What do Pope Leo XIV and Billie Eilish have in common? 
Neither have kids, and both were spontaneously named by numerous people in a recent survey as the person they most admired in the world. Among that set of popular celebrities, their admirers had some of the lowest desired family sizes: 2.04 kids for Pope Leo’s fans, 2.1 for Eilish’s. At the opposite end of the spectrum, superfans of Cardi B (4 kids), Tom Brady (3 kids), Michael Jordan (5 kids), and Chris Brown (3 kids) topped the list for desired family size, with all their fans wanting 3.2 or more children.
The small family sizes for the pope’s fans may be a misleading number; some of the people who named him as their favorite public figure might be Catholic clergy, committed to celibacy. When we add a range of demographic controls to adjust for this effect, the Pope Leo Fanclub’s adjusted desired family size rises to 2.18, while Eilish’s falls to 1.72, the lowest of any celebrity we studied.
Those sound like two cherry-picked examples. They aren’t. For the Institute for Family Studies&#8217; 2026 State of Fertility report, my colleagues and I surveyed more than 4,700 Americans about the texture of their social and cultural lives, and one finding jumped off the page. We asked every respondent to name the public figure they most admired, then matched that figure to the number of children they were publicly known to have, as well as other demographic traits. The result: Each additional child borne by someone&#8217;s most-admired celebrity was associated with larger family-size desires for the fan — about as strong an association as the number of siblings that person grew up with.
For women, the celebrity effect was larger and more statistically reliable. The effect of being a fan of a big-family celebrity on desired family size was nearly as large as the effect of being a regular churchgoing person, and I think we can safely assume the median Cardi B superfan is not the median churchgoer.
These aren’t small effects, and they appear in a country where the birth rate is below 1.6 children and falling. It’s high time we got serious about asking what exactly it is about modern culture that leads to such low birth rates. It’s not just simple economics: Religious people have far more kids than non-religious yet work in the same economy. While pro-natal policies that give cash to parents do boost births a bit, the overall effect has been a bit underwhelming. It’s time to take a good look at our culture, and culture, in a country like ours, is set at the top. It is set by the famous across various dimensions of society.
There are exceptions to the celebrity effect, of course. NBA YoungBoy and Elon Musk both have around dozen acknowledged children, yet their fans have below-average desired family sizes: around 2.2-2.3 children in both cases (and Elon’s under-30 fans only desire about one child on average). 
In both cases, those are men who had children with many women, which might undermine the influence of their big families on their fans. Most people don’t just want offspring; they want a family — a spouse who loves them, children around them, and a home full of memories. Thus, it’s not just celebrities who have many children who may shape fertility desires, but celebrities who have compelling family lives for fans to emulate.
This shouldn&#8217;t surprise anyone who has watched a teenage girl reorganize her wardrobe around a pop star or a young man pick up lifting because an athlete made it look like the point of being alive. We are imitative creatures. We always have been. We rehearse adulthood by copying the adults we find magnetic. Nowadays, the adults many people find most magnetic — the ones whose lives fit into our pockets for hours a day — are, disproportionately, people whose brand is built on everything except raising children.
This is not a knock on any individual star. It&#8217;s a description of an incentive structure. In some cases, it’s explicit: K-Pop stars are often required by their contracts to remain single and childless, and if by chance they do start a family, their fans often turn on them. They exist to be accessible heartthrobs, not real people.
Fame in 2026 rewards availability, mobility, reinvention, and the appearance of perpetual youth. It requires a carefully cultivated and sustained personal brand meant to capture a devoted audience, not just the highest number of eyeballs.
Unlike the celebrities we see on TV, parents have to set limits on their availability, and they often put down roots. And, well, let’s face it: It’s called &#8220;dad bod&#8221; for a reason. 
Sure, a celebrity with one carefully managed child and a glam squad might read as aspirational, but a celebrity with five? Their kids are almost certainly not on screen, unless the celebrity deliberately puts them in the frame. In turn, the culture-shaping class in our society tends either to be childless or to present themselves as such to maintain their image. As we find in the data, the result is that their fans suppress their own fertility desires.
Not all hope is lost. The same cultural machinery that has talked us out of children can talk us back into them. We don&#8217;t need to lecture young people about their duty to the nation. Nobody has ever been nagged into wanting a baby. We need to make family life visible, attractive, and high-status again, and the fastest way to do that is through the people we already can&#8217;t stop watching. We need more famous families.
So how do you manufacture a more familistic celebrity culture? You can&#8217;t draft people into parenthood, and you shouldn&#8217;t try. But you can stop treating elite fertility as a private eccentricity and start treating it as a public good worth incentivizing. France already does a version of this: Its family quotient system hands its largest tax breaks to high-earning parents — on the theory that the people who set the tone for society should find children easy and rewarding rather than punishing. We could do the same: make it absurdly, conspicuously rewarding for the most influential Americans to have big families and let the cultural spillover do its work on the millions watching.
It is possible that paying Taylor Swift a billion dollars per kid (and maybe a billion more for a nice lullaby album) would do more for the American birth rate than spending that same billion on another round of child tax credits spread out, with a few bucks extra for each kid in America. I am not actually proposing we cut Taylor a check, but some math from our estimated effect sizes suggests that Taylor Swift having two kids could theoretically boost fertility for her cohort of fans by over 200,000 babies. 
If we take the effect sizes from published studies of cash benefits as gospel, a billion dollars spent on baby bonuses for regular people would only get you about 40,000 extra babies. Subsidizing celebrities’ families might be a bad idea for a whole host of reasons (and probably no image-conscious celebrity would ever agree to take the money!), but the principle of the matter stands: Cultural interventions could be valuable ways to reverse the birth dearth.
Of course, family aspirations aren’t the same as family outcomes. We find that celebrity families have a big impact on the total number of children young people want to have; their effect on couples’ actual intentions to have more is smaller. It takes more than a glossy Instagram family to change what people actually do. Turning the desire for kids into the third kid in the car seat requires something else: friends who show up, neighbors who help, and a society that makes room for parents.
In the same study showing celebrity fertility effects, we found that individuals who had more supportive friends (i.e., whose friends would deliver them meals after a baby, celebrate with them, or babysit a child) not only wanted more kids — like the celebrity effect — but also actually intended to have more kids. Celebrities can help ripen the culture for family life, but supportive American communities remain indispensable to making families’ desires a reality.
***
Lyman Stone is a senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from McGill University and is also director of research at the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence.
This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

