We are too few, and they are too many : Pronatalist Rhetoric on Motherhood and Reproductive Choice in Germany and the United States of America

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how motherhood, reproductive choice, and declining birth rates are constructed in official political party discourse in Germany and the United States of America between 2024 and 2026. The study analyzes party programmes and official Instagram posts from parties at opposite ends of the political spectrum in each country, applying Robert Entman's (1993) framing theory as its primary analytical framework, and interpreted through Sharon Hays' (1996) concept of intensive mothering, and postfeminist sensibility (McRobbie, 2009; Gill, 2007), using qualitative content analysis after Mayring and Fenzl (2019). The central finding is one of absence. Across the entire corpus, regardless of country, party, or platform, the woman who chooses not to become a mother is entirely absent as a legitimate political subject. Conservative parties construct this absence as a civili- zational problem to be reversed. Progressive parties defend reproductive rights but frame them consistently around the management of unwanted pregnancies rather than the right not to mother at all. Postfeminist sensibility (McRobbie, 2009; Gill, 2007) further reveals how even progressive treatment recommendations reproduce this expectation through the language of choice. This absence is not incidental. Entman (1993, pp. 54-55) argues that frames operate through what they omit as much as what they include. That omission is power. Across both national contexts and the full ideological spectrum, it works to maintain motherhood as the unquestioned organizing expectation of women's lives, rendering alternatives not merely marginal but invisible.