Trump’s new Moms.gov website is an anti-choice hub that misleads women | Moira Donegan
OhOn the website’s home page, a photo of a heavily pregnant white woman is cropped below the head, so that she is faceless, anonymous, cradling her enormous belly beneath the skirt of her yellow dress. She seems to be standing in a field of tall grass, the kind in which you can catch ticks. The photo is flanked on either side by chubby infant footprints — one pair in pink, another in blue — a clear nod to the anti-abortion movement’s favorite symbol, what they call “precious feet.” A banner at the top declares that the “Moms.gov” site, which was launched by the White House on Mother’s Day, offers “resources, information and assistance to new and expectant mothers,” and announces that it “meets the needs of mothers and fathers facing difficult or unexpected pregnancies” — that is, those who often seek abortions. In fact, the site doesn’t do much other than link to Option Line, a referral network of Christian anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers run by the anti-abortion group Heartbeat International.
The launch of Moms.gov was accompanied Monday by an uncomfortable Oval Office press conference, in which members of the Trump administration and some of the most aggressively anti-choice Republican members of Congress gathered to tout the new website and applaud the Trump administration’s pronatalist stance. Dr. Mehmet Oz, a wellness influencer and former television personality who now holds a position in Trump’s Health Department as Medicare and Medicaid administrator, lamented that Americans are, in his chilling personal parlance, “sub-babies.” “One in three Americans don’t have enough babies,” Oz said. “That means you either don’t have children or you have fewer children than you would normally want to have.” Oz claimed the fertility rate had fallen below 1.5 (a Johns Hopkins study indicates it’s actually quite a bit higher and the U.S. population isn’t shrinking) and predicted a coming wave of “Trump babies.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., meanwhile, took the opportunity to express his own troubling views on what he called the “fertility crisis.” “In 1970, men had twice as many sperm as our teenagers do today,” he said, another questionable claim. “This is an existential crisis for our country.” At times during the news conference, Donald Trump, who was seated at his desk and wearing a long purple tie, appeared to close his eyes or lose concentration.
The pronatalist push is not new from the White House, which has demonstrated an unusually consistent commitment to ideological misogyny and attempted to exercise its political discretion in ways that encourage women’s financial dependence on men, their early and frequent pregnancies, and their confinement to the home, while discouraging their aspirations for work, education, self-determination, or equal dignity.
But the launch of the website, which makes no mention of contraception or paid family leave, and only mentions abortion and childhood vaccination in terms of limits and exemptions, also reflects the Trump administration’s attempt to reconcile itself with an anti-abortion movement that has complained of feeling dismissed or taken for granted in the post-Dobbs era.
After the June 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe, when Republican-controlled states quickly banned abortion and sent waves of health-seeking women fleeing across state lines into Democratic territories, Republicans experienced worse-than-expected turnout in the fall midterm elections — a result that many attributed to outrage over the Dobbs decision and the chaos and suffering it unleashed. Subsequently, as a wave of popular referendums reaffirmed the popularity of abortion rights in many Republican-controlled states, Trump appeared to have learned the lesson that abortion restrictions were a political loser and that the anti-abortion movement, to which he had already announced the end of Roe, was not entitled to more favors. During the first months of his second administration, discontent among many in the anti-abortion movement was palpable as Trump did not move more quickly and aggressively to further restrict abortion or ban the procedure in states where it remained legal.
This may be changing. As the 2026 midterm elections approach, the anti-abortion movement appears poised to rack up more of the victories it has been eagerly awaiting since overturning Roe in 2022. An appeals court recently reduced mail-in access to the abortion drug mifepristone, which is used in a vast majority of U.S. abortions and has been crucial to preserving abortion access for women in Republican states, as the pills have been easily and frequently mailed from elsewhere; the Supreme Court temporarily preserved access. Meanwhile, the Trump administration just dispensed with its former FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, who was criticized by the anti-abortion movement for slowing down a review aimed at finding a safety excuse to remove mifepristone from the market. He will likely be replaced by someone more sympathetic to the anti-choice cause.
Moms.gov, meanwhile, offers little real support for pregnant women. Instead, it connects them to anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers, Christian organizations that pose as clinics in order to confuse and trick pregnant women who would otherwise seek abortions. Emergency pregnancy centers often offer pregnancy tests and even ultrasounds, but routinely overestimate gestational age, misleading women into believing they are over the legal limit for abortion, and often promise assistance, such as diapers or cribs, that is not provided or turns out to be dependent on the intended parents’ religious upbringing. They are not medical centers and they are not reliable: they are intended to deceive women, to encourage them to give up control of their bodies and their lives, and to patronize them, treating them as resources to be extracted rather than as people with dignity and a right to the truth. In this sense, they are a decent metaphor for the Trump administration itself.
