Having kids is easy, and anyone who says otherwise is an ugly feminist trying to scare other women out of their only true source of joy and fulfillment: This is the narrative that has grown up in the MAGA movement in recent years. The right has become increasingly obsessed with nostalgia for the imagined bliss of 1950s-era white families with housewives-in-aprons raising large broods. At the same time, they have become progressively vitriolic toward anyone who notes that the era’s realities were much harsher than what was shown on Nick at Nite sitcoms. Part of their story, then, is that it’s a vile myth that pregnancy and motherhood can be hard on women.
Before his death in September 2025, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk regularly advised young people to “get married young and have more kids than [you] can afford.” Along with his wife Erika, he frequently implied that financial barriers to raising kids are exaggerated by the left for nefarious reasons.
The message has also been picked up by MAGA commentators like the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, who recently proclaimed “[m]ost people are supposed to be parents” after a viewer expressed anxiety over the stresses of parenting. “So, you’re you’re doing a thing that billions of people have done before you,” he added, explaining that the frustrations of raising kids are only “occasionally” felt and that the new mother will soon “grow into it.”
On MAGA social media, a popular meme is to contrast a drawing of a miserable-looking woman at an office versus a smiling woman in an apron tending a large family, mocking women for buying “feminist propaganda” that “sold women fluorescent lights as liberation.” (As the blogger at Cartoons Hate Her noted, these men “never stop to ask themselves if they would choose spreadsheets over babies,” because they have chosen spreadsheets while leaving “routine tasks of childcare” to women.)
“Imagine how much propaganda it took to convince women that this is oppressive,” Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, over a photo of herself sitting on grass in a sundress and kissing a baby, as if motherhood were nothing but soothing moments cooing over sleeping babies. This followed a picture of her pregnant body accompanied by the caption that “peak feminism is having babies.”
The MAGA movement would have been wise to ignore Lindsay Clancy, who is currently standing trial in Massachusetts for killing her three children in 2023. Her lawyers are arguing that she is not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming she strangled the children and then attempted suicide in the throes of postpartum psychosis. The fact that it’s an incredibly rare condition that occurs in around one in 1,000 births would have made it easy to shrug it off as an anomaly.
The problem for the right, though, is that Clancy’s case has become a conduit for a lot of women’s rage and frustration over how hard motherhood can be, and how they feel gaslit by the way their pain is often minimized by their immediate families and society-at-large.
The problem for the right, though, is that Clancy’s case has become a conduit for a lot of women’s rage and frustration over how hard motherhood can be, and how they feel gaslit by the way their pain is often minimized by their immediate families and society-at-large. While postpartum psychosis is rare, conditions like postpartum depression and anxiety are common, occurring in around one in six new mothers. Beyond the talk about medical diagnosis, the case has also kicked off a larger social media conversation about how pressured, isolated and overworked mothers feel. There has even been a surge of conspiracy theories blaming Patrick Clancy, Lindsay’s ex-husband and father to the deceased children, for the killings. These are utterly baseless, as Lindsay Clancy has confessed. But Patrick has become a useful scapegoat for women to unload anger at their own husbands over being left to handle an unfair share of childcare duties.
With this in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that movement rooted in misogyny can’t be chill about women speaking out like this, especially when doing so gives lie to MAGA propaganda painting motherhood as a relaxing vocation. Clancy’s case and trial has been accompanied by a surge of accusations that women are simply lazy liars, even (and especially) if they claim to have a medical diagnosis like postpartum depression. Walsh was the most prominent of these offenders, posting on X that many claims of postpartum depression are “selfish” and the result of parents unwilling to “subordinate our own needs and desires” for the sake of children.
Walsh was joined by a chorus of mostly MAGA men echoing his claims that it’s merely that women don’t want to work and are mad that they can’t have mimosa brunch anymore. Suffering mothers were callled “crybabies,” and accused of hating men for no reason. Others posited that postpartum depression is merely a result of women having sex before marriage. When a Bulwark editor defended his own wife, who had postpartum depression, he was mocked by MAGA users who implied that he was being manipulated by a domineering woman.
By overreacting like this, Walsh and his fellow travelers, such as Trump’s buddy Jack Posobiec, inadvertently revealed they don’t believe their own propaganda painting motherhood as natural and easy. To label mothers who struggle as lazy and selfish is also to concede that raising kids requires hard work and sacrifice. Further, the critics have never made a compelling case why women should feel obliged to undertake such a task if they don’t want to — especially if, as MAGA demands, they adhere to traditional gender roles where they can’t expect much help from their husbands.
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Plenty of people on the right have realized what an own goal this was, and they have tried to offer a more sympathetic response to women’s struggles. Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro pushed back on his colleague Walsh, saying that postpartum disorders are real and only a “moron” would think otherwise. Podcast host Meghan McCain and other conservative women argued that denying these realities would only alienate women from the right-wing cause. Candace Owens tried to split the difference by blaming the psychiatric medications Clancy was on and not the alleged psychosis itself.
Outside of Owens, who can’t resist turning everything into a conspiracy theory, it’s comforting to hear that not everyone on the right has completely lost their minds about this. Still, skepticism is warranted. None of these folks want to invest in a more robust health care system to diagnose and treat postpartum conditions, nor are they interested in addressing the sexist attitudes that lead women to take on the lion’s share of household duties, even when working full-time like their partners. They certainly won’t advocate for universal affordable childcare. In this light, posturing as sympathetic is an empty gesture, meant to encourage women into motherhood without actually helping them survive it intact.
But among all these responses, Katie Miller’s was particularly galling and tone-deaf. She didn’t deny that the condition is real, but she insisted “clinical postpartum depression is not inevitable” and then proceeded to wax on about how life “is better, richer, and fuller with kids,” and to scold women not to let “fear of the unknown keep you from having kids.”
Except, of course, no one was telling women not to have kids if they want them. Feminists don’t hate mothers or children. They were arguing instead that mothers and children deserve more care and support — from fathers, from employers, from society-at-large. That’s a position of care and love. The conservatives who claim to uphold motherhood only have platitudes, and a big dose of shaming for anyone who says mothers deserve more than empty words and AI-generated images of happy housewives in aprons.
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