New York Knicks v Cleveland Cavaliers – Game Three

America Needs More Famous Families

babies

Birth Rates

family

kids

Upstream

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/upstream" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream</a>, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
Two hundred fifty years ago this week, our Founding Fathers declared the self-evident truth “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Most Americans know this phrase by heart. However, <a id="m_4061674854836230776OWA07270982-2b1c-cac0-c335-20e8a2f1ea32" title="https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3960" href="https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3960" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid%3D3960&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1782401549605000&amp;usg=AOvVaw21NXy2lfge7h8Evcxo--EE">polling released</a> by Quinnipiac University just a month ago found that barely one-third of Americans think our nation is “living up to the ideal.”
While many of those polled still firmly believe our nation’s best days are ahead of us, we certainly have work to accomplish, starting with equal rights for the preborn child.
After all, the Declaration of Independence noted our God-given rights in particular order: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our Founders knew that without life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are impossible.
Public discourse on abortion has shifted away from when life begins, especially after Roe v. Wade was overturned. This is a settled fact. Biologists, who Americans agree are the most qualified group to determine when life begins, <a id="m_4061674854836230776OWAf52da664-3608-ac37-f313-a2cf1acb4a11" title="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36629778/" href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36629778/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36629778/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1782401549606000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0CfXk2T_ky1aUsJpd6itDy">nearly unanimously agree</a> that life begins at conception. America now faces the question of personhood.
But knowing when human life begins, have the Founders failed to answer the question of personhood for us? By no means. &#8220;All men are created equal,” according to the Declaration, comes without qualification.
As a nation, we have been forced to self-correct time and time again after we have attempted to qualify what it means to be a legal person. Even the Constitution, signed only 11 years after the Declaration, fell from the founding standard of equal rights and accommodated slavery under the Three-Fifths Compromise.
Only three-fifths of the slave population, nearly all of them black Americans, counted when factoring state representation and taxation, and none were given the rights to own land, marry, or be educated, much less vote. Under the law, they were still wrongfully regarded as property, not humans endowed with the inalienable rights our nation should have always recognized.
Not even President Abraham Lincoln’s <a href="https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation/transcript.html">Emancipation Proclamation</a> nearly 100 years later provided a complete remedy to former slaves. Freed from the institution of slavery itself, black Americans would still suffer under Jim Crow laws and continued racism after Lincoln declared “that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.”
While the 14th Amendment, namely <a id="m_4061674854836230776OWA171b170d-107a-63f4-bf5a-f1ffac3be3cc" title="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment" href="https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1782401549606000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0HY4aVJ6uArgWEYW-H79ZH">the Equal Protection Clause</a>, established no citizen would be denied “the equal protection of the laws,” another century elapsed before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, upheld enforceability of equal rights for black Americans, including among private individuals and businesses.
Signers of the Constitution also failed to recognize and protect the rights of women, allowing others later to interpret the phrase “all men are created equal” to be qualified by sex. The U.S. movement for women’s suffrage fought for decades for the right to functional equality with men — first among this, the right to vote. It took the 19th Amendment to ensure no citizen was denied the right to vote on the basis of sex.
America has persevered, correcting these tragic distortions of the equal rights our nation was founded upon, but she has still failed to recognize the preeminent right to life that is core to any other rights our nation has historically transgressed.
After 250 years, we have still failed to recognize the personhood of the preborn child, even as the 14th Amendment revived the language of the Declaration, stating “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Abortion systematically denies preborn children due process. The right to life cannot be qualified by whether a human is born or preborn; otherwise, we undermine the spirit and ideals upon which this nation was founded.
On America’s 250th birthday, we must return to the founding principles we declared self-evident in 1776, first among these, life.
***
Kristan Hawkins is president of Students for Life of America and Students for Life Action, with more than 1,700 groups on middle and high school, college and university, and medical and law school campuses in all 50 states. Follow her <a id="m_4061674854836230776OWAb523a394-8768-772b-322c-3a476b6f473a" title="https://twitter.com/kristanhawkins?lang=en" href="https://twitter.com/kristanhawkins?lang=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/kristanhawkins?lang%3Den&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1782401549606000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0UmNV8M4599irY9MRYD5HY">@KristanHawkins</a> or subscribe to her podcast, <a id="m_4061674854836230776OWAa5e88b98-a0f7-126b-83bc-c62e9d4dd9fb" title="https://kristanhawkins.com/podcast/" href="https://kristanhawkins.com/podcast/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://kristanhawkins.com/podcast/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1782401549606000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2hUh7hfDsZ-YwcUOxRMAap">The Kristan Hawkins Show</a>.
John Mize is CEO of <a id="m_4061674854836230776OWA295399bd-9d2e-31dd-0f5d-9e5d911ab261" title="https://aul.org/" href="https://aul.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://aul.org/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1782401549606000&amp;usg=AOvVaw113Omgm8oJ76kEd4VT8VK-">Americans United for Life</a>, the nation’s leading pro-life legal advocacy organization.

www.istockphoto.com/portfolio/vgajic

The Right To Life America Still Denies

Abortion

America 250

Momcozy is a top choice for mothers when they purchase a breast pump, but a potential connection with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has raised concerns about customers&#8217; personal information being harvested by the Chinese.
Since Momcozy is a Chinese-based company, it could be required to share information with the group under China’s laws. U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) — who chairs the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee — expressed his unease with Momcozy possibly sharing customers&#8217; information with the CCP.
“We have already seen cases where foreign adversaries such as China have sought to exploit U.S. laws to acquire information that could be used against individuals and our national interests,” he explained in a letter sent to Momcozy on Wednesday that was obtained by The Daily Wire.
The HELP Committee, led by Cassidy, recently launched an investigation following the U.S. Department of Education’s report revealing that foreign entities aligned with the CCP were trying to “influence American universities.&#8221; He also has looked into numerous cybersecurity lapses that put private American data at risk.
The private information that is shared with Momcozy not only puts the parents at a potential risk, but their newborns as well, according to Cassidy.
“As we consider steps to protect families from having their information misused, we must pay particular attention to protecting the safety of our children,” Cassidy wrote.
The HELP Committee sent a letter to the chief executive officer of Momcozy, Athena Pan, Wednesday afternoon to better understand how Momcozy protects the privacy of these families.
In the letter, the HELP Committee addressed three specific protocols that Momcozy follows, requesting answers to numerous questions regarding how privacy is protected. The three protocols targeted are “detailed person information” that is collected, Momcozy’s headquarters in China, where the information is “transferred” and “processed,&#8221; and products connecting to Momcozy’s app via bluetooth or Wi-Fi.
The Senate committee also raised questions regarding Momcozy&#8217;s use of information, what personal information is actually being stored, and any sharing of information with the Chinese Communist Party. 
&#8220;In the last five years, has Momcozy shared any information of individuals who reside in the United States with the Chinese Communist Party or the Chinese government?&#8221; the letter asks, adding, &#8220;What privacy and security protocols does Momcozy have in place to ensure this information is not improperly accessed?&#8221;
The HELP Committee requests answers to their questions by July 6, 2026.
Momcozy did not respond to The Daily Wire&#8217;s request to comment.

MomCozy Sunrise Echo

Leading Baby Product Company Questioned Over Potential CCP Ties

China

Chinese Communist Party

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The U.S. fertility rate reached a record low in 2025, continuing a troubling trend as annual deaths are projected to exceed annual births in America within the next decade.
Total births per 1,000 American women aged 15-44 dropped to 53.1 last year, according to data released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last year also marked the first time in U.S. history that women in their late 30s had higher birth rates than women in their 20s, The Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/us-news/why-the-u-s-fertility-rate-has-hit-a-record-low-13e7c2f8?mod=e2tw">reported</a>.
Recent <a href="https://x.com/BradWilcoxIFS/status/2042211547343450313/photo/1">projections</a> from the Congressional Budget Office warn that, beginning in 2033, there will be more deaths reported in the United States than births. After 2032, U.S. population growth will be entirely dependent on net immigration, according to the Congressional Budget Office&#8217;s projections. The United States recorded just 514,000 more births than deaths in 2025.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Striking CBO projection: by 2033, deaths will outpace births as a consequence of falling fertility. <a href="https://t.co/FJ7lBJOvsB">pic.twitter.com/FJ7lBJOvsB</a>
— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) <a href="https://twitter.com/BradWilcoxIFS/status/2042211547343450313?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 9, 2026</a></blockquote>
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The U.S. fertility rate now stands at 1.57 births per woman, below the replacement level of 2.1 and among the lowest in the world. Data from 2023 showed that only eight countries, including Russia and China, had lower fertility rates than the United States. South Korea has the world&#8217;s lowest fertility rate at 0.80 births per woman in 2025, which was a slight <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/06/asia/south-korea-population-fertility-rate-intl-hnk-dst">increase</a> from 0.75 in 2024 and 0.72 in 2023. The United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and Spain also have lower fertility rates than the United States.
A big part of the declining U.S. fertility rate is the continued sharp decrease in births among young women and teenage girls. Since 2010, the birth rate among women between the ages of 20 and 24 dropped from nearly 100 births per 1,000 women to just over 50 births. For girls between 15 and 19, the birth rate has plummeted 72% since 2007.
&#8220;People are waiting longer to enter parenthood and probably want to make sure that things are set in their lives before they do so. There might be a lot of uncertainty, and that might not be good for a society in general,” Wendy Manning, co-director of Bowling Green State University&#8217;s National Center for Family &amp; Marriage Research, told the Journal.
The Trump administration has expressed concern about America&#8217;s declining birth rate and has enacted policies to encourage more Americans to have babies. President Donald Trump&#8217;s &#8220;Big, Beautiful Bill,&#8221; passed by Congress last year, sets up $1,000 Trump accounts for babies born between 2025 and 2028 and increases the child tax credit.
President Trump also signed an executive order in February 2025, seeking ways to lower costs for in vitro fertilization.
&#8220;My Administration recognizes the importance of family formation, and as a Nation, our public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children,&#8221; Trump&#8217;s order <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/expanding-access-to-in-vitro-fertilization/">stated</a>.
Vice President JD Vance has also been outspoken in his desire to see more babies born in the United States. Speaking at the March for Life in January 2025, Vance <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23XJ2SqI8FA&amp;t=332s">told</a> pro-life demonstrators, &#8220;Our society has failed to recognize the obligation that one generation has to another is a core part of living in a society to begin with, so let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.&#8221;
&#8220;And I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them,&#8221; Vance added. &#8220;And it is the task of our government to make it easier [for] young moms and dads to afford to have kids, to bring them into the world, and to welcome them as the blessings we know they are.&#8221;

