Dear Editor:

Not just a cadre within the extreme Right of the Republican Party (recall “Dr.” David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the of the Ku Klux Klan, Republican member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, who endorsed Trump’s three candidacies), it is also the acronym for a key tenet of the Nazi Party: Kirke, Kuchen, und Kinder (Church, Kitchen, and Children).

Hitler’s anti-immigrant, racially-pure Christian nationalism imposed subordinate roles on women within the Reich. Their lives were to be grounded in traditional "family values," valorizing above all the birth and nurturing of "Aryan" children. According to the Fũhrer, a German woman’s world was “her husband, her family, her children, and her home.”

To that end, he incentivized marriage and childbirth with 1,000-Reichsmark loans, to be forgiven after the births of at least four children. Nazi laws discouraged German women from attempting to work in administrative, legal, and medical professions. ‘Aryan’ women were forbidden to use contraceptives or to seek abortions; performing abortions on them was punishable by death.

Fast forward to MagAmerica. Overturning Roe v. Wade is the capstone of Trump’s war on women’s rights. His vice president supports a federal ban on abortion, with no exceptions for rape or incest. His party has halted legislation guaranteeing the right to birth control; the Maga doctrine of fetal personhood has prevented the codification of the right to IVF.

To address the demographic fact that the US birthrate has declined to 1.5 children per woman, the president encourages women who are US citizens to have more babies: each of their children born during his second presidential term will receive a $1,000 "Trump Account," accessible at age 18.

Instead of granting citizenship to courageous, hard-working and law-abiding immigrants to raise our birth rate to replacement levels, Trump wants to reduce American women to the “barefoot and pregnant” ideal of bygone times.

Natalism is a hallmark of fascist regimes. Just as German women’s social and economic gains during the Weimar Republic were brutally reversed by Hitler within months of his chancellorship, so American women’s rights to bodily autonomy and civic equality have suffered sustained attacks during Trump’s half year back in office.

Bill Hammond

Boothbay