The Capitalized Womb: They've Done This Before. They're Doing It Again.

What the "underbabied" panic, the abortion bans, and the mass deportations really have in common.

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In 1808, when the international slave trade was banned, plantation owners turned to forced reproduction to sustain their labor supply. The womb became a line item. A capital asset. Today, the administration is screaming about sperm counts, banning abortion without exceptions for rape, shaming childless women, and deporting millions of Black and brown workers. The logic is identical. The beneficiaries are the same. This is not a coincidence.

A note before we begin: this piece covers forced reproduction, sexual violence against enslaved women, and current reproductive coercion policy. I’m not drawing this comparison for shock value. I’m drawing it because the historical record is precise, the economic logic is identical, and I think you deserve to know that.

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The Factory

In 1808, the United States banned the international slave trade.

Not because slavery was wrong. Because the money was already here. The enslaved population — roughly one million people — was already on American soil, and the men who owned them had done the math.

They didn’t need the ships anymore.
They had something better.

They had women.

After 1808, the domestic slave economy had to become reproductively self-sustaining. Enslaved women’s bodies became what historians Ned and Constance Sublette, in their landmark work The American Slave Coast, call “the capitalized womb.”

Not a metaphor.
A line item.

Enslaved people were collateral, currency, and commodity — literally used as substitutes for gold and silver in a cash-poor economy. And the most valuable asset of all was a woman of childbearing age, because every child she bore was born into slavery.

Born as property,
Born as profit.

Slave owners raped enslaved women.
Routinely.
Systematically.

For two reasons at once: because they could, and because it was productive. An enslaved child fathered by the enslaver was still enslaved.

The womb didn’t belong to the woman. It belonged to whoever held the deed.

Men were selected and hired out as “stock.”

Women who produced many children were called “breeders” — a word used without embarrassment in property records, in letters, in court documents.

Young girls were violated.
Resistance was met with violence.

Enslaved women who tried to control their own reproduction — who used cotton root and sage tea and herbal knowledge passed down through generations to space pregnancies, induce miscarriage, refuse — were doing so at extraordinary personal risk.

The body was the factory.
Reproduction was the supply chain.
And the people at the top of the economy got very, very rich.

I need you to hold that history in your hand for a moment. Don’t set it down yet.

Because I want to tell you about right now.

The Math Hasn’t Changed

The top 1% of Americans hold approximately $49–52 trillion in wealth.

That is not a typo.

One percent of the population controls roughly 31% of everything in this country. The bottom half of Americans — 66 million households — share about 2.5%.

One hundred billionaire families spent $2.6 billion — 16.5% of total political contributions — in the 2024 election cycle.

This is not a side note.
This is the foundation.

Everything else you are about to read makes sense only if you understand that we are living in an oligarchy, and oligarchies — like plantation economies — require one thing above all else to function: a large, cheap, controllable labor supply.

You cannot have an economy that funnels nearly a third of all wealth to one percent of the population without a workforce that has no real choice but to keep showing up.

The plantation needed bodies.

So does this.

Now watch what this administration has done on two tracks simultaneously.

Two Tracks. One System.

Track one: remove the existing labor pool.

The Trump administration has pursued what scholars at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism have documented as a “remigration” policy — a term imported directly from European white nationalist ideology, referring to the expulsion of immigrants and their descendants who do not meet the racial and cultural criteria of the far right.

Mass deportations.
ICE arresting 36,000 people in a single month.
A stated goal of one million deportations a year.
Raids at Home Depot parking lots.

Sweeps of immigrant communities that have been laboring in this country — in agriculture, construction, hospitality, healthcare — for decades.

And here is the part that cannot be coincidence: on February 7, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order prioritizing the resettlement of white South African refugees — explicitly, by race — while simultaneously dismantling asylum protections for everyone else.

The people being removed are Black and brown.
The people being welcomed are white.

This is not subtext. It is policy.

Stephen Miller — the architect of the mass deportation campaign — has said openly that he views all visa programs as “a bridge to citizenship” and has worked for a decade to reduce the country’s reliance on non-white immigrant labor.

The “remigration” framework envisions a three-phase purge: first the undocumented, then non-citizens broadly, then the “non-assimilated” — a category flexible enough to mean whatever is needed.

They are removing bodies.
Millions of them.

And that creates a vacuum.

Track two: replenish with preferred bodies.

This is where I need you to stay with me.

Sperm Count and Existential Crisis

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, stood at the launch of the administration’s Moms.gov maternal health initiative on May 11, 2026, and declared a national “existential crisis” — because teenage boys today have half the sperm count of men in the 1970s.

He has repeated this claim in congressional hearings.
In television interviews.
In political speeches.

Existential crisis. For sperm counts. In teenagers.

The science, for the record, does not support the claim. Experts note that semen analysis is rarely performed on minors, that the data is extremely sparse, and that a 2013 review of decades of studies found no preponderance of evidence for decline.

But the science is not the point.

The point is that the Secretary of Health and Human Services is framing the reproductive output of American boys as a matter of national survival. That framing is doing work. Pay attention to what work it’s doing.

Dr. Mehmet Oz — now the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — stood at a White House event and announced that one in three Americans is “underbabied.”

The fertility rate, he said, is 1.6 births per woman.

“We’re way below what we need to replace the people that we have in America.”

Replace. That word is doing work too.

And then there is JD Vance.

In 2021, speaking to Tucker Carlson, the current Vice President of the United States said that America was being run by “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.” In a separate podcast, he said that professional women who prioritize careers have “no real value system” — that their path “leads to misery, it leads to unhappiness.” That they had “passed the biological period when it was possible” to have children.

