Lorde is not a MAGA tradwife for going off birth control

In an interview with Rolling Stone to promote her upcoming fourth album, Virgin, New Zealand pop star Lorde revealed that she’s off birth control for the first time in 15 years. “I’ve now come to see [my decision] as maybe some quasi right-wing programming,” she admits, referring to the rise of right-wing fear-mongering and misinformation spreading around hormonal contraception. “But I hadn’t ovulated in 10 years. And when I ovulated for the first time, I cannot describe to you how crazy it was. One of the best drugs I’ve ever done.” 

This comment (along with a few others) has been met with an intense backlash from both Lorde’s fans and critics. One X user wrote that Lorde “really went off birth control and immediately became an incel nazi, welp.” Another wrote, “Honestly thrilled that Lorde perpetuated the idea that birth control is bad… before I attempted to spend $100+ to see her in a concert tomorrow morning instead of afterwards.”  

While a lot (almost all) of these comments are ridiculous, they aren’t coming out of nowhere. We are living in a time when politicians in the US, and increasingly in the UK, are actively pushing women back into the home and towards motherhood. Just last month, the New York Times reported on how the White House is currently assessing ways to persuade women (particularly white women) to have more children because of the declining birth rate. These incentives include potentially giving every American mother $5,000 after delivery, reserving 30 per cent of scholarships for the Fulbright program (the prestigious government-backed international fellowship) for applicants who are married or have children, funding government programs that educate women on their menstrual cycles so they can better understand when they can conceive, and awarding a “National Medal of Motherhood” to mothers with six or more children. If that last one sounds familiar, it’s because it is: the Nazis similarly awarded German women who fulfilled their racial ideals with motherhood awards. The bronze awards were given to mothers who birthed and raised four to five children, the silver was awarded to mothers of six to seven children and the gold award to mothers of eight or more.

This has created an environment where people are rightfully suspicious of narratives questioning birth control, particularly because of the complete bans on abortion in 12 states in the US, and partial bans in seven other states. Misinformation about hormonal contraception, and contraception in general, is rife on social media, as Lorde acknowledges in her interview, with it being pushed by right-wing and new age spirituality influencers who tell women that it’s better and more ‘feminine’ to be off contraception and be ‘natural’. Politicians in the US are also spreading misinformation. Representative for Georgia’s 14th congressional district, Marjorie Taylor Greene, once said that the Plan B pill, which is not an abortifacient and works by obstructing or delaying ovulation, “kills a baby in the womb once a woman is already pregnant”.

With all this in mind, the immediate rage towards Lorde’s statement is understandable. But we need to be wary of when our fears of the right mean that we are ignoring real issues that people are having in society. Lorde didn’t explicitly say she had a bad experience with birth control, but the reality is that some people do. In her article, ‘Why are so many young people ditching the pill’, Sinead Campbell spoke to a final year student at Durham University who experienced blood clotting in her leg as a result of taking the combined pill, prescribed to her by her GP as a form of acne treatment when she was 19. “The idea that it’s being handed out to teenagers to treat things like acne is so dangerous. I think people are becoming a bit more sceptical of that,” she told Dazed. This is not everyone’s experience, but it is some people’s experience on the pill, and those experiences should not be ignored because of our fears of right-wing cooptation. 

The right are, unfortunately, very good at addressing the problems or anxieties that people have in society and doing something about them. That doesn’t mean that their solutions are good; they are often and almost always very bad and rarely deal with the root of the problem. The best example of this is Americans’ anxieties around the production and quality of their food. The Democratic Party has done little to address people’s fears around the chemicals in their food, but Republican figures like RFK Jr want to ban toxic food chemicals. At the same time, however, he is also peddling unscientific, eugenicist wellness narratives. 

Some people have problems with their birth control. They have issues with the fact that they were lazily given it at a young age to deal with every or any problem they brought to their doctor. It is extremely unfortunate that we are in the climate that we are in right now, but that doesn’t change the fact that some people are dissatisfied with their birth control and want it to be better. They are not MAGA tradwives for expressing that. If the left were smart, we’d address some of these problems head-on, before the right does.