The NY Times’ fashion critic had and story published yesterday about the trend of women connected to the White House who are all pregnant. Not only are they pregnant, they seem to be celebrating their pregnancy in a way that clearly makes the Times uncomfortable.
Last Sunday, in between trips to Europe to negotiate an Iran peace deal, Vice President JD Vance and his very pregnant wife, Usha, posted a Father’s Day Instagram Reel talking about how much they love reading to their kids and about the imminent arrival of their fourth child.
“Luckily, there’s going to be a new baby for you to read to,” the second lady says to her husband, “so you’re going to have many more years ahead of you.” She is wearing a stretchy coral dress that hugs her stomach, making what she is talking about very clear.
She’s referring to this clip.
The story notes that Karoline Leavitt and Katie Miller have also recently been pregnant. And while the author admits that’s a coincidence, she also seems to think it’s part of the White House “fertility platform.”
That three such prominent women in the MAGA movement were pregnant at pretty much the same time was, indubitably, a coincidence. But for an administration that has such an intuitive and strategic understanding of the power of aesthetics that an unspoken dress code in which men outfit themselves in the image of the president has developed, it has also become a telling one.
Together, the women have created a notably consistent, and somewhat paradigm-shifting, picture of the White House’s family and fertility platform.
If the bare-chested, muscled mixed martial arts fighters of the U.F.C. match that President Trump hosted on Flag Day were the poster guys for MAGA’s image of masculinity, then the pregnant women of Trump world are one half of their feminine counterparts. Along with the sheath-clad, lip-filled, pageant-haired Mar-a-Lago set, they offer an image of idealized womanhood that gives literal shape to the pronatalist movement.
Not content to make this strained case alone, the author calls on Jill Filipovic to back her up.
“It almost feels like a memo went out,” said Jill Filipovic, the host of the “Week in Women” podcast. “They have quite intentionally opted to present themselves as, ‘I am really pregnant, and this is what women were chosen to do,’ and they are happy to say that both with their looks and their mouths.”
Why is this a problem? Because of posts like this one from Katie Miller.
In honor of Mother’s Day, a reminder that peak feminism is having babies.
The most radical thing a woman can do is embrace her biological destiny. pic.twitter.com/SCDiuJpKof
— Katie Miller (@KatieMiller) May 10, 2026
All of these women are, according to the story, calling attention to their pregnant bodies.
There was Vance in April, deplaning on an official trip with her husband in Hungary in a body-hugging lilac sweater and a satin skirt, cradling her growing stomach; here she was later that month greeting King Charles III in another body-aware dress. There was Leavitt, at Christmas, in a stretchy knit dress, hand atop her belly; here was Miller at Trump’s party on New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-Lago in a bias-cut halter gown, arm also cupping her stomach.
Forget the maternity muumuu. Forget body-con. This is baby-con. In case you missed it, the hand serves to focus the eye.
How dare they.
The result, Filipovic said, is that “you have some of the most powerful women in the country throwing themselves not just behind these ideas but creating the aesthetics that propagate these ideas.” That, she said, “is very influential.”
Why, they’re practically pregnancy influencers!
There are really two problems with this silly article. The first is that the tone is clearly very critical and suspicious of the motive of these women. But it’s not hard to imagine three pregnant women in, say, a future Kamala Harris administration getting a very different reaction under the same circumstances. Instead of the headline we have here “The Politics and Power of the Pregnancy Image” we could just as easily get a positive story headlined with some snappy title like, “The baby boom among Harris aides.” But in that article the pregnancies would be seen as a positive and maybe even a rebuke to conservatives and their stereotypes about progressive women.
And that brings us to the article’s more central problem. The reason it’s easy to imagine a different take is because this article doesn’t seem anchored to any substantial criticism. Is there something wrong with being pro-pregnancy or in wearing a dress that shows off pregnancy? The author and her hand-picked critics seem to feel that way but they’re afraid to say why exactly. So we get a lot of attitude but no real argument.
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