Serving Two Masters: Trump Team’s Tensions on Reproductive Politics
Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
It is hard to make predictions, especially about the future, as Yogi Berra, Niels Bohr, and other luminaries have remarked. But there are already signs that the incoming Trump administration may have some difficulty establishing consistent policies about controversial issues concerning human reproduction.
On the one hand, consider “the conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration.”
The notorious Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership seeks to delete terms such as “reproductive rights” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists” (p. 5) and insists (p. 450) in a remarkable juxtaposition that “abortion and euthanasia are not health care.”
The 887-page document (plus 32 pages of front matter) also asserts that “research using human embryonic stem cells involves the destruction of human life” (p. 460) and “three-parent embryo creation and human cloning research should be banned” (p. 461). The term “abortion” (which appears on 60 pages) should be removed from “controversial sexual education materials.” Mandate never mentions IVF, which is widely popular across party affiliations, but there are ominous signs elsewhere of significant campaigns to abolish it, including among organizations heavily involved in Project 2025.
On the other hand, follow the money.
The person who made by far the largest financial contribution to Trump’s campaign – spending at least $277 million, almost all on the Presidential race – is Elon Musk. He is thought to have between 10 and 12 children (one died as an infant, and he has disowned one who is trans and who disowns him). At least half of them were the result of IVF treatment, some via surrogacy, and there are reports that he has offered his sperm to others for free, to help and also to improve the gene pool. His own father, who has seven children (two by his former stepdaughter) advocates the Trump-endorsed “racehorse theory” of human breeding, which he wouldn’t call eugenics as such. (Why not?)
Musk moved to Texas in 2021 for tax reasons but he’s no cowboy. He is at root a Silicon Valley techie, of a particularly obnoxious type. Not only does he follow the ubiquitous motto (generally attributed to Mark Zuckerberg) “Move fast and break things,” he epitomizes the eugenic immodesty of many Californian industrialists. This dates back to Leland Stanford, founder of the university, David Starr Jordan, Lewis Terman, and then William Shockley, and was revived in this century with personal genomics and research into editing embryos.
Meanwhile, selecting embryos according to their algorithmically determined scores for complex traits – including IQ – seems to be developing into a real business, despite opposition from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG) and many others. At least three start-ups claiming to commercialize what the ACMG has called “an inexact science” have been financed by tech entrepreneurs, including Sam Altman and Peter Thiel.
The eugenic implications of this trend are becoming increasingly obvious. As are the potential contradictions within conservative opposition to reproductive rights. Some of the differences within the Trump coalition are based on religion: conservative Catholics are unusually prominent and tend to be less interested in free-market capitalism than in promoting marriage and having children. And what happens, for example, when Musk-style, techno-enhanced pronatalism runs up against the conservative campaign for embryonic personhood? As one observer noted, some fertility specialists argue that:
“these technologies need to happen [while also saying that] women should go back to the 1950s: On one hand is ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ and then they say, ‘Let’s go to Mars with artificial intelligence.’”
As activists trying to promote a humane, generous, fair society, we clearly have huge tasks ahead of us. But perhaps contradictions on reproductive rights and technologies within the relatively loose coalitions around the incoming President may open up spaces in which we can work.
Nothing is presently very predictable. Which means that anything is possible. Put your seatbelts on, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
