By Ben R. Williams
According to Dr. Mehmet Oz, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and possibly the most damaging snake oil salesman Oprah has endorsed in her decades-long attempt to weaponize wine moms against science, Americans are “under-babied.”
This comment came at a May 11 White House event to discuss maternal healthcare. Oz said that 30 percent of Americans are under-babied, which means that “you either don’t have any children, or you have less children than you would normally want to have.”
“We’re way below what we need just to replace the people that we have in America,” Oz said, adding that the birth rate in America has been falling since 2007.
However, Oz said, that’s all about to change, thanks to human frogfish Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign and the White House’s focus on raising birth rates by lowering the cost of fertility treatments.
“As the services get better, we make them more affordable, we’ll have more Trump babies,” Oz said, accidentally conjuring an image of a truly nightmare-inducing Muppet Babies spinoff.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but something has gone awry with your country when you have to convince people to make babies. Historically, baby creation is not a recreational activity that requires a sales pitch.
I can’t help but wonder, what kind of babies does the Republican party want Americans to have?
One thing’s for certain, they don’t want undocumented immigrants to make babies. They call those “anchor babies” and they hate them, unless they happen to come from the current First Lady, in which case it’s fine.
Realistically, they don’t want legal immigrants having more babies, either. This country isn’t a huge fan of any immigrants at the moment.
They certainly don’t want single mothers to have babies. They view that as a moral failing.
The ideal candidates for baby-having, in their eyes, are married heterosexual couples who can easily afford to have children without relying on government assistance, preferably while the husband supports the family financially so the wife can stay home and raise the children.
If that’s the goal, the government’s easiest option would be to invent a giant time machine to send America hurtling back to 1971, the last year that worker pay kept pace with productivity.
Folks like RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz are trying desperately to convince us all that low testosterone and fertility issues are the reason that people aren’t having babies. It’s obvious to anyone who isn’t sheltered from reality that the real reason is money.
Everything is too expensive and our wages are too low. The days of supporting a family on a single income are over for anyone who isn’t making six figures, and depending on how big those six figures are, it might still be a struggle. Groceries are too expensive. Gas is too expensive. Rent is too expensive. Homes are too expensive. Medical care is too expensive. Even with insurance, the bills for delivering a baby run into the tens of thousands of dollars. It used to be that people did home births because they had thoughts about crystals and planets; now it’s a financially appealing option.
And why, exactly, are low birth rates a crisis? For a large portion of my life, I heard that overpopulation was the existential threat our world was facing. My friends with children have told me that finding a day care with an opening is next to impossible. Our elder care facilities are overflowing. Our power grids are struggling. There aren’t enough job openings. If you still think we don’t have enough people in this country, I recommend going to the grocery store at 5:30 PM on a weekday.
It’s almost as if the billionaire oligarchs who own our politicians don’t care about babies and children; it’s as if they care about making certain there continues to be an impoverished underclass so desperate for opportunities that they’re willing to be exploited for their labor because they lack any more appealing options.