He said this.
It’s on tape.

He later called it “sarcasm” while simultaneously insisting on “the substance of what I actually said.”

The substance was:

Women who do not reproduce are choosing misery.
Women who choose careers over motherhood are broken.
Women’s value is reproductive.

That is not sarcasm. That is a position.

The Advertisement

Now look at Usha Vance.

Yale Law. Litigator at Munger, Tolles & Olson — one of the most prestigious firms in the country.

She clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts.
Seven weeks after giving birth.
She did not take her foot off the gas pedal.

And now she records videos extolling the rewards of domesticity. She speaks publicly about her role as mother, her pregnancy with her fourth child, the fulfillment of putting family first. She has become, in the media ecosystem of this administration, a model of what a woman should choose.

View the video released by the White House here.

I want to be careful here, because I do not know what is in Usha Vance’s heart. What I know is the function her visibility serves:

A Yale-educated litigator who clerked for the Chief Justice has voluntarily set aside her career to raise children and support her husband’s political ambitions — and the administration is using her image to tell every other woman in America: this is the right choice.

This is what fulfillment looks like.
The rest is misery.
The message is not subtle.

The woman who represents the upper limit of female professional achievement is being deployed as an advertisement for stepping back.

And somewhere in this country tonight, a girl who was raped is being told she must carry the pregnancy to term.

And If You Were Raped

Nine states — Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas — have total abortion bans with no exception for rape or incest.

None.

A child who is a victim of incest in Alabama must carry that pregnancy.

A woman who was sexually assaulted in Louisiana has no legal recourse for the pregnancy it caused.

Five more states have rape and incest exceptions so narrow and procedurally burdened — requiring police reports, limiting access to the first eight weeks — that they are functionally inaccessible. In Idaho, you must produce a police report. In practice, the numbers of abortions performed under rape exceptions in these states are often in the single digits annually. Sometimes zero.

And in West Virginia right now, Republican legislators are actively trying to remove the state’s existing rape and incest exception — including for minors.

Read that sentence again.

They want to remove the exception for minors who have been raped.

This is the Through Line

OYE. Let me bring this together for you, because I know how this sounds and I want to be precise.

I am not saying that the men running this administration have sat in a room and said: let’s rebuild the plantation economy.

I don’t think that is what happened.
I think something more dangerous happened.

Three separate ideological systems — white nationalism, Christian nationalism, and oligarchic capitalism — converged on the same solution to the same problem, and they don’t need to coordinate because their incentive structures are identical.

The white nationalists want a whiter country.

Deport the Black and brown people; welcome the white South Africans; suppress the vote; redraw the districts to exclude the undocumented from population counts.

They call this “demographic engineering.”
Stephen Miller calls it making America what it should be.
The Christian nationalists want women in their prescribed role.

Reproductive, domestic, subordinate.

They use the language of fulfillment and God’s design, but the policy outcome is the same as it was in 1808:

The womb is not yours to control.

It belongs to the family, to the community, to the nation.

Your body is a vessel for the next generation of workers and soldiers and consumers.

Choose otherwise and you have chosen misery — just ask the Vice President.

And the oligarchs? The oligarchs need labor. They always need labor.

They need enough workers that wages stay low and the leverage stays with the employer. Forty years of union-busting, automation, wage stagnation — and now you’re removing millions of immigrant workers from the supply while simultaneously telling women their highest calling is to produce more.

Do the math. It does itself.

This is the through-line: The body as an economic instrument.

In the antebellum South it was the enslaved woman’s womb, producing property for the balance sheet. Today it is the rhetoric of “underbabied” America, forced birth, the shaming of childless women, the sperm-count crisis, the maternal health initiative — all of it pointing in the same direction.

Produce.
Replenish.

Fill the vacuum left by the people we expelled.

And if a raped child has to carry a pregnancy to keep the supply chain moving — well. That’s the cost of doing business.

It always was.

They Knew. So Do We.

The enslaved women of the antebellum South knew what was being done to them.

They resisted with everything they had — with herbal medicine and lunar calendars, with extended nursing, with the profound and dangerous act of refusing to let their bodies be factories.

They did this at the risk of their lives.

They understood, without academic language or policy papers, that control of reproduction is control of a people.

We have their example.
We have the historical record.
We have the scholars who have done the work to name it.

What we have to decide is whether we’re going to act like we don’t recognize what we’re looking at.

It’s Already Half Past Too Late To Say The Quiet Part Out Loud

The sperm count crisis is not about sperm counts.
The “underbabied” panic is not about fertility.
The abortion bans are not about life.
The deportations are not about the law.

It is about who produces the labor, who controls the labor, and who gets to keep what the labor makes.

They have done this before.
They know how it works.

And they are counting on us not to make the connection.

Make the fucking connection.

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Sources for this piece: Ned & Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast (2016); JSTOR Daily, “Race, Fertility, and the Science of Slavery in Antebellum America”; NBC News, “RFK Jr.’s warnings about sperm counts fuel doomsday claims about male fertility” (2026); NewsNation, “Dr. Oz says 1 in 3 Americans are ‘underbabied’”; Crooks and Liars, “J.D. Vance: Professional Women Without Children On A ‘Path To Misery’”; Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, “Remigration: How a European Ethnic Cleansing Proposal Became Official Trump Policy”; KFF, “Rape and Incest Exceptions in States with Abortion Bans” (2025); CNBC, “The wealth of the top 1% reaches a record $52 trillion” (2025); Federal Reserve DFA Data, wealth distribution 2024.

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