Baby stroller in graveyard

America Is On Track To Literally Die Off, New Fertility Data Warns

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The following is an edited transcript excerpt from <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/mks-ep-1945-sub?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">The Michael Knowles Show</a>.
* * *
A huge proportion of babies born in the United States are now born to foreign nationals who are cheating the immigration system. 
Can we acknowledge this whole “anchor baby” thing is a problem? I should hope so but I’m not totally sure that we can.
The whole concept of birthright citizenship comes from the British. The idea stems from a distinction between jus soli — the right-of-the-soil — and jus sanguinis — the right-of-blood. The notion that you get your citizenship from the blood of your parents versus receiving citizenship because you were born on certain soil.
Well, we get the idea from English common law. And guess what? The English — the Brits — have not had jus soli, right-of-the-soil birthright citizenship, since 1983. So even they recognized there’s a problem.
Can we too recognize that there’s a problem here?
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/mks-ep-1945-sub?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-1054531 aligncenter" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-1024x171.jpg" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-1024x171.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-768x128.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-1536x256.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1.jpg 1800w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Western Lensman gives some very good background on this topic on X, posting a clip about pregnant mothers from Turkey giving birth in the United States. Here&#8217;s the clip:
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2020. Turkish anchor baby ring found operating in Long Island, NY — mothers got taxpayer funded healthcare.
This is insane:
&#8220;Prosecutors say more than 100 pregnant women from Turkey came here to give birth, so their children were instantly granted U.S. citizenship.&#8221;… <a href="https://t.co/mjxyihjeO2">https://t.co/mjxyihjeO2</a> <a href="https://t.co/QcWl50rEXd">pic.twitter.com/QcWl50rEXd</a>
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) <a href="https://twitter.com/WesternLensman/status/2039716413225550306?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 2, 2026</a></blockquote>
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Source: WesternLensman/X.com
There are “anchor baby” operations — what amount to birth tourism schemes — that have been operating in this country for years. Prosecutors described a case on Long Island where more than 100 pregnant women from Turkey came to the U.S. to give birth so their children would automatically receive U.S. citizenship.
<blockquote>The defendants fraudulently facilitated the births in the United States of approximately 119 Turkish children. And those children now hold birthright U.S. citizenship.</blockquote>
Officials alleged the scheme was openly advertised abroad — essentially marketing the idea: if you want your child to be born in the United States and become an American citizen, this is how you do it.
This is a business. This is an industry.
You see versions of this in other countries too — there were similar cases involving Chinese birth tourism operations in the past.
So, again I ask, can we acknowledge that this is a problem?
Yes.
Where does the problem derive from? It derives from what is now an outmoded conception from English common law — so much so that the English themselves moved away from it — and from interpretations of the 14th Amendment that have been expanded far beyond what some argue was originally intended.
So what’s the solution?
The solution, very obviously, would be to place limits on how birthright citizenship is applied. You don’t necessarily have to eliminate it entirely — you could define it more narrowly. Some argue that even within the text of the 14th Amendment there are grounds for interpretation about who qualifies, since the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” has historically been debated.
That’s the argument.
And the broader point is this: if a country cannot define who is and is not a citizen, then it raises serious questions about sovereignty and governance.
That’s why this debate keeps coming up.

New parents watching babies in hospital nursery

‘Anchor Baby’ Schemes Are Thriving And The System Making It Possible Is Still Untouched

14th Amendment

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The Daily Wire&#8217;s Isabel Brown fired back after the hosts of ABC&#8217;s &#8220;The View&#8221; went into full meltdown mode on Monday over her passionate support for younger women embracing more traditional families.
&#8220;I’d like to thank the women of @TheView for showing their truest, darkest colors today: they’re literally shrieking like demons at the thought of encouraging young women to have children. PS &#8211; &#8216;stupidest&#8217; isn&#8217;t a real word,&#8221; Brown posted.
&#8220;They want you to hate happy, healthy, fulfilled young people with kids. Even more disturbingly, they want you to hate babies so much that you never want them in the first place. Their response to my encouragement for Gen Z women to get married and have kids? &#8216;You&#8217;re telling people to have as many babies as they want to? Again I&#8217;m going to send you back into the past,'&#8221; Brown continued. &#8220;In other words, *wanting* a baby literally is not a choice as a so-called &#8217;empowered&#8217; woman in 2026.&#8221;
Brown doubled down, saying that she believed the family was the &#8220;strongest threat to evil&#8221; in the world, and adding, &#8220;Again, I reiterate: HAVE THE COURAGE to get married and have a beautiful family. Your life will be better because of it.&#8221;
After promising to further address the topic — and the comments from &#8220;The View&#8221; — on her next Daily Wire show, Brown shared the full segment from the ABC midday talk show: &#8220;If you just can&#8217;t help yourself in the meantime &amp; want to grab some popcorn — here&#8217;s the whole segment of 5 grown women screeching about how I am the &#8220;stupidest&#8221; person on the Internet, who should divorce my husband, and probably never should have become a mom in the first place. Misery sure loves projection, doesn&#8217;t it?&#8221;
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
And if you just can&#8217;t help yourself in the meantime &amp; want to grab some popcorn &#8211; here&#8217;s the whole segment of 5 grown women screeching about how I am the &#8220;stupidest&#8221; person on the Internet, who should divorce my husband, and probably never should have become a mom in the first… <a href="https://t.co/ijm2z8MxfV">pic.twitter.com/ijm2z8MxfV</a>
— Isabel Brown (@theisabelb) <a href="https://twitter.com/theisabelb/status/2038691529795965026?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 30, 2026</a></blockquote>
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Whoopi Goldberg opened the segment with a clip of Brown, speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), encouraging young women to get married and have children — and she and her cohosts immediately claimed that Brown was promoting backward thinking.
Goldberg began by claiming that women of color had been criticized in the past for having too many children, saying they were the reason that government assistance programs were getting cut.
Cohost Sara Haines argued that by promoting traditional families, Brown was reducing women to only the value of their reproductive organs: &#8220;The whole women&#8217;s movement was not about bucking the trend of staying at home or loving tradition. It was giving women a choice to do what they wanted. And that&#8217;s what this is too. Marriage, children. It&#8217;s a choice.&#8221;
&#8220;The fact we keep putting this on women, that their only worth in society, politics, policy is if they produce a baby or have a husband is the stupidest, most old-fashioned thing!&#8221; Haines continued. &#8220;We have come too far! The world has over 8 billion people! We no longer need to force people to procreate and pump out babies! We have arrived here! Women now and girls now have a choice!&#8221;
Ana Navarro also weighed in, ignoring the fact that Brown had been clear about women getting married prior to starting families and complaining that no one was expecting men to step up and be responsible for all the babies.
&#8220;If you&#8217;re not paying my bills, you don&#8217;t get to tell me what I do with my uterus,&#8221; she declared.
Cohost Sunny Hostin went a different direction entirely, claiming that Brown&#8217;s position was untenable primarily because of President Donald Trump. Blaming him for the fact that child care was too expensive for most working families, Hostin argued that women should think twice before following her advice.
Goldberg followed right behind, arguing that red states were enacting laws that were not encouraging women to do anything other than &#8220;flee&#8221; from them: &#8220;You&#8217;re telling people to have as many babies as they want to? Again I&#8217;m going to send you back into the past.&#8221;

