A “grim future” lies ahead, Trump’s former press secretary said, unless people like her don’t start heavily breeding.

For all conservatives’ huffing and puffing about being censored, we sure have to hear a lot out of their mouths. On her Fox News show Outnumbered this week, former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany theorized that the solution to all of the world’s evils is as simple as “filling the world with a lot of Christian babies.” (Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist and agnostic women can continue to use birth control, I guess?)

Her full quote: “The [antidote] to darkness is light. And the [antidote] to a really grim future is filling the world with a lot of Christian babies, who can bring that light to the world.”

McEnany’s bizarre, pro-natalist comments aren’t exactly surprising coming from someone who repeatedly asserted that President Trump “supports life” at a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying of covid while Trump deliberately downplayed the pandemic. Nor is conservatives’ faux moral panic about the supposedly rapidly declining birth rate all that new: Anti-abortion activists and lawmakers have been weaponizing concerns about the need for more babies for basically forever in order to shame and punish those who have abortions and keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen (read: economically reliant on men.)

But McEnany’s comments are especially uncomfortable at a time when beliefs like hers are driving a legislative crisis targeting our most fundamental reproductive freedoms. Near-total abortion bans are rapidly proliferating across the country, most recently in Idaho, inevitably forcing those who lack the resources to circumvent these bans to carry unwanted pregnancies and give birth.

As Salon reporter Kathryn Joyce has pointed out, McEnany’s wish for
an army of Christian babies to emerge from women’s wombs reflects a rich history of evangelical fearmongering and activism in response to a supposed decline in Christian Americans to helm the conservative political movement. These fears eventually gave rise to the “Quiverfull” movement, which Joyce describes as “a fundamentalist Christian subculture that urges believers to eschew all forms of contraception and have as many children as God chooses to give them, both as a means of demonstrating their pro-life convictions and of reclaiming the culture from the left.”

All of that said, for all their tantrums about why we need more babies stat, McEnany and her fellow pro-forced birthers seem to have few thoughts on how to achieve this in a country that’s essentially designed to punish both pregnancy and motherhood with our lack of child care, living wages, and protections for working parents. But I guess these minor logistical issues and all the other “darkness” in the world will naturally sort itself out if certain God-fearing women would just get to breeding.