What, to the MAGA Right, Is a Child?

Last summer, I wrote an essay about the danger posed to adoptees by the efforts to end birthright citizenship. At the time, I wanted to talk about what it means for anyone to belong to a community, all the way from family to nation. Now, after the Supreme Court’s feeble 5-4 ruling upholding that sacred principle, I want to ask a slightly different question. With the howls of rage coming from people like Stephen Miller and Mike Lee, I want to ask what exactly a child is to the MAGA right. In the past, I’ve argued that MAGA views children mainly as things to be fashioned into proper, authoritarian citizens. I think this is true, but incomplete. So I want to reinterrogate this question now.   

As I argued then, this teleological approach to fashioning a child in the preferred image of the parent—and, indeed, the nation—comes perilously close to treating them as a thing to be owned. Consider the framing around the “parental rights” issues championed by the MAGA right over the last few years, namely around school curriculum and LGBTQ rights. It’s nothing new for parents to exert pressure over what their children see and learn in public spaces. But the language of the MAGA right’s assaults on library books and discussions of gender and sexuality is particularly authoritarian. 

I’ve argued in the past that this is an approach that is neither about the well-being of the children nor is it even about the preferences of all parents. Restricting content in the classroom and attempting to constrain how children explore and express their identities—as with Florida’s infamous Don’t Say Gay bill—is a form of authoritarianism that seeks to impose a small group of parents’ views on all families. It’s a coercive approach that extends an authoritarian vision of parenthood beyond one’s own children, whose individualism and dignity they disdain, to all the children of their community. It’s a contempt not only for other parents but also for other people’s children, as well as for children qua people. 

All of this is on display in the politics around adoption. Right-wing activists have long opposed LGBTQ+ couples adopting, and the Trump administration even fought against an Oregon statute requiring LGBTQ+ foster children be placed in affirming homes. More recently, the assault on IVF has further endangered the rights of same-sex couples, especially women, to build their own families. 

Within adoption itself, the American legal tradition has long sustained the practice of closed adoptions—arrangements wherein the child not only has no information pertaining to their birth parents but also limited-to-zero legal rights to obtain relevant records. It’s a practice that adoption reform advocates rightly condemn as a fundamental violation of the child’s human rights, leaving them in a state of perpetual infantilization before the state. It’s also one that has roots in the pioneering practices of Georgia Tann. Tann spent decades in the early-to-mid-20th century arranging adoptions, frequently targeting celebrities like Joan Crawford and Dick Powell as recipients, only for it to be revealed in the time that she had engaged in extensive child theft and trafficking. Some 5,000 children were stolen, sometimes right off their front porches, and marketed for adoption by Tann and her Memphis-based Tennessee Children’s Home Society from the 1920s to the early 1950s.

Today, American adoption remains in need of reform, largely thanks to the closed adoption practices that Tann helped normalize across the country. In 2025, journalist T. J. Raphael released a multi-part investigative podcast with Wondery, titled “Liberty Lost,” about Godparent Home—the home at the evangelical Liberty University where pregnant teenage girls are housed until their children are born and then adopted out of their care. Former residents allege that the home placed significant pressure on them to give up their children. 

The girls themselves were already extremely vulnerable, considering that many were raised in households religiously opposed to abortion but also determined to avoid the social stigma of teenage pregnancy. Since the 1980s, parents from across the country have sent their daughters to the Godparent Home, leaving many of them with little choice but to accept the warped hospitality of being made to hide themselves away until their child could be placed with a new family—all with little regard for their wants or wishes. The anti-abortion argument on the Christian right has always emphasized a Biblical view of children as “a blessing.” But the practices of the Godparent House, other places like it, and many of the parents who consigned their daughters to carry their children in shame and out of sight do not align with this view. Rather, they treat the child alternatingly as a stain, a scarlet letter on the girl, and as an opportunity for some other family not marked by sin to swoop in and gain a child. 

I certainly don’t mean to compare modern closed adoption, one-to-one, to trafficking. I think that does a disservice to everyone involved, especially the many happy families that now exist thanks to necessary and life-saving adoptions. But I find this history to be an interesting wrinkle given the contemporary right’s obsession with human trafficking and kidnapping. 

Here the principle of ownership rears its head again. But this time, it’s a communal logic and—often implicitly, though sometimes explicitly—a racial one. There is a sense that they, some alien group of others, are coming for our, for your, children. In 2024 interview with Politico, journalist Mike Rothschild explained the appeal of child trafficking conspiracies like Pizzagate:

There’s always been a certain amount of salaciousness in these conspiracy theories, and there are theories going back about the awful sexual depravity of the Catholics or later on of the Jews. So you’re always going to find a certain amount of attention paid to any kind of conspiracy theory involving sexual proclivity of trafficking. And if it involves children, people immediately just lose their mind—even if these children don’t exist. There are no children who have been trafficked because of Pizzagate because Pizzagate isn’t real.

But if you just put out the suggestion there, it grabs ahold in a way that is difficult to dislodge. I think a lot of it has to do with antisemitism. I think a lot of it has to do with fear of the occult and Satanic panic. So you get all of these things that are mixed together: the anti-Jewish sentiment, the fear of Satanism.

I think that a lot of what I have described here so far, from parental rights to adoption to paranoia about trafficking, is a view of children as a resource—as a kind of national strategic reserve. It’s a commoditized view, yes, but it’s also a security-oriented one. And this matters because many of the loudest pro-natalists seem to view children as a piece of ammunition in a race war. Elon Musk claims to be concerned about global population collapse. Yet over and over again, he stresses the importance of preserving the character and integrity of white, European societies through birth rates. He has gone so far as to say that the culture of Western countries will vanish if the women in Europe don’t start having babies. He makes these proclamations even as he posts racist and incendiary comments about immigration to places like the UK and issues lurid warnings about civil war. 

So when Stephen Miller or other MAGA types suggest banning pregnant tourists from visiting the United States, this is a view of children not only as objects but as essentially a material resource in a race war. That is how you get The Federalist’s Sean Davis saying we may have to sterilize people coming into the United States. 

The right’s current conception of children is a toxic blend of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race and James Dobson’s draconian Evangelical pedagogy. Beyond simply instrumentalizing and commoditizing children, the right today frequently treats them as a thing to be harnessed in the service of defeating their enemies, earthly and spiritual. The birthright citizenship fight cannot only be about the constitutional view of a child born in America. It must be, as all truly great liberal principles are, about the universal birthrights of dignity, liberty, and equality that every human has from the moment they enter this world. 

Featured image is After School, by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller