The fertility rate in the US has hit a record low … and it’s hardly surprising.

On Twitter, the Australian writer Maxine Beneba Clarke bestowed this fact with “its appropriate medical and sociological term: ‘The Trump Effect’”.

The health risks of having a child are already high but more than 20 million Americans are also set to lose medical coverage the moment Donald Trump legislates his American Health Care Act, which renders childbearing – let alone parenthood – an increased source of economic risk.



In fact, Time magazine – something of a presidential favourite – declares Americans are but one “diagnosis away from financial ruin” if the president’s promised bill passes. A diagnosis like what? Oh, like having “a baby who spent months in the neonatal intensive care unit”, says Time.

For a man whose campaign pledged to “punish” the act of abortion, Trump has perhaps facilitated the greatest single economic inducement to its clinical practice in all of US history. Abortions are, after all, medically safer and, now, less economic risk.

Of course, it’s not merely the threat of financial annihilation compelling Americans to reconsider reproduction. It’s the social risks as well. I mean, how prospective a parent would any sensible American wish to be given there remains a 50% chance they might have … a girl?

Sociologists, you see, are discovering a “Trump effect” of their own – the encouragement towards misogynistic bullying the president has supplied to emerging generations from his Twitter pulpit.

Politico chronicles that he has called Rosie O’Donnell “fat”, “dumb” and “a loser”, Ariana Huffington is “unattractive inside and out”, Megyn Kelly is “average in every way” and Hillary Clinton “doesn’t even look presidential”.

Let’s add his statements insisting Carly Fiorina shouldn’t seek political office because “look at that face”; that Mika Brzezinski is “bleeding badly from a facelift”; and a crowned Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, was but “Miss Piggy”.

When permission is provided by the president himself to humiliate movie stars, media grandees, prime-time journalists, chief executives of multinationals, prize-winning beauty queens and a goddamn former secretary of state on the basis of their looks, what kind of protection could any ordinary suburban parents possibly provide to their daughters?

It’s not the unborn I feel sorry for. My sympathies are with the existing women of America, obliged to live through this shitty epoch. It’s not just restrictions on their reproductive rights, the aforementioned risks of health-coverage-denied pregnancy or even the president’s public woman-hating that bodes badly for the American female experience.

It’s also the disappointment of realising that the end point of the painful physical perfection demanded of women by the dominant culture is merely the temporary approval of someone like Trump. That sure is some paltry prize.

Consider just how many adjustments to the female body are obliged by the beauty standards for which Trump is both a business investor and explicit political advocate.

Today’s commercial standard of feminine beauty far outstrips demands to make “the heels higher and the bathing suits smaller”, as Trump dictated back when he was just some rich, creepy sleazo buying the Miss Universe pageant.

Perfect hair, perfect skin, expensive perfume, immaculate makeup, youth and an endless wardrobe of appropriate outfits just don’t cut it anymore. Vigilant prevention of camel toes, VPLs, bingo wings, muffin tops and side boobs aren’t enough either, nor is the vast consumer frontier of shaving, plucking, dieting, working out, Madonna arms, Kardashian lips, orthodontics, nose jobs, boob jobs, butt lifts, face lifts, labiaplasty, liposuction, anal bleach or Botox.

Nipple paint isn’t enough, genital dye isn’t and neither is Passion Dust which – wait for it – is a vaginal glitter bomb that causes infection, but is sold online as “what all vaginas are supposed to look, feel and taste like; soft, sweet and magical!”

It’s not enough because it never is. The likes of Trump forever appoint themselves to find fault because humiliation – or the threat of it – keeps women in line. I repeat: the man fat-shamed Miss Universe. So why keep trying, girls?

Seriously, why?

Trump may be rich, powerful and capable of leading the world into nuclear war with one public tantrum, but think this through: would that man’s capricious approval of your looks be worth the pain of a single wax? The sting of a tweeze? The hunger for a forgone cupcake?

If the answer’s no, remember: Trump is just the alpha of a vulgar pack worldwide who imitate his foul behaviour. Precisely none of these less powerful, less wealthy men who rate human women as a “piece of ass”, just like the president, are any woman’s better option than a tub of Ben & Jerry’s and a night in watching Riverdale. Anyone who’d kick you out of bed for merely looking like Alicia Machado can take that vaginal glitter bomb and shove it in their own preferred orifice of infection; baby, you’ve got better things to do.

When Trump laid into Mika Brzezinski’s face the other morning, Bette Midler returned Twitter fire with a meme showing Trump’s own visible panty line. Me, I hogged into an iced doughnut; I’ve got into the habit of doing so whenever public body-shaming rears its Trump-like head.

One can hit the streets, the airwaves and the ballot box to protest Trump politically; I’ve done so before, I’ll do so again. But my rebellion against the judge-and-punish woman-hating Trump espouses with his catty legions comes in the shape of a human woman indulging her own physical comfort, without shame.

It’s a march that proceeds one lazy doughnut at a time. And as a refusal to validate any agenda to humiliate and control women, I promise all my sisters; it’s completely delicious.