JD Vance at March for Life: Abortion debate is a question of choosing either God or paganism

FireDragon76 said:

Then why shame those that look at their meager finances and the precarity of the current social and ecological arrangements and conclude they cannot raise a child? People like Vance want to turn 21st century realities into culture war talking points divorced from the material basis of family life in the first place.



Most Americans say the economy continues to be a pressing concern. Housing affordability hasn't really budged downward. And all the proposed remedies of the Trump regime do little to address underlying causes, which is the hoarding of wealth in speculative investments in real estate.

The way JD Vance and Donald Trump talk about “family values” is mostly about appearances. They parade images of happy children and families and talk about moral duty, but their policies don’t actually make family life any more sustainable. The things that used to make stable families possible—good wages, affordable housing, reliable healthcare, accessible childcare—are nowhere to be found. What they’re really doing is demanding people have more kids while pretending economic insecurity is a virtue.


The way the Right talks anxiously about who is “having kids” exposes the same problem. They point to Latino or immigrant families as proof that Americans could just choose to have more children. But those families are often living in conditions that would be considered illegal, unsafe, or unacceptable in mainstream society—overcrowded housing, informal work, stretched social networks. Treating that kind of struggle as a model for everyone else is cruel and dishonest. It normalizes hardship and pretends that enduring precarity is somehow virtuous.

What Vance and Trump are really offering is not a path to prosperity or flourishing families, but a managed decline dressed up as moral duty. They want people to accept tighter margins, less security, and more stress, and to feel virtuous for doing it. Strip away the smiling children in the ads, and what’s left is austerity sold as a moral project.

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