Isabel Brown

Daily Wire Host Fires Back After ‘The View’ Melts Down Over Her Support For Young Families

Daily Wire Host Fires Back After 'The View' Melts Down Over Her Support For Young Families

Media

Politics

The Daily Wire

The View

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
My husband and I are expecting our fourth baby, but it took us a few births under our belt to figure out which birth plan worked for us. After two hospital births and a home birth, our decision for baby number four was easy: We’re planning to have another home birth.
Not every baby can or should be born at home. But if you’re lucky enough to have a healthy baby and a healthy pregnancy, home birth is a beautiful option. And it’s one that more and more families are choosing. While home births are still a small share of overall births in the United States (<a href="https://www.nacpm.org/communitybirthdata?utm">less than 2% of total births</a>), this rate has <a href="https://theweek.com/health/home-births-rise?utm">increased roughly 60%</a> over the last seven years. 
It’s not a mystery why we’re seeing such rapid growth in this seemingly radical birth plan. There is something seriously wrong with how hospitals handle childbirth in America. The United States has one of the highest maternal mortality rates among wealthy countries. In the 1980s, maternal <a href="https://www.americanactionforum.org/insight/maternal-mortality-in-the-united-states/?utm">mortality rates began to increase</a> after about 50 years of decline. Some studies suggest that between 2000 and 2021, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2021/maternal-mortality-rates-2021.htm?utm">maternal mortality in the United States nearly doubled</a>. That’s pretty shocking considering the medical advancements we’ve made. Childbirth has been around as long as people have. How are we still getting this so wrong?
When I first explored home birth during my third pregnancy, I found the philosophical differences between OBGYNs and home birth midwives staggering. OBGYNs are doctors. They are looking for medical problems and often find them. Midwives, by contrast, do not see childbirth as a medical problem to be solved. And, if you have a good midwife, she will guide you during pregnancy to set you up for a healthy delivery, preventing problems before they arise. 
In every meeting with my midwife, she checked in on my diet. I was given a nutrition plan (my pseudo-vegetarian diet had to go), encouraged to exercise, eat a lot of protein, and cut out sugar. “Sugar is hard on you, and it’s hard on the baby,” my midwife told me. This really struck me. It’s hard on the baby. Would an OBGYN ever be that brutally honest? Maybe. But usually after a mother has already been diagnosed with gestational diabetes. Women in the United States face a cascading series of complications during pregnancy and birth. It is reasonable to assume that poor maternal nutrition plays a role.
But my decision to have a home birth didn’t come from a belief that doctors are bad or doing something inherently wrong. It came from my two experiences with hospital births. 
I went into my first childbirth having no “birth plan.” I gave birth at a hospital because that’s what you do. I had an epidural because why not? I want to be clear: There is nothing wrong with getting an epidural. But there are some things to consider before making this choice.
The ability to move your body during labor can be vitally important. If the baby is in an undesirable position for birth because you’ve been lying immobile on your back for hours due to the epidural, the baby could get in a bad spot. This could put the baby in distress and lead to an emergency C-section or, in the case of my oldest son, a vacuum birth.  
Flash forward to my second pregnancy, and my plan was to try to go without the epidural, but I would get one if I needed it. This was a ridiculous plan. If you would like a natural childbirth, you cannot leave the door open to the epidural. You need to be committed, your husband needs to be committed, and your doctors need to be committed. Because once things get hard, you will ask for the epidural. And that’s exactly what I did.
Everything was going well with the epidural until it wasn’t. The pain was gone, I was starting to feel like I might be able to get some rest, and then I started feeling exhausted. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. My heart rate and blood pressure tanked quickly, and I lost consciousness. The next thing I remember, nurses were screaming at me to open my eyes. I felt horrible. I felt weak. I felt like I was dying. 
They backed off the epidural medication, and my vitals improved. I was able to start talking, but I felt so weak. I couldn’t imagine how I could deliver a baby feeling this way. That’s when they told me they wanted to try the epidural medication again, confident that they could do it while keeping my vitals strong. I very groggily said, “Ok.” Minutes later, I was unconscious again. 
I have now learned that what I went through was just something that happens sometimes, but apparently, it’s not common enough for any of my nurses to have seen it before. They all looked terrified. Once they stabilized me, they shockingly wanted to try the epidural medication a third time. I had the wherewithal to say absolutely not. I need to be awake.
After about an hour, the pain of the contractions came back, and I was relieved. I didn’t want any remnants of the epidural medication in my body (although I’m sure there were some). I was still feeling very weak. After begging for and guzzling a strong cup of coffee, I delivered my beautiful second baby boy, and I felt incredible. I was completely connected to what was happening because I could feel it. It was hard, but I did it. I felt happier and stronger than I ever had in my life. The weakness was gone, replaced by pure euphoria. I felt like I could do anything.
When it was time for baby number three, I knew what I wanted. No epidural, no Pitocin (the drug given to almost every woman in a hospital, unless they specifically opt out, to speed up the labor process). I wanted a completely natural childbirth, which led me to pursue home birth.
My home birth was beautiful. I was in the comfort of my own home, with my own things. My midwife was with me the entire time. In a hospital, the doctor basically comes in when it’s time to push; it’s impersonal, rushed, and dehumanizing. At home, I didn’t have to ask permission to drink a cup of coffee. I didn’t have to ask permission to stand up and move around. There were no other patients for a doctor to tend. I felt completely taken care of.
When I gave birth at home, I felt the same way I did after my second. I can do anything. I felt euphoric because women have a natural hormone release that is supposed to happen during birth, which is vitally important for bonding with your baby and avoiding postpartum depression. An overly medicated birth can disrupt that important hormone release. Many women who have struggled with postpartum depression in the past choose an unmedicated birth for exactly this reason.
After I gave birth, my midwife stayed for about an hour and then left. We were able to rest. After being up all night, my husband, baby, and I took the best nap of our lives. No nurses came to wake us up every hour. Our baby wasn’t subjected to endless unnecessary tests that could wait until her first pediatrician appointment. We got what all three of us needed: sleep. We were comfortable, happy, and at peace with our beautiful baby girl. My midwife came back several times to check on us. I didn’t have to go anywhere.
Home birth isn’t for everyone, but my husband and I discovered it’s definitely for us. And if God continues to bless us with a healthy pregnancy, I am looking forward to another beautiful, unmedicated birth in the comfort of my own home.
***
Mary Clare Amselem is a stay-at-home mother and a former education policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

Baby sleeping on mother’s chest in bed at home

I Trusted The System For Two Births. Then I Decided To Take Control.

