Transcript: MAGA Wants to Force Women to Pee in Cups at Airports

As MAGA personalities start demanding a ban on women coming to the U.S. and having babies, a writer who covers Trumpism explains what this reveals about today’s right—and why we should take it seriously.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 6 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

The right has long been obsessed with the idea that huge numbers of women come illegally to the United States only to have babies. But now Donald Trump’s top officials and the MAGA movement are giving this a new twist. They’re seriously talking about preventing pregnant women from entering the country. This is being discussed all over MAGA media. Some are talking about forced sterilization. Others are talking about pregnancy tests before entry.

Sarah Posner, a writer for Talking Points Memo, memorably summed this up with a single tweet: “So will every woman now have to pee in a cup at airports?” It’s a damn good question. And it’s all very ludicrous, except for one thing—it reflects an actual vision for the country, a vision that JD Vance and Donald Trump and a lot of significant MAGA personalities very much share. So we’re talking to Sarah Posner about all of it. Sarah, great to have you on.

Sarah Posner: Thanks for having me again, Greg.

Sargent: So the backdrop to all this is the Supreme Court ruling upholding birthright citizenship. This unleashed fury and anxiety among MAGA figures across the spectrum, who started to imagine the United States getting dramatically swamped by far more immigrant babies going forward. One leading MAGA figure said the possible ways forward now should include: “Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners,” “deny entry to all female foreigners,” “require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”

Wow. What’s your immediate reaction to just the sheer level of fear and anxiety we’re witnessing here?

Posner: Well, I think we’re witnessing a sheer level of racism. The anxiety about birth tourism, and women coming to America from China or other places just so they could have a baby who would be an American citizen, has long been a talking point in the anti-immigrant right. So it’s not like it came out of nowhere.

But never have I seen the range of people talking about such extreme policy proposals, if you can call them that, to try to prevent this thing that can already be prevented by U.S. consulates, who investigate this sort of thing when they’re deciding whether to grant somebody a visa, and can turn down somebody’s visa based on that.

What these people are proposing is the idea that women would be potentially sterilized if they wanted to come to America. That’s insane. Or that testing women, giving women pregnancy tests before they come. I mean, it’s just so bananas. I can’t even believe that they’re not ashamed to talk about it on TV.

Sargent: Yeah, and they even seem to be enjoying it a whole lot as well. I want to read some quotes from leading MAGA figures. Here’s Mike Davis: “We need to get all illegals out of our country fast, and we need to start with birthing-aged women.”

Ben Shapiro: “If you’re coming in six months pregnant, we should not give you a four-month visa. We should give you a one-month visa and then kick your ass out, right?”

Sarah, one interesting thing here is that there’s always been this intense misogyny to MAGA. And here you’re seeing almost a conflation or a bundling of the misogyny and the hysterical hatred of immigrants and the great replacement theory, just really juiced up to the most hyperbolic and insane levels you can imagine. You’re good on the topic of MAGA misogyny. What do you make of that element of it?

Posner: Well, for one thing, MAGA has always been very interested in policing women’s bodies, whether it’s preventing them from having an abortion, preventing them from accessing birth control, or in this case, preventing them from being in the United States when they go into labor, right?

Like, all of these things are about making sure that they have control over women’s bodies and women’s reproductive freedom. So that is completely on brand for them, to be obsessed with this.

And then you add that to their obsession about immigrant, quote-unquote, “invasions”—that these invasions of immigrants are making the United States less pure, are........

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