“Men had twice the sperm count as our teenagers do today. This is an existential crisis for our country.”
On at least four occasions since taking over as head of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has used his authority and platform to express grave concern about the sperm quality of teenage boys. “Men had twice the sperm count as our teenagers do today. This is an existential crisis for our country,” he said. An existential crisis!
Unsurprisingly, Kennedy was wrong about this. A recent paper, Sperm Concentration Remains Stable Among Fertile American Men: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, concluded:
In contrast to prior global studies, this analysis suggests no clinically significant decline in sperm concentration among confirmed fertile men and the general male US population without known infertility.
“Pronatalism: Just White Christian Nationalism in Disguise”
However, this is more than just another instance of Kennedy spreading medical misinformation or being fascinated with male genitalia, both human and animal. None of this is occurring in a vacuum, and it must be considered in light of everything else that’s happening today.
Indeed, the pronatalist agenda a core part of MAGA/MAHA. JD Vance famously mocked “childless cat ladies,” and an anti-abortion rally said, “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Elon Musk said, “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” while Dr. Mehmet Oz worried that Americans are “under-babied.” Dr. Oz also promoted fertility medications saying they would lead to more “Trump babies.”
Though it’s hard to object to cute babies, Katie O’Conner wrote about the movement’s unsettling beliefs in her article Pronatalism: Just White Christian Nationalism in Disguise:
Scratch just beneath the surface of the so-called pronatalism movement—a movement all over the pages of Project 2025 that’s based on the belief that people need to have more babies because declining birth rates are a threat to civilization—and you’ll find that it’s basically just white Christian nationalism in disguise. The movement is full of ideological contradictions that make it crystal clear: pronatalists’ desire for people to have more babies is in service to their primary goal of reenforcing a system of religious, racial, and gendered hierarchy that favors conservative white Christians.
This fits in well with the Trump administration- some recent headlines include US Accepts Only White Refugees for Sixth Consecutive Month and Trump Calls Somali Immigrants ‘Garbage’ As US Reportedly Targets Minnesota Community– though Kennedy doesn’t care about this at all. He routinely gushes over Trump saying, “he’s got the highest testosterone level.” On multiple occasions Kennedy even claimed divine intervention brought them together – “God sent me Donald Trump”- and Kennedy has thoughts on how children may be of use to Trump. He has expressed concern about children’s health in relation to their fitness to serve in the military, as has Dr. Oz.
In contrast to these future soldiers, Kennedy has said only “very, very sick kids should die from measles”, and that “children, healthy children, should not die of measles.” Derek Beres of the Conspirituality podcast coined the term “soft eugenics” to describe this noxious attitude, which he defined thusly:
The idea that if you take away life-saving healthcare and services from the vulnerable, then you can let nature take its course and only the strong will survive.
Kennedy’s sperm obsession combined with his desire for healthy “Trump babies” to serve in a military led by a White supremacist, whom he believes to be a divinely anointed, testosterone-filled übermensch can be thought of a corollary to soft eugenics. I’ll call it soft Lebensborn after the Nazi program to encourage the breeding of “racially pure” children. When viewed with this historical precedent and today’s current events in mind, Kennedy’s obsession with teenagers’ ejaculate isn’t just creepy and weird, but dark and disturbing.