Fewer Teen Births Is Good, Unless You're the Patriarchy
(AND THE MISOGYNIST, PATRIARCHAL, THEOCRATIC, CHRISTOFASCIST WAR ON WOMEN continues apace!)
Fewer Teen Births Is Good, Unless You’re the Patriarchy
PUBLISHED 4/17/2026 by Jennifer Weiss-Wolf
Conservatives are drilling down on distracting young women by pressuring early motherhood.
Chase Infiniti as Agnes and Lucy Halliday as Daisy in The Testaments. (Disney and Hulu / Russ Martin)
This article was originally published by The Contrarian.
How on-brand for the federal government to announce that U.S. birth rates are falling—just as The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, dropped on Hulu last week.
In the fictional nation of Gilead, first envisioned by Margaret Atwood in her 1985 dystopian novel and expanded on screen for nearly a decade now, declining fertility catalyzed a Christian nationalist revolution in modern-day America, spawning a society rooted in patriarchal dominance and state-sanctioned violence. The Testaments, now three episodes in, is making a deliberate appeal to Gen Z and young viewers, featuring the spectacularly savvy Chase Infiniti and Lucy Halliday among Gilead’s tradwife-in-training rebels.
Doubly fascinating then, that it is the real-life status of teen birth rates in particular now driving the news. In a drop considered “extraordinary” by statisticians, the number of babies born to mothers between the ages of 15 and 19 fell by 7 percent in 2025. Translated into hard numbers, NPR reports around 126,000 babies born to mothers in that age range last year—11.7 births per 1,000 females—compared with 35 years ago, when the teen birth rate was 61.8 births per 1,000. (The rate has declined nearly every year since 1991.) Southern states, where teen pregnancy rates are highest, account for much of the recent calculus, according to The New York Times: More than 50 percent in Kentucky, and just under 50 percent in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Declining birth rates globally have been the supposed rationale for much of the Trump administration’s unabashed and self-professed pronatalist agenda. (He dubbed himself the father of IVF, the fertilization president, remember?) But unpacking the complicated, and sometimes contradictory, realities of teen pregnancy and parenting can make for a far stickier set of political talking points. Seemingly, it would be good news for both parties to quantify the success of initiatives to enable consistent contraceptive usage and improve reproductive literacy, yes? Though I certainly can’t imagine a world where conservatives would recognize the value of continued access to abortion care, were that one of the drivers.
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The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s 2019 sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, set 15 years after the original novel. (Disney and Hulu / Russ Martin)
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A fascinating Times analysis indicates that the data shows we are indeed headed in that direction—and the most drastic shift among American women is not to forgo having babies altogether but wait longer to do so. There’s even a demographic name for it: a “postponement transition,” which is what happened in the United States in the 1970s and Europe in the 1990s. According to the article, women in their 40s are now more likely to become mothers. I have no real horse in the race about what is the “right” age to become a parent. But I know a thing or two about the influence older women are flexing in the Trump era. We have seen it play out recently in the fight back against ICE in communities, in who is opposing the SAVE America Act, in who is showing up for No Kings rallies. No wonder conservatives are now drilling down on distracting young women by pressuring early motherhood; look no further than the Heritage Foundation’s 2026 report “Saving America by Saving the Family,” which makes explicit the depravity of the call. Authoritarians know it too: When women amass our power, it hews toward more robust democracy.
https://msmagazine.com/2026/04/17/teen-birth-rates-testaments-girls-handmaids-tale-heritage-foundation/