REVEALED: Elon and Trump's Plans to Mint More Mothers
Introducing the “Fertilization” President and the Surrogate King
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
What’s most urgent isn’t just what’s happening, it’s that more women don’t know it’s happening at all. The push to control reproduction in America is no longer just about abortion bans. It’s becoming a full-spectrum campaign to shame, incentivize, and pressure women into motherhood on someone else’s terms. We need to start talking about it. Not in whispers, not just in policy wonk circles, but out loud and in the open. Because the people designing this future are already doing just that.
Want to help spread the word and get rewarded?
If you refer just 3 friends to subscribe to this Substack, you’ll get 1 month free.
10 friends = 3 months free.
25 friends = 6 months free.
Because talking about this stuff matters. And the more of us there are, the harder we are to ignore.
Trump is calling himself the fertilization president and the government is considering paying women to breed. Elon Musk is fighting against his children’s mothers who don’t follow his strict rules while he maybe searches for even more surrogate moms to help him create an army of his own children. What bizarre timeline are we living in right now?
Let’s break down the latest.
Musk reportedly told Ashley St. Clair, the conservative influencer and mother of his 14th child, that he was thinking about bringing in more women to act as surrogates so that his brood could “reach legion-level before the apocalypse.”
Sadly, this isn’t just the bizarre fantasy of a billionaire. It’s a glimpse into a real policy vision being sketched by Trump’s allies: one where women’s bodies are tools of statecraft.
A legion is a Roman military unit containing thousands of men that was a key to expanding the Roman Empire.
Musk's personal reproductive mission fits within the broader right-wing push for pronatalism. It’s not just about his personal choices, it’s about the policies they want to institute for all of us.
We are currently aware of four women who have at least 14 children with Musk, but that could be higher. When talking about having kids, Trump once told a radio host “I’ll supply funds, and she’ll take care of the kids.” And Musk has taken that to its logical end, paying women to birth his legion.
St. Clair, the conservative influencer who is currently fighting with Musk over their parental rights and obligations, has long been a proponent of this pro-natalist stance. She once went on Fox News and offered this take: Americans without kids “just want to pursue pleasure and drinking all night and going to Beyoncé concerts. It’s this pursuit of self-pleasure in replace of fulfillment and having a family.”
The irony is staggering.
St. Clair is reportedly in litigation with Musk after refusing to sign an NDA and declining to give up legal autonomy. According to The Wall Street Journal, she was pressured to keep Musk’s name off the birth certificate and was offered $15 million and $100,000 a month in exchange for her silence.
In other words: the man building a “legion” of children doesn’t exactly want to fund their care, he wants control. And the women involved, like St. Clair, are discovering what happens when they deviate from his demands.
This isn’t just about having children. It’s about who gets to define how a woman achieves purpose and fulfillment in her life. What the right continues to signal, through rhetoric, policy, and now Musk’s behavior, is that female autonomy is the enemy. Beyoncé concerts? That’s dangerous. But birthing the children of billionaires under strict legal gag orders? That’s family values.
Musk, it appears, has been using X to identify and reach women to breed his children. That’s how he met St. Clair. Cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong said he approached her the same way. When she said no, he unfollowed her.
Like many powerful men, Musk uses his wealth to control women, but these payment schemes reveal something more. As St. Clair has refused to comply with his demands to, for example, not hire her own attorney, he has lowered the amount of child support he’s willing to provide. For Musk it’s not about supporting the children, it’s about producing them. The women in these scenarios are a means to an end.
Musk's pronatalist views align perfectly with the current administration's agenda on population growth. According to The New York Times, the White House has been actively soliciting ideas for boosting the birth rate, many of which are deeply concerning:
A proposal to reserve 30% of prestigious Fulbright scholarships for applicants who are married or have children
A $5,000 cash "baby bonus" for every American mother after delivery
A "National Medal of Motherhood" for mothers with six or more children, (proposed by Simone Collins, the aspiring Serena Joy of our time)
Government funding for programs that educate women on their menstrual cycles, in part so they "can better understand when they are ovulating and able to conceive"
As
noted, “what isn’t on the list are the basic things that actually enable parents (and especially mothers) to parent and also have lives and jobs.”While The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 talk a lot about declining birth rates and marriage rates, often reframed as the ‘decline of the American Family’ they rarely talk about the specific policies they will promote to fix it.
That’s because their policy methods are about restricting women's access to reproductive care and the workforce - not really about addressing the conditions that make women not interested in having lots of kids.
And Musk, in his role as the head of DOGE, isn't doing anything to make life easier for real American mothers either. He's been "slashing staff and billions of dollars from the federal government," with "massive benefit programs such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare in the crosshairs." These are the very programs that support mothers and children—the same demographic he claims to care so much about.
There’s no simple policy fix to the birthrate. It doesn’t actually work to pay people to have more kids. Michelle Goldberg noted:
Last year, the Nobel Prize-winning Harvard economist Claudia Goldin published a paper called “Babies and the Macroeconomy,” aiming to understand the difference between developed countries with moderately low birthrates, like Sweden, France and Britain, and those with very low ones, like South Korea, Japan and Italy…In the most unequal countries in Goldin’s analysis, men wanted to have more children than women did…Many women, it appears, simply don’t want to get stuck with all the domestic drudgery that comes with raising children, and there’s little evidence that state subsidies can make traditional social arrangements more appealing.
