LETTERS An umbrella provided cover for a baby stroller in the Boston Public Garden in June 2023.David L. Ryan/Globe Staff It’s a conservative strategy to occupy women with babiesThanks to Renée Graham for her insightful words in “Women aren’t ‘under-babied,’ ” (Ideas, May 17). She...

LETTERS

An umbrella provided cover for a baby stroller in the Boston Public Garden in June 2023.David L. Ryan/Globe Staff

It’s a conservative strategy to occupy women with babies

Thanks to Renée Graham for her insightful words in “Women aren’t ‘under-babied,’ ” (Ideas, May 17). She rightly points out the issues surrounding marriage, family planning, and women’s bodily autonomy that play crucial roles in the current administration’s plans to increase the birth rate. At issue is not women’s health or well-being but, rather, changing demographics that may endanger views that favor the white Christian nuclear family.

Directives from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which brought us Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” point in the same direction of defining a family as “one man and one woman” and promoting procreation. These ideas are nothing new as part of coercive strategies to occupy women with babies. In 2008 President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey created a centralized database tracking the health of pregnant women.

Efforts to enhance the push to keep women at home raising babies also include the recent federal cuts in student loans for students in schools of nursing or other health professions. These are blatant attempts to “under-educate” in order to counter potentially under-babied women.

Individuals who value freedom and democracy need to firmly confront and oppose these authoritarian measures.

Elizabeth Sommers

Cambridge

Who would want to bring a child into our unstable world?

There’s another rationale for declining birth rates, one that I’ve heard cited for several years now, but which may be getting more prevalent in our current political climate: a reluctance to bring babies into such an unstable world. An overheating planet, rising sea levels, a rising cost of living, unaddressed gun violence, suppression of women’s rights and minority voting rights — the list of concerns goes on. Any so-called golden age is in the rearview mirror, and was always illusory at best. With a government that’s ignoring or willfully exacerbating these problems, is it any wonder people are choosing not to reproduce?

Rich Feinberg

Boston