Can we have a discussion that prescinds from party identifications, a discussion that involves normal people talking to each other?

TikTok showed a 32-year-old teacher sharing with the world her previous evening’s pillow talk with her “fiancé” — they “won’t be having kids” if Donald Trump’s in the White House.

Michigan Democratic state representative Laurie Pohutsky felt the need last winter to tell global humanity she was being sterilized so as not to bear children during a Trump Administration.

I get it. You don’t like Donald Trump. But do people really think it is normal that decisions about parenthood are being made on the basis of the incumbent in the White House?

This would be easy to mock: “I can’t have a baby while two-timing Grover Cleveland ignores his illegitimate bastard.” “How can you bring a child into the world when Abraham Lincoln is ignoring democratic norms, suspending habeas corpus, and breaking up the Union?” “William Howard Taft’s rollback of TR’s environmental protections revolts me!” But I don’t want to mock. I want to raise a more serious discussion: Do people really think this is normal?

A priest-friend of mine who lived in communist Poland once made an observation I’ve often pondered. He pointed out that American politics are normal because, whoever’s in the White House, life really does go on, largely undisturbed.  In contrast, when the General Secretary of the “Polish United Workers’ Party” sneezed, all Poland went “na zdrowie!”  Politics affected if there was meat or toilet paper in the store.  Whatever you think of Donald Trump, he’s no Edward Gierek, much less Leonid Brezhnev.

I get that you might not like Trump policies. But America has muddled on these past five months as it is wont to do. You can still attend protests after Pilates. And, bet your bottom dollar, the sun will rise tomorrow.

So, is refusing parenthood and cutting your tubes a rational response to January 20, 2025? Or is it an excuse? Performative virtue signaling?

Barring eschatological intervention, I’m betting that America will be here, there will be a President, and the sun will come up May 26, 2046. The only difference is: you will be alone. The child at your side won’t be there. Neither will Donald Trump who, if he’s still around, will be pushing 100. Did it make sense? Was it worth it? Will you be satisfied to have lost it all to have protested “the Orange Man” and marched around a Tesla dealership — like the aforementioned teacher, who will then be likely a menopausal 54?

I’m not even going to get into the larger issue of the American cultural inversion that has lost sight of the Catholic teaching about openness to life. Catholic teaching remains what all Christians once viscerally understood: that life, as the gift of Him who is “Lord and Giver of life,” is self-justifying. Life didn’t have to prove it deserved to exist; rather, it was the occasional human foreclosure to the gift of life that demanded justification, even by lawful means. Now, instead, we have a situation where existence has to justify its existence, where life is no longer a good but, at best, neutral, sometimes bad, but above all just “useful.”

Despite huge pressures to the contrary, these are the insights that Pope St. Paul VI defended in Humanae Vitae (no. 12) [see here]. For whatever other faults he may have had, Pope Paul VI earned sanctity by his prophetic reaffirmation of that constant Christian teaching. Today is when the Solemnity of the Ascension should be celebrated but, in much of the United States, it will be punted to next Sunday. Where it is not observed, today may be celebrated as the optional memorial of Pope St. Paul VI.

We’re in a demographic dearth. There are lots of reasons for it. But is objecting to whomever is sitting in the White House really one of them?