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Donald Trump loves a nickname and his latest self-appointed title of the “fertilisation president” is as bizarre as it is chilling. Announced with his signature bravado at a Women’s History Month event, the moniker drew laughter from his supporters. But for many, it evoked something more sinister: a dystopian vision ripped straight from Gilead, where women’s bodies are state property and motherhood is a mandate.
This declaration comes amid an increasingly hostile political landscape for reproductive rights in the US. After the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, the criminalisation of pregnancy outcomes is on the rise, with women prosecuted for self-managed abortions and even miscarriages. Read more Bolstered by Trump’s rhetoric, the Republican Party is not just restricting abortion – it is redefining pregnancy as a matter for law enforcement.
The fact that Trump’s declaration coincides with the release of the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale this month feels almost too on the nose. Once regarded as a cautionary tale, the adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel first aired in 2017, just after Trump’s election, and has increasingly mirrored real life. After his recent re-election, social media echoed with chilling chants of “Your body, my choice” – a phrase fit for Atwood’s totalitarian dystopia.
The final season’s synopsis reads: “June's unyielding spirit and determination pull her back into the fight to take down Gilead, while a trailer shows June (Elisabeth Moss) handing out box cutters and declaring ‘Let the revolution begin’.” As the kids say: #mood. But The Handmaid’s Tale is far from the only cultural work interrogating the often mythologised role of motherhood.
In the past decade, literature and film have increasingly rejected the idealised image of joyful motherhood, replacing it with raw portraits of exhaustion, regret and systemic inequality. Singer Chappell Roan was criticised for saying everyone she knows with children is unhappy. Photo: Josh Brasted/FilmMagic In 2014, Jenny Offill’s novel Dept.
of Speculation gave voice to the ambivalence, loneliness, and dissatisfaction of motherhood. In Motherhood (2018), Sheila Heti’s narrator ponders childlessness amid the visible unhappiness of mothers around her, writing: “I feel like a draft dodger from the army in which so many of my friends are serving.” Films such as The Lost Daughter and Nightbitch capture the identity erasure of caregiving and domestic labour, while nonfiction such as Touched Out by Amanda Montei and Mom Rage by Minna Dubin situate personal experience within broader systems of inequality.
Meanwhile, a wave of divorce memoirs by Leslie Jamison, Lyz Lenz, Sarah Manguso and Maggie Smith chronicle marriages undone by unequal parenting and the relentless expectation of female sacrifice. Even pop culture isn’t immune. Singer Chappell Roan recently sparked controversy on the Call Her Daddy podcast by describing her friends with young children as “in hell” – sleep-deprived, joyless, visibly drained.
Speaking about people who have children, she said: “I literally have not met anyone who’s happy – anyone who has, like, light in their eyes, anyone who has slept.” The backlash was swift and multi-pronged: TikTok lit up with angry moms, conservative outlets scolded her for lacking maternal instinct and feminist media questioned whether motherhood needs a PR makeover. But Roan clearly struck a nerve because her comments brushed up against an uncomfortable truth: many women do feel like they're in hell, and not necessarily because of the kids.
When we talk about “motherhood”, we’re not just talking about raising children. We’re talking about a web of economic, emotional and political expectations. The light isn’t gone from mothers’ eyes because they’re holding babies – it’s because they’re holding everything else .
Still, one shortcoming of this new wave of Dissatisfied Mother Art is its tendency to remain in the realm of re-enactment The mental load. The career losses. The intimacy gaps.
The eroded sense of self. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner writes in Fleishman Is in Trouble : “Maybe it was the overwhelming unfairness of what happens to a woman’s status and body and position in the culture once she’s a mother. All those things can drive you crazy if you’re a smart person.
If you are a smart woman, you cannot stand by and remain sane once you fully understand...
the constraints of this world on a woman.” Acknowledging these inequalities isn’t anti-motherhood. It’s honesty.
And that honesty is essential if we want to build a culture that supports rather than romanticises caregiving. Motherhood narratives, whether in fiction, memoir, television or film, shape how we see mothers, which in turn shapes policy. They’re political – which is why they’re so ripe for manipulation and political agenda.
It’s no coincidence that the tradwife trend is rising alongside anti-choice, anti-feminist politics. These sanitised portrayals of 1950s-style motherhood – white, Christian, domestic – prop up a vision where women’s roles are fixed and unchallenged. This is the Republican ideal: mandate birth, strip support and romanticise the sacrifice.
An abortion rights demonstrator dressed in a 'Handmaid's Tale' costume protests outside the US Supreme Court in June 2022 following the overturning of Roe v Wade. Photo: Reuters In that context, writers and filmmakers who refuse to idealise motherhood aren’t just making art. They’re making a political statement.
And that resonates, especially with millennials, who face economic precarity and growing scepticism about parenthood. As birth rates fall, more cultural works are confronting the grim realities of postpartum depression, maternal mortality and the inequity baked into family life. These stories offer a necessary counterweight to “family values” fantasies that valorise mothers while devaluing their labour.
Still, one shortcoming of this new wave of Dissatisfied Mother Art is its tendency to remain in the realm of re-enactment, rather than engaging in reimagining. Art holds up a mirror. But it can also offer a map.
And right now, we need both. As reproductive rights erode and gender inequality persists, Trump calling himself the “fertilisation president” isn’t just absurd – it’s a warning. Motherhood is increasingly politicised, so telling the truth about what it really demands is itself an act of resistance.
Narratives around motherhood can reinforce outdated ideals, or they can challenge them – making visible the labour, loss and imbalance so often hidden behind the word “mother”. These stories don’t just reflect our world; they shape what we believe is possible within it. Not every story has to end in hope, but every honest one opens the door to something better.
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