birth

Health

The following is an edited transcript excerpt from <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1933-the-new-ayatollah-of-iran-is-gay?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">The Michael Knowles Show</a>.
* * *
We&#8217;re not supposed to say anything but good about people who&#8217;ve just died. As the saying goes, speak no ill of the dead.
This man, however, left a wake of death, destruction, and catastrophe wherever he went. And most people don&#8217;t even know his name: Paul Ehrlich.
I write about Paul Ehrlich at some length in my book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Speechless-Controlling-Words-Minds/dp/1684510821/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Y2L5GPaNcg2v5jnT9SD5ksR5a40NcpExppW6aHVVBg2FzlIHja61O5i6m-pH9wpIMWHGSkrLhkrd8rHzMDQN1iA3BuBH-UVJi0EyStx6M6l_7HKhwR0GKrN8w6e8rOUE18q_fPEggyexww619c7-BErp7yFNm38xTMhU_w6ZaMi3k03CxrXWwSCCSRcazdNo3eNXnHdUbDw3bae74VylSnpc0SFRJr6jlNhYAX6vRAs.q0vDzxnV2mm76BoF3WDe4Demnp2J-5X6usahlx1IIbo&amp;qid=1773785807&amp;sr=1-2">Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds</a>.” 
And now, here we have his obituary in <a href="https://x.com/SonnyBunch/status/2033466323842331077">The New York Times</a>:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
“Premature,” lol. The abject refusal to just admit this guy was completely wrong is one of the funnier Boomer-coded traits. <a href="https://t.co/oM5GYgDEtR">pic.twitter.com/oM5GYgDEtR</a>
— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) <a href="https://twitter.com/SonnyBunch/status/2033466323842331077?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 16, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Source: @SonnyBunch/X.com
The headline and sub-headline reads: 
<blockquote>Paul Ehrlich, who alarmed the world with The Population Bomb, dies at 93. 
His bestselling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement, but he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.</blockquote>
Here we go. Big lie. 
His predictions “proved premature.” What were his predictions? His prediction was that if the population grew any more, we would have widespread famine, because the Earth could not sustain all those people.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1933-the-new-ayatollah-of-iran-is-gay?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-1054531" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-1024x171.jpg" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-1024x171.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-768x128.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1-1536x256.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/MK-watch-now-1.jpg 1800w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
His prescriptions, therefore, were to stop having kids and sterilize people. We should use the government to reduce the population. These policies of his led to the one-child policy in China and forced sterilizations in India. This guy is — not single-handedly, but pretty close — responsible for the population crisis (or depopulation) that we face today.
And they say his predictions &#8220;proved premature.&#8221; 
Since he made his prediction that we would inevitably face mass starvation because the population was growing too much, since that time, the world population has doubled and global malnutrition has been cut dramatically. Today there are twice as many people as when he made his prediction, and we are more well-fed than ever.
It&#8217;s not that his predictions proved premature. They were completely wrong. Totally wrong. 
The New York Times is covering for Ehrlich in its obituary of him. Ehrlich did more evil than almost anybody in the 20th century. And the consequences of his stupid predictions and prescriptions — because he prescribed policy to governments — were mass evil.
The consequences of his ideas led to mass death, sterilization, the violation of basic rights, and he never let up on it.
Here is Paul Ehrlich, in the 1970s, discussing the problem as he saw it:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
In a 1970 interview, Paul Ehrlich stated: &#8220;The FCC should see to it that large families are always treated in negative light on television.&#8221;
He added that if this approach failed, then the government should &#8220;legislate the size of the family&#8221; and &#8220;throw you in jail if you have… <a href="https://t.co/Ij7C5eso4W">pic.twitter.com/Ij7C5eso4W</a>
— Gentry Gevers (@gentrywgevers) <a href="https://twitter.com/gentrywgevers/status/2033583323864568245?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 16, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Source: @gentrywgevers/X.com
In the interview, Ehrlich says,
<blockquote>The first thing the government should do is try and take the pressure off to reproduce &#8230; Young couples — if they don&#8217;t have children — people say, &#8216;gee, they must be sterile.&#8217; They never say, &#8216;gee, maybe they like good wine and going to the theater and so on, they prefer that to scraping diapers.&#8217; So there&#8217;s pressure to have children. So the first thing that should happen is that the president ought to say, &#8216;From here on out, no intelligent, patriotic American family ought to have more than two children, preferably one, if you&#8217;re starting a family now.&#8217; He ought to make the FCC see to it that large families are always treated in a negative light wherever they appear &#8230;  you can move to giving women bonuses for not having babies, that almost certainly would do the job. 
If that didn&#8217;t have the effect, then you could move to changing the tax structure so that people who had the money and had the children paid more for them — in other words, increase taxes on people with children rather than decrease them, since when they have the children they require more services. 
If that doesn&#8217;t work, then you&#8217;ll have the government legislating the size of the family. And people say, &#8216;Oh that&#8217;s impossible, government can never intrude and tell you how many children to have.&#8217; Well, I got news — you know it intruded a long time ago and told you how many wives you can have and there&#8217;s not the slightest question that if we don&#8217;t get the population under control with voluntary means that in the not-too-distant-future, the government will simply tell you how many children you can have and throw you in jail if you have too many.</blockquote>
So God tells us in the book of Genesis to &#8220;Be fruitful and multiply.&#8221; 
This Antichrist figure comes out in the 1970s and says, &#8220;Do not have children. It&#8217;s unpatriotic to have children.&#8221;
It&#8217;s funny because patriotism comes from the word &#8220;Pater,&#8221; meaning father — it&#8217;s an extension of filial piety, it&#8217;s an extension of the family — and he&#8217;s saying the pro-family thing to do is to destroy your family.
He says, first we&#8217;re going to incentivize people — we&#8217;re going to discourage them culturally. Say having kids is bad, you should just drink good wine instead. 
All these arguments you hear today — Don’t you want to travel? Don’t you want to have experiences? Don’t have kids.
And if that doesn&#8217;t work, we&#8217;re going to pay people not to have kids. Give women bonuses. Subsidize it. Say instead of having kids, go work at the widget factory, do spreadsheets, we’ll give you money.
That doesn&#8217;t work? Okay, now we punish you. Forget the carrot, now it&#8217;s the stick. If you have kids, we&#8217;re going to tax you. We&#8217;re going to make you pay for the privilege.
And if that doesn&#8217;t work, we&#8217;re just going to stop you from having kids.
What does that mean in practice? Because China implemented this. It means forced abortion. The government comes in and kills your child. You want to keep your child? No. Government kills your child.
It leads to policies like in India, where people were told you can only get access to food and resources if you sterilize yourself.
That happened because of this guy. Because of his book. Because of his ideas.
He said in &#8220;The Population Bomb&#8221;: 

<blockquote>The battle to feed all of humanity is over… hundreds of millions of people will starve to death… nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.</blockquote>
Totally wrong. Could not have been more wrong.
He said we must have population control — hopefully through voluntary means, but by compulsion if necessary. That was his thesis.
He described population growth as a &#8220;cancer.&#8221; Population growth just means more people. So if more people are a cancer, then people are the disease.
Human beings are a disease.
The left has held on to that view for a very, very long time. And this is where the truly wicked origins of leftism — which endeavors to invert reality — began, during the French Revolution as an assault on the Church. This is where the real satanic, Luciferian character of liberalism really begins to show itself. One of the fruits of liberalism is the view that human beings are a disease that must be cured, that must be eradicated from the earth. 
And now this guy is eradicated from the earth. And it&#8217;s sad, because every man&#8217;s death diminishes me because I&#8217;m a human. 
As John Donne wrote in his famous poem, &#8220;No Man is an Island&#8221;:
<blockquote>No man is an island entire of itself; every man 
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 
own were; any man&#8217;s death diminishes me, 
because I am involved in mankind. 
And therefore never send to know for whom 
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.</blockquote>
We should pray for him, because he led a very, very evil life. And in many ways, maybe he didn’t fully understand what he was doing. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
But we can’t just think about him — we have to think about the institutions.
This guy got everything wrong. Not a little wrong — perfectly wrong. And he never paid a price for it. He kept his positions, his prestige, his influence. His policies were implemented. They led to enormous harm. And the institutions backed him up.
And now one of the chief cultural institutions, The New York Times, is still covering for him — still saying his ideas were just “premature.”
Not premature. Wrong.
And as a final note, that idea — “forgive them, for they know not what they do” — this connects to something else.
The world feels tense right now. The stakes feel higher. There’s conflict in Iran, division at home, a lot of strain in the culture. For Christians, this is Lent. And if you’ve paid attention over the years, this season often feels like that — more tension, more conflict, more difficulty. In the story, this is the period in the desert, the temptation, the struggle.
And then comes Easter.
I’m not saying everything magically gets better overnight. But if you believe in spiritual realities, that there is a meaning to history, a rhythm to the liturgical calendar, then it’s not surprising that things feel strained right now.
Sometimes things look like they’re falling apart — like when Christ was crucified on Calvary — right before they come back together.
That’s the pattern.

