means to an end,' said Emma Waters, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
And many of those who support the Trump fertility drive remain completely unaware of being part of a political movement.
Elissa Fernandez, 43, a mother of eight from Seattle, said she had never heard of pro-natalism, and never set out to have lots of kids, as did Kamiyo Culbertson, 60, a married mother of nine from Washington State.
However, Ms Culbertson welcomed Mr Trump's push for women to have more children.
'It's encouraging to hear,' she said. 'I think there's been a leaning the other way – don't get married, don't have kids, that's definitely the story we got from our culture.'