I had my first child in December; he will also be my only child. I’m going one-and-done with kids for the same reasons many women in the United States are having fewer babies, and later in life. Faced with economic uncertainty, climate change, and vanishing reproductive rights, it feels like a prudent choice. Most importantly, it’s what I want.

The Trump administration is trying to figure out how to change my mind, and doing a terrible job of it. On April 21, The New York Times published an article about various incentives the White House is kicking around in hopes of reversing the country’s historically low birth rate. Among them are a $5,000 “baby bonus”—cash in hand for each infant delivered—and a “National Medal of Motherhood” bestowed on women with six or more children.

The public response to the Times story was fast, and much of it was furious. Social media was flooded with references to The Handmaid’s Tale. Bewildered parents wondered who could be convinced to have a baby for $5,000. (A recent study found that it costs nearly $300,000 to raise a child in the United States.) Why not enact policies, such as paid family leave and universal preschool, that would actually ease the burden of parenting?

The simple fact is that many of the pronatal voices with Trump’s ear either don’t care about this burden, or don’t see it as a burden at all. Among them are Vice President J.D. Vance, who has suggested that parents should have more voting power than other citizens, and Elon Musk, who has fathered at least a dozen children he seems to play little part in raising. Behind these men is a chorus of pronatal activists desperate to kickstart a baby boom. Many of them recently attended NatalCon, the subject of another viral Times article. A running theme of that event, held in Austin, Texas, in March, was that bearing children is a woman’s obligation. “Women need to take their jobs seriously,” one female attendee told the Times reporter. “Not their jobs. Their duty.”

This sentiment should terrify women—not least because we’ve heard it before, emanating from some of history’s darkest chapters and ugliest corners. The natalism promoted by the Trump administration and its allies echoes insidious forces and regimes. In the United States, the far right has long insisted that motherhood is not only a woman’s deepest desire and biological destiny, but also a role she must inhabit to avert the collapse of Western civilization. The 14 Words, a popular white-nationalist slogan, is a pronatalist rallying cry: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The Turner Diaries, a racist novel published in the 1970s that served as inspiration for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and January 6 insurrectionists, depicts white women as racial soldiers charged with replenishing the world.