Paul Ehrlich at a press conference this afternoon at Macquarie University.Internationally famous biologist, Paul Ehrlich, is visiting Australia and will be taking the position of Visiting Professor in Environmental Studies at Macquarie University.

One Of The Most Evil Men In History Just Died

Birth Control

Obituaries

Opinion

Population

The New York Times

For years, the abortion debate has been framed almost exclusively around law and ideology. But behind the slogans are women making deeply personal decisions often under intense financial pressure. <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3729671/">National research</a> consistently shows that the cost of raising children, especially childcare, weighs heavily on those decisions.
March 12 is National Working Moms Day. At Human Coalition, we are taking this moment to celebrate the hardworking moms we serve as the nation&#8217;s most trusted life-affirming alternative to Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry. Every day, we serve pregnant women who are already working to support their other children and fearing that they can&#8217;t possibly welcome another child in their current circumstances. 
But if we’re serious about honoring working moms, we need to confront an uncomfortable truth: childcare is one of the most consequential factors shaping decisions about work, family, and even abortion. 
According to Human Coalition, a national pro-life organization that serves thousands of pregnant women each year, <a href="https://www.humancoalition.org/impact/blog/continuum-of-care/">76%</a> of women seeking abortion say they would prefer to parent if circumstances were different, and financial reasons figure prominently in many of those decisions. Nearly 40% cite <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3729671/">economic concerns overall</a>, and more than one in four say they “<a href="https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/pubs/psrh/full/3711005.pdf">can’t afford a baby and childcare</a>.” 
These are not abstract statistics. They represent women staring at bank accounts, calculating rent, daycare, groceries, and gas, and concluding they have no room left for a new baby.
Consider “<a href="https://www.humancoalition.org/impact/blog/how-does-childcare-affect-a-womans-abortion-decision/">Cindy.</a>&#8220;
When she first came to Human Coalition, pregnant with her second child, Cindy was overwhelmed and unsure whether she could choose life. With practical support, she completed her GED, secured childcare vouchers, and started working. Stability seemed within reach.
Then her employer changed her hours. She lost childcare. Without childcare, she lost her job. One scheduling shift unraveled everything.
Human Coalition walked with her again, helping her regain stability. But Cindy’s story illustrates a broader reality: for many working-class mothers, childcare access is fragile. One disruption can mean lost income, lost opportunity, and a life thrown off track.
That’s why recent reforms in the Working Families Tax Cut deserve real attention.
The legislation included meaningful steps to strengthen childcare access and expand flexibility for working- and middle-class parents. Lawmakers <a href="https://www.ffyf.org/policy-priorities/tax-policy-and-child-care/#:~:text=The%20tax%20code%20was%20updated%20in%20July,or%20provide%20child%20care%20for%20their%20workforce">reinforced funding</a> streams by increasing the Child &amp; Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), expanding dependent care assistance program (DCAP) limits to $7,500, and boosting the Employer-Provided Child Care Credit (Section 45F) to encourage business-supported care.
The bill also modernized certain eligibility pathways and acknowledged something working mothers have long understood: that affordable childcare isn&#8217;t a subsidy for working parents; it&#8217;s a foundation for a culture that makes room for new life.
And without accessible childcare, financial stability slips away for some of the most vulnerable moms in our nation.
These reforms matter because the cost burden is staggering. In 2024, parents reported spending roughly 22% of their income on childcare and nearly 30% of their savings just to maintain it. A new<a href="https://americanfamilysurvey.byu.edu/american-family-survey-2025"> 2025 American Family Survey</a> showed that the average annual price of center-based child care is $15,570, rivaling mortgage payments in many communities.
And even when families can afford care, they often can’t find it. More than half of Americans live in a “<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/childcare-deserts-labor-shortage-infrastructure-affordable-childcare-working-parents-2021-11">childcare desert</a>,” where there are at least three children for every licensed childcare slot.
This isn’t just an affordability crisis. It’s an access crisis.
The cultural conversation often assumes Americans don’t want families anymore. The data tell a different story.
A 2024 peer-reviewed paper from scholars Lyman Stone and Clara Piano found that states with less restrictive childcare regulations have meaningfully smaller “<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/coep.12677">fertility gaps,</a>” which represent the gap between how many children women say they want and how many they actually have. In the state with the most burdensome regulations, simply adopting the regulatory environment of the least restrictive state would increase fertility rates by roughly 13%. 
Strikingly, in every state, the average desired family size remains above the replacement level of 2.1 children.
Women want children. They need the structural support that makes those children economically possible.
The goal here isn’t to replace immediate family or community support with government. It’s to remove unnecessary barriers that make family formation financially perilous. Smart childcare reform can expand options for those who need them most. If we want stronger families, a healthier economy, and a culture where moms don’t feel forced into abortion by their circumstances, we cannot ignore the role childcare plays in all three.
National Working Moms Day shouldn’t be reduced to social media tributes and corporate platitudes. It should prompt serious reflection about the policies shaping women’s real-life experiences. For many women standing at the edge of a decision between life and death for their unborn child, it can be an undeniably pro-life policy.
We’ve made meaningful progress. But until no woman feels cornered into a permanent decision because of a temporary economic barrier, our work isn’t done.
* * *
Clare Ath is the senior policy analyst at Human Coalition, one of the largest pro-life organizations in the nation, which operates a network of telecare and brick-and-mortar women’s care clinics across the country.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Toddler girl embracing mother in doorway as she gets home from work

