Who could have guessed they would be the ones on my mind? It was a personal appointment, perhaps the most intimate variety, and MAGA characters don’t normally seep into my private life. But there I was last month, at some point between a transvaginal ultrasound and substantial bloodwork, pondering the lives of Karoline Leavitt, Usha Vance, and Katie Miller.

These three women are at the forefront of a trend: a so-called mini “baby boom” unfolding across the upper echelons of the Trump administration. In other words, Leavitt, Vance, and Miller are pregnant, each with due dates in late spring or summer. Their pregnancies have been accompanied by a bit of culture war, too: Fox News noted the “full boom” as evidence that the women are enthusiastic devotees of the administration’s pronatalist agenda. There was Vice President JD Vance, who at a March for Life rally shortly after his family’s announcement, declared: “Let the record show, you have a vice president who practices what he preaches.” In a December Instagram post announcing her pregnancy, Leavitt thanked Trump, a self-declared “fertilization president,” for “fostering a pro-family environment in the White House.” Miller regularly supplies her X account with expressions of pronatalist, anti-contraceptive concerns about the country’s declining birth rate.

I found myself in the unlikely position of envying the cheerfully un-ambivalent, un-conflicted, pregnant ladies of MAGA.

But back to me, in the doctor’s office. I am not pregnant, nor do my husband and I know if we ever want to be again after having a baby a little more than four years ago. Should we stick with one, this objectively awesome kid, we’d be a part of the fastest-growing family unit in the United States. “One and done,” as they say, would be normal and good, fine and familiar. Still, there isn’t much about our undetermined decision-making process that has felt stable. Instead, I face a steady source of neurotic turmoil, a topic I have now discussed across three therapists, one of whom, in January, suggested that I visit a reproductive endocrinologist to discuss the option of embryo freezing. Which is what brings me to a fertility clinic in New Jersey, where I found myself in the unlikely position of envying the cheerfully un-ambivalent, un-conflicted, pregnant ladies of........

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