But that won’t stop them from trying - because it’s all optics. And in the background, they will continue to fight for the real strategy to increase the birthrate: restrict reproductive rights.
For example, while the administration is publicly pushing for more babies, the far right groups that helped overturn Roe v. Wade are targeting those trying to lower maternal mortality and increase access to contraception (BOTH GOOD AND IMPORTANT THINGS). The Alliance Defending Freedom recently sent a letter to the Administration urging it to cut ties with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (also known as ACOG and the leading professional association of OBGyns in the country) on it’s two projects: (1) the Women’s Preventive Services Initiative which advises which preventative services like contraception should be covered in full, and (2) Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health, which creates protocols to make childbirth safer.
The Affordable Care Act says insurance companies have to cover women’s preventive health services like contraception without cost-sharing like co-pays or deductibles. You may recall the massive 2014 Hobby Lobby case where they objected to having to pay for contraception on the grounds of their religious objections.
The ADF is upset that ACOG will not fall in line with their schemes and advise “fertility-awareness based methods of family planning” as part of insurance coverage requirements instead of IUDs and BC. Meaning they want doctors and scientists to tell women that the rhythm method is the best form of contraception.
In early April, the Trump administration froze birth control funding via Title X which would go to help 834,000 low-income people and uninsured people access care like contraception and STI testing.
These efforts align with Justice Clarence Thomas's 2022 concurring opinion in the Dobbs decision, where he suggested the court should "reconsider all of the court's substantive due process precedents," including the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut ruling that affirmed the right to contraception.
Recent layoffs at HHS and the CDC have dismantled programs that monitor safety at fertility clinics. According to the Washington Post, “Federal programs that help people compare IVF clinics, monitor safety in fertility and make sense of health data have been scaled back by the Trump administration in a move some maternal health experts predict will have an enduring effect on women and children.”
What the right refuses to recognize is that the real reasons women aren’t having more children is because we no longer have to.
The pronatalist movement loves to romanticize the past, painting a picture of women who found deep fulfillment and purpose through having large families. But this narrative conveniently ignores historical reality.
Women of the past weren't necessarily having lots of children because they loved it and because they felt like it was their highest calling. They were having lots of children because there was no reliable birth control, the infant mortality rate was high, the concept of marital rape didn't really exist, social and political mores gave them few other choices: they generally couldn’t own property or have bank accounts or earn a living and "spinsters" were socially reviled. And while religion provided a framework for understanding their duties, historical records show that many women still viewed childbearing with dread rather than joy, often writing in private diaries about their fears of yet another potentially deadly pregnancy.
Today's birth rates are declining because women have actual choices.
Today's women are making rational decisions based on economic and social realities:
The astronomical cost of childcare, which can consume more than half of a median income in many states, makes having kids economically impossible
The absence of guaranteed paid parental leave (the U.S. remains the only developed nation without it) makes having kids and a fulfilling career really hard
The persistent wage gap that punishes women professionally for having children makes women terrified of leaving their jobs to have kids.
The burden of student debt delays family formation
The rising cost of housing makes family-sized homes unaffordable for many
Our healthcare system makes pregnancy and childbirth financially risky
The ongoing expectation that women will shoulder the majority of unpaid domestic and caregiving work punishes mothers
The fact that being a single childless woman can actually be quite pleasant
When Elon Musk offers select women millions of dollars to have his children, he's inadvertently acknowledging this reality. He probably does understand that having children is costly in terms of time, money, career opportunities, and bodily autonomy. His "solution" is to pay women enough to offset these costs (with NDAs attached, of course).
But most women don't have billionaires dangling financial packages in front of them to reproduce. They have to make difficult choices in a society that simultaneously glorifies motherhood while providing almost no structural support for mothers.
If Musk and the pronatalist movement were truly concerned about declining birth rates, they would focus on making it less financially and socially punitive for women to have children. They would advocate for universal healthcare, affordable childcare, paid family leave, and equitable distribution of domestic labor.
Instead, they're focused on removing reproductive freedoms while offering symbolic medals and modest baby bonuses that don't begin to address the real costs of raising children in America today.
This reveals that their true objective isn't supporting women's choices—it's eliminating them.
P.S. Become a paid subscriber to join us in the comments where we have interesting and nuanced conversations about the political issues that matter to you
I think one thing I’d add is the often physically destructive effects of pregnancy and birth, especially for women of color. Will Trump and Musk work to reduce maternal morbidity & mortality? Will they provide pelvic floor PT to repair our bodies?
I know they purportedly want a higher birth rate in part because some of these jokers are worried about replacement theory (gag). But that is only one sector-- I think the oligarchs are harnessing the power of Christian nationalism to promote forced birth as a way to create a new crop of wage slaves.
I work in OB, and forced birth will have a VERY quick effect- another 15 years and there will be a generation of lower-income children entering the workforce. In states where they are trying to lower the age so child labor is legal, perhaps sooner. There is a capitalist agenda here that is dovetailing with and using the Dominionist and Christian fascist ideology.