The Hard Truth About Being A Working Mom In America

childcare

employment

You’re not ready to become a mother.
I wasn’t &#8220;ready&#8221; when I became one at 29. I definitely wasn’t ready to be married at 22, either. Happily, I did it all anyway. And then I watched as I steadily grew into these roles, finding my footing with a little grace, a lot of missteps, and more joy than I would’ve ever expected.
For this, I’m probably an anomaly — and definitely not a good feminist, according to The New York Times, which on Friday published its latest <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/us/politics/us-birthrate-decline-women.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/us/politics/us-birthrate-decline-women.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1772321232845000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3hYnYfwr9CW_joLMOUB1GT">article</a> about the precipitous decline in the U.S. birthrate. The framing was predictable: this is a good thing, insisted the gaggle of childless twenty-something women interviewed for the piece, because it means women are finally waiting until they’re &#8220;ready&#8221; to have children.
The most obvious first rebuttal to this argument are the statistics on marriage, motherhood, and happiness. According to the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), the <a href="https://www.compactmag.com/article/get-married-young/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.compactmag.com/article/get-married-young/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1772321232845000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3-NbsFdVUogNa1Ku-mQhlO">happiest</a> young women in America are married moms, and it’s not close.
And the longer women wait to marry and have children, the less likely they’ll be able to reach those milestones — socially and biologically. Recent IFS <a href="https://ifstudies.org/insights?id=3886" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ifstudies.org/insights?id%3D3886&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1772321232845000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0TJTJPhmOurlAEs7kT_KPJ">research</a> indicates that women’s odds of having children fall dramatically after they turn 30.
But the deeper issue with framing the debate over falling birthrates as a feminist win is the suggestion that anyone is ever &#8220;ready&#8221; to become a mother. By today’s cultural standard — what Brad Wilcox has called the “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFzU4ND77tA" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DNFzU4ND77tA&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1772321232845000&amp;usg=AOvVaw1FLr-6BB0wE7G5jU5CLi1-">Midas Mindset</a>” — the term &#8220;ready&#8221; usually has capitalist connotations. It’s defined by having a certain income, reaching a certain level of professional success, or having racked up enough life experiences, like traveling and dating around before settling down.
Indeed, the women <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/us/politics/us-birthrate-decline-women.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/us/politics/us-birthrate-decline-women.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1772321232845000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3hYnYfwr9CW_joLMOUB1GT">interviewed</a> by the Times — the young marketing student who regrets having to care for her siblings while her mom hustled to make ends meet; the recent grad who wants to build her career first; and the gym employee who “enjoys the [childless] peace” with her husband — are all under the impression that being ready for kids is primarily a logistical and financial proposition.
But if this standard were real, we should expect there to come a moment in most women’s lives when they’ve reached some or all of these benchmarks, prompting them to wake up and suddenly find they’re ready to become mothers.
But that’s not what’s happening. Because that’s not how any of this works.
The women featured in the Times seem to believe that becoming a mother is something they can accurately imagine ahead of time. They believe it’s an endeavor that will someday fit into pictures of their lives they’ve already painted. The problem is that motherhood doesn’t lend itself to that kind of logic. There is no analog to having children by which women (or men, for that matter) can ever really make an informed decision not to do it. That would be like saying, “I’ve looked at this from every possible angle, and I’ve decided not to live on Mars.” To say such a thing would be to have no actual idea what we’re choosing or not choosing.
What many of the women interviewed by the Times don’t seem to understand is that to become a mom is to fundamentally change. A woman in her early twenties can look at the prospect of motherhood as if it were simply another life choice. She might think “maybe I’ll move to another city,” or “maybe I’ll break up with my boyfriend,” and she can pretty fairly imagine what those experiences would be like, because she’d still be herself when or if they happened. But to contemplate motherhood as the same sort of question is a category error. Because when she becomes a mom, she will change so fundamentally that she, frankly, has no business making decisions today on behalf of that stranger.
That probably explains why childless women who try to defend their decision tend to overestimate the hard parts of motherhood and wildly underestimate the wonderful parts. Rose Paz, a young college student who spoke to the Times, said she doesn’t want to have kids right now because it would be a financial struggle, and she remembers the painful experience of watching her own parents stress out over money.
I can empathize with that fear, and it’s true that below poverty, motherhood can be a daily crisis. But if Ms. Paz is imagining some future point in her life in which she won’t feel stressed about money — that is, I’m sorry to say, a fundamental misunderstanding of both stress and money. Life just doesn’t work that way, and motherhood has nothing to do with it.
Another woman, a social demographer, told the Times that the falling birthrate is a “success story” because women are finally making sure they have their &#8220;lives in order&#8221; before having kids. &#8220;We spent decades shaming women for having kids under the wrong circumstances, for not having their ducks in a row… now they are holding up their end of the bargain,” she said.
Certainly, no woman should ever be shamed for having a child; much less a woman whose deadbeat partner has chosen to abandon her to single motherhood. But the social stigma on teen and single motherhood was never really about women having kids when they were poor; it was about women having kids when they weren’t married. These supposedly empowered women claiming to have taken back control of their own lives aren’t talking about making sure a man commits to them before having babies; they’re talking about making enough money.
Again, that’s not the right perspective. The happiest women in America are married moms. Past a certain level of basic material security, the hardships of parenthood aren’t really mitigated by more money, because they’re much deeper and much more existential than the merely financial. They are mitigated by marriage, though. And that’s because, just as it takes a man and a woman to make a baby, it also takes a man and a woman to raise a baby.
It turns out, the best parts of marriage and motherhood have nothing to do with money, either. In my experience, they are surprising and unscripted. The best parts are finding your babies in bed, reading under the covers with a flashlight. It’s when they say “ex-shepally” when they mean “especially.” It’s watching their hair grow wild and curly. It’s catching them being kind to a young stranger. It’s seeing yourself care more about them than your own comfort, when you hadn’t really known that was possible.
I’m almost 40 now, with two young daughters and a marriage going on 17 years. I can’t imagine a deeper source of both vulnerability and joy than this family of mine. I can reasonably imagine what life would have been like if I hadn’t gotten married young. I remember what it was like to travel alone, to answer to no one but myself, to sleep in on Saturdays, and to pee in solitude.
Women who haven’t married or had children, however, don’t have the same insight into their own what-ifs. They may really believe that not having children during their healthiest childbearing years is the path toward their deepest happiness. But they don’t know it, and they’re almost certainly wrong. From a Christian perspective, I believe this is why God made childbearing something totally outside our control.
The hard things in life are usually the very best things, but most of us don’t have the strength, on our own, to choose the hard things. Young women should get married and have babies anyway. They’ll see — I mean this literally — exactly what I mean.
Maria Baer is a contributing writer at the Institute for Family Studies and co-host of the Breakpoint podcast with The Colson Center for Christian Worldview.
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The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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Mother of Girls

No One’s Ready To Be A Mom

Motherhood

New York Times

Parenting

Welcome to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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I’m a Luddite in many ways, at least in theory. I hate social media, prefer to spend my free time in nature — usually with a gun, bow, or rod and reel in my hand — and long for the days when you could buy a truck with a manual transmission. In fact, I have often quipped that America went to heck in a handbasket when Ford stopped putting manuals in their F-150s (2008, for those keeping track). I’m not a big fan of governments regulating just about anything, but I applaud the fact that millions of Americans have gravitated toward the MAHA movement, which prioritizes <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/rfk-flips-the-food-pyramid-and-announces-massive-changes-to-dietary-guidelines">whole foods</a> over modern, processed garbage.
If you called me a redneck or Jesus freak, I would have a hard time beating the allegations, but even as an old-school Midwesterner, I find many on the Right’s insistence that American life was better in the 1950s, or any glamorized bygone era, to be preposterous. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/24/americans-take-a-dim-view-of-the-nations-future-look-more-positively-at-the-past/">found</a> that &#8220;around six-in-ten (58%) say that life for people like them is worse today than it was 50 years ago.&#8221; This is unfounded. <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/economist-thomas-sowell-alarmed-trumps-tariffs-may-spark-worldwide-trade-war" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dailywire.com/news/economist-thomas-sowell-alarmed-trumps-tariffs-may-spark-worldwide-trade-war&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1771705058176000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2LD7Zvboy56-RaMc8K3Mv_">The economist Thomas Sowell</a> is right about a great many things, including the fact that there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
I despise many of the side effects of the massive industry surrounding modern medicine. <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/best-of-2025-the-experts-are-finally-admitting-that-adhd-is-a-scam" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dailywire.com/news/best-of-2025-the-experts-are-finally-admitting-that-adhd-is-a-scam&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1771705058176000&amp;usg=AOvVaw39O6UpkChLorueBKQd6UIK">Overmedication</a> is a serious problem, and a healthy lifestyle is often a far better option than whatever a doctor may be prescribing. But when trouble comes knocking, it sure is great to have the kind of doctors and hospitals we take for granted today.
In 1950, the infant mortality rate in the U.S. was 29 deaths per 1,000 live births. Today, that number is around five out of 1,000. Childbirth is so remarkably safe in the modern world, at least in developed countries, that most people never think about mortality rates, but a couple of generations ago, there was a strong chance neither of my children would have survived. My daughter required an emergency C-section after my wife labored for several hours with no progress. Of course, C-sections were not uncommon in 1950, but they were <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/no-women-arent-50-more-likely-to-die-from-childbirth-today-than-a-generation-ago" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dailywire.com/news/no-women-arent-50-more-likely-to-die-from-childbirth-today-than-a-generation-ago&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1771705058176000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3NH7Rl_-azH8AWHB4aZR2p">riskier</a> for both the mother and baby.
The beginning of my son’s life in 2024 was more difficult by orders of magnitude. My wife’s water broke at 28 weeks, and the little man arrived at 29. As I sped to the hospital at 5 a.m., I assumed there was a 50-50 chance our boy would survive. He was well under three pounds, and I had never personally met anyone who had a baby at his gestational age. At the hospital, however, the doctors and nurses were shockingly calm and professional. I almost couldn’t believe it when they said, “He’s doing great.”
In 1950, there would have been essentially nothing that most hospitals could have done for my son. <a href="https://www.nicuawareness.org/blog/a-brief-history-of-advances-in-neonatal-care?utm_source=chatgpt.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nicuawareness.org/blog/a-brief-history-of-advances-in-neonatal-care?utm_source%3Dchatgpt.com&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1771705058176000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0_dKbPiC3DLnDgSerQBJ8D">Neonatal</a> care was nonexistent or in its infancy, depending on where you lived. Specialized incubators, ventilation, and steroid treatments were primitive, if available at all. Today, babies born at 29 weeks survive at a miraculous clip north of 90%.
I wouldn’t wish a nearly three-month stay in NICU on my worst enemy. It was certainly the most trying time of our lives, but by my son’s original due date, we were bringing him home, something that would have been nearly impossible before NICUs became widespread in hospitals across the West in the early 1970s. In a generation, modern medical advancements completely transformed how premature births are viewed in the developed world, not to mention the countless diseases, such as polio and smallpox, that have been almost entirely eradicated in the West. When was the last time you thought about malaria? There is a reason why the deadliest killer in human history is an afterthought outside of the third world.
Even when I’m in the woods, away from modern technology and the worries of 21st century life, I’m still the beneficiary of modernity. Heroes of the American outdoors, such as <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/episode-1-daniel-boone?elementPosition=4&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+Show+Episodes+Carousel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Daniel Boone</a> and Davy Crockett, used inaccurate, expensive, and unreliable flintlock muzzleloaders to hunt big game. Terms such as “flash in the pan” and “keep your powder dry” are references to the myriad ways those rifles often failed to go boom, leading to an empty dinner table — or much worse in a combat scenario. I can get my cheap Ruger bolt-action rifle wet, forget to clean it, or even drop it out of a tree stand, and it&#8217;s still going to get the job done. Trail cameras, GPS mapping, modern camouflage, and scent control all give us a leg up on the tasty animals we love to hunt. Anyone who has fooled around with old, unreliable outboard motors will tell you how nice it is to power a boat with a modern, direct injection engine that fires up at the turn of a key.
I’m generally an <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/what-will-power-the-ai-revolution">artificial intelligence</a> skeptic, but where did I go to find infant mortality rates from the 1950s? You guessed it: ChatGPT. Of course, I double-checked the numbers since AI is still notoriously, and sometimes hilariously, wrong on occasion. But as a writer, I’d be a fool not to use AI to source my work.
As much as I complain about the downfall of the manual transmission, my teenage, stick-driving self would never have imagined connecting a smartphone, which didn’t exist, to my truck using technology that didn’t exist, so I can listen to almost any song ever written for a measly $12.99/month. Modern life, the internet in particular, brings unique challenges that did not exist a generation ago. But I do know for a fact that those who insist that we got the short end of the stick never had a preemie.
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Brady Leonard (<a href="https://twitter.com/bradyleonard" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/bradyleonard&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1771705058176000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3xW8B8U6olS-OfXAGfYCuk">@bradyleonard</a>) is a writer, musician, and host of <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-no-gimmicks-podcast/id1207009705" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-no-gimmicks-podcast/id1207009705&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1771705058176000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0eK8wJN6vsP-ActNqEXSSd">The No Gimmicks Podcast</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Human and robot polygonal hands

