Covfefe Chronicles | Ep. 13 – White House Fertility Warning Rekindles America’s Old Obsession With White Birthrates
When Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., stepped behind the White House podium this month and declared that America’s falling birthrate was a “national security threat,” it sounded like bureaucratic concern. But what it really signaled was a familiar moral panic about whose bodies belong to the nation and whose don’t.
Kennedy warned that the U.S. fertility rate has sunk to about 1.6 births per woman, well below the so-called “replacement rate” of 2.1. The administration followed with promises to make fertility treatments cheaper and expand IVF access. On paper, it looks like family policy. But in practice, it sounds like demographic triage and a racist government trying to engineer a baby boom to preserve its version of America.
The White House’s fertility warning isn’t just about numbers. It’s about nostalgia for a whiter, more obedient past. From early-20th-century eugenics and “no race suicide” campaigns, to the modern “Great Replacement” conspiracy, fertility alarms have always been the soundtrack to white male anxiety. When politicians start talking about wombs in the language of national security, it’s not biology they’re worried about; it’s power slipping from their aging hands.
The U.S. birthrate has been dropping for decades, for reasons that have nothing to do with patriotism or DNA. People are delaying or forgoing parenthood because of student debt, unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, and the crushing cost of childcare. In other words, Americans aren’t infertile, they’re broke and exhausted.
But that’s not the story being told from the podium. Kennedy’s statement painted reproduction as a matter of national survival, as though birthrates were ammunition in an invisible war. “We are below replacement rate,” he warned, “and that poses a threat to our population stability.” That language has a long, ugly history. In the early 1900s, Theodore Roosevelt used nearly identical words to urge white women to “do their duty” for the nation, coining the phrase “race suicide” to describe falling white birthrates.
A century later, the same fear has been rebranded as policy. And notice who’s always doing the talking. It’s white men, especially aging white men, watching their dominance fade with every new census, every brown and Black baby born, every woman who decides her body isn’t a national resource. Their alarm over “decline” isn’t about population numbers. It’s about losing control, privilege, and power to dictate who counts as the future.
At its core, this is about control of women’s choices, racial demographics, and of the narrative of decline. Kennedy’s warning isn’t new at all. It’s just the latest verse in a centuries-old hymn to white panic. Because the truth is, the nation isn’t running out of people. It’s running out of excuses for inequality.
