Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris may have been a barrier-breaking prosecutor, a U.S. senator, and the first female vice president. But, although she’s a beloved stepmom, she does not have biological kids of her own, a fact her opponents have raised to cast doubt on her presidential fitness. This is a bizarre inverting of the longtime hang-wringing over whether female politicians with children could adequately do the job—but then again, we’re in the middle of a strange election where the politics of fertility are all but taking over.

Elsewhere in the news cycle, Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance has repeatedly railed against “childless cat ladies” and said parents should have more votes than people without children; he has also supported extreme abortion bans, including those that criminalize the procedure for rape victims and pregnant children. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has been very open about how his own two children were brought into being with the help of fertility medicine, and his interest in improving paid family and medical leave. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has five children (with three different women), and has made clear he did little to none of the actual child-rearing.

The divide is stark: Democrats (and feminists) continue to push for the kind of pro-family policies that are standard among our economic peer nations (paid parental leave, affordable child care) while Republicans (and conservatives) across the country work to ban abortion. They talk about how much they love babies, and then undercut Democratic efforts to actually support mothers and infants.

That partisan split might be a decades-old one, but it is seeing a new, grimly ironic manifestation in the broader culture. For example, some self-styled “trad wives” (and some who live the lifestyle but don’t adopt the moniker) enjoy lucrative careers of pretending not to work for pay—but they do work for pay, by putting that precise supposedly traditional lifestyle and their many children on social media. Conservative male influencers emphasize the necessity of male dominance and feminine submission, including women who will submit to having as many babies as a man desires and aren’t abortion-having feminist careerists. Meanwhile, those supposedly concerned for the nation’s future and the familial prospects of millennials and now zoomers are (at best) still asking “Why aren’t you people having kids??” and (at worst) sharing their own half-baked theories about generational selfishness. The childless millennials and Gen Zers in question defer to a series of answers that, while accurate diagnoses of policy failures, are now such ubiquitous explanations for complex life decisions that they have morphed into generational tropes more than accurate explanations: the world is burning, everything is terrible, we have six-figure student loan debt, child care is unaffordable, the rent is too damn high.

It is true that birth rates have declined significantly in the U.S.—although ours remain higher than those in many other Western and wealthy nations. But the reasons why fewer Americans are having children, and the ways in which we should think about it, are complex and myriad. Instead of grappling with these diverse and interconnected incentives, childbearing decisions have been flattened down into partisan talking points. From the right: that women have become too selfish, too career-obsessed, and too unconcerned with the future of the nation to have as many babies as they should, which is fueling family breakdown, a masculinity crisis, and demographic decline (that birth rates are lower among white women than Black, brown, and immigrant women generally goes unsaid but is nevertheless a particular point of consternation). The message from the left is more materialist: families don’t have enough support; young people are too broke; the........

© Slate