I’m A Manual-Driving, Gun-Toting Skeptic — And I’m Glad I Live In 2026

Health Care

medicine

As if the 2020s couldn’t get more surreal, the United States is no longer only a global leader in economic and military power — but it has now become the go-to international hub for mass-producing babies.
This is not hyperbole. Chinese video-game billionaire <a href="https://www.wsj.com/us-news/chinese-billionaires-surrogacy-pregnancy-7fdfc0c3">Xu Bo</a> has reportedly fathered over 100 children — 12 of whom so far have been born via surrogates in the USA, thus gaining birth-right citizenship. Bo says he wants at least 20 US-born offspring — all boys (superior to girls) to one day take over his business. When a Los Angeles Court denied Bo parentage rights over 4 of these babies in 2023 — none of whom he had actually met yet, as he had been “busy” — it exposed the uncertain terrain of international surrogacy arrangements. Where, and to whom, did these children now belong?
In another disturbing story in the press this week, a surrogate mother in Nevada is now suing a Chinese couple in California, alleging she was deceived about their identities and intentions, learning only after giving birth that she had carried the twenty-sixth child for the same pair in quick succession. Some of the babies had been hospitalized by abuse. According to reports, the FBI is now <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/02/04/us-news/surrogate-sues-chinese-parents-of-26-she-claims-duped-her-tell-me-the-truth-about-the-baby-i-carried/">investigating</a> whether the couple were selling these babies they were producing at scale.
Meanwhile, members of Congress are <a href="https://blakemoore.house.gov/media/press-releases/representatives-blake-moore-john-moolenaar-introduce-legislation-to-prevent-foreign-adversaries-from-abusing-american-surrogacy-industry">scrambling</a> to address federal loopholes that allow foreign nationals to use American surrogacy services while securing birthright citizenship for those children.
The free market is one of the great engines of American prosperity, but it has never meant that anything and everything may be bought and sold. America prohibits the sale of organs, the sale of votes, and the sale of citizenship. Western countries do so not because we oppose free markets, but because we understand that some things are too fundamental to human dignity and national integrity to be reduced to commerce.
Surrogacy crosses that line. Under surrogacy, a child becomes a commodity exchanged for cash. Women become raw materials to be exploited for reproductive gain. Payment structures, abortion clauses, ‘selective reduction’ decisions in the case of twins or triplets — all are negotiated with a “surrogate” mother in advance, and are usually at the discretion of the “commissioning party”. Whatever sales language is used — “intended parents,” “journey,” “compassion” — the structure is unmistakably commercial. And increasingly, it is international. <a href="https://eggdonorandsurrogacy.com/surrogacy-trends-2025/">Projections</a> suggest the global surrogacy market will exceed $129 billion by 2034.
Even in situations outside of the extreme, surrogacy is harmful to children. Every surrogacy deal, no matter how well-intentioned, deliberately inflicts a severance wound on a newborn baby – isolating her from the only mother she has ever known – and places her in the care of the adults who commissioned its trauma. Psychologists warn that this kind of early separation can produce lasting harm — post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, attachment disorders, developmental delays, and behavioral issues in later childhood. What adults call a miracle, the child experiences as loss. We don’t allow puppies or kittens to be separated from their mothers until at least 8 weeks following their birth. The commodification of human newborns is striking in comparison.
A national ban on surrogacy is obviously necessary to protect babies from being commercialized, and women’s bodies from being commodified as wombs-for-rent. But a domestic ban will not be enough to fully prevent this exploitation. It isn’t only Chinese billionaires who look to take advantage of reproductive technologies abroad.
Where American couples have found the cost of surrogacy prohibitive at home, they’ve looked to economically vulnerable women in lower-GDP countries – Mexico, Guatemala, Nigeria, across Southeast Asia – to rent their wombs for less. To end exploitation, America must shut down their own role as a consumer in the global trade too.
National bans have turned into an international cat-and-mouse chase. When India banned surrogacy for foreigners after years of operating as a hub for cheaper “reproductive tourism,” international surrogacy clinics quickly migrated to Nepal and Thailand. When Thailand restricted commercial arrangements following scandals, agencies shifted operations over to Cambodia. After Cambodia shut them down, they popped up in Laos. Bans move in the right direction, but we need a global crackdown, fast, to prevent the overseas baby trade from flourishing from one country to the next.
The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, is in agreement. She called for a complete global abolition of surrogacy in her <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/un-expert-calls-recognition-surrogacy-system-violence-exploitation-and-abuse">recent report</a> to the United Nations, highlighting human rights abuses intrinsically interwoven in the use of women’s bodies as gestational vessels. The United States is in a powerful international position to embrace this mandate and take a lead on the world stage.
A national ban on surrogacy is an imperative to prevent exploitation at home, but further work must be done to ensure that wealthy American couples don’t continue this unethical practice by buying babies from overseas. For this administration, that means pursuing international cooperation on the issue; negotiating agreements to prohibit such trade; and promoting a shared commitment to protect human dignity across borders. America should have no part in the global trade of human life — be it as consumers or suppliers of the goods. Babies simply aren’t for sale.
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Lois McLatchie Miller (@LoisMcLatch) is a writer and commentator from Great Britain.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Doctor examining a pregnant woman

How America Became A Hub For Global Surrogacy

Surrogacy

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