How Usha Vance's Pregnancy Reinforces the MAGA Ideal for Women
Usha Vance's pregnancy is very convenient for her husband and the political party he's hoping to lead in the future.
I’ve wanted to write about this since Usha Vance’s pregnancy was announced in late January, but it didn’t fit into my editorial schedule so I scrapped it — until the Vances were booed at the Olympics. And suddenly the timing felt right again.
This is not an article suggesting women can’t have 4 kids if they want to. This is a critical look at the messaging communicated by this administration about what they believe women should be doing and how they’re using a very specific woman to illustrate their point.
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A few weeks ago, news broke about Usha Vance’s 4th pregnancy, apparently doing her part to meet the birth quotas her husband, the uncomfortably pronatalist Vice President, is so desperate to fill. It should surprise no one that the wife of a man who said “Let me say very simply: I want more babies in the United States of America,” would be pregnant again.
JD Vance also seems like the kind of guy who’d ask the doctor to give his wife the husband stitch. But I digress.
While Usha isn’t due until late July, I’d bet actual money that JD tries to get her to induce on July 4th, linking the birth of their child with America’s 250th birthday.
More importantly, my hunch is that this pregnancy is meant to do a lot of work for the image of this administration and the people in it, not to mention validate the message that a woman’s most important role in life is wife and mother.
To be fair, Usha isn’t the only woman in the Trump administration who is pregnant. Both Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, and Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and quite possibly the most vile person in America, are also pregnant. If Trump himself could get a woman pregnant without the optics being messy, he’d likely do it just to participate in the “MAGA baby boom.”
But Leavitt and Miller are less interesting to me. Both are white nationalists who were already deeply invested in the right wing “traditional family” ideology prior to marrying.
Usha, on the other hand, has a very different origin story. She’s the daughter of Indian immigrants, both of whom are academics. Her mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri, is a microbiologist who is currently on the faculty at UC San Diego and is deeply committed to DEI policies in education. In fact, she is one of the founding members of a pilot course called, “Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Biology and Medicine, exploring the practice and philosophy of science from a multicultural perspective, the historical use and misuse of science in biomedical research and social policies, and issues of race and medicine in a post-genomic age,” according to the Chancellor of UCSD.
Usha’s parents encouraged their 2 daughters to read, study, and pursue a higher education, which Usha did by obtaining a bachelors, masters, and eventually a doctorate degree, graduating from Yale Law school in 2014 – where she fatefully met JD.
She was raised Hindu and even married her husband in a ceremony celebrating both of their faiths. She’s a vegetarian, for goodness sakes.
It’s hard to square this highly educated woman of color allowing herself to be steamrolled by pronatalist panic and enthusiastically making another baby to support her husband’s white supremacist friends (aka The Heritage Foundation).
And yet here we are.
As Kate Mangino explains in her enormously helpful article decoding the Heritage Foundation’s Saving America by Saving the Family policy paper, their focus is on creating policies that reinforce traditional gender norms, reward families that have 3 or more children, and encourage women to drop out of the workforce altogether in favor of raising children.
Surprisingly, this is Usha Vance, in a nutshell.
This is not Karoline Leavitt or Katie Miller, both of whom are still very much employed and presumably will continue those jobs after giving birth.
If this administration is using Usha Vance as the example of ideal motherhood, rather than Leavitt or Miller, we see a few things:
