On the website’s landing page, a photo of a heavily pregnant white woman is cropped below the head, so that she is faceless, anonymous, cradling her massive belly underneath the skirt of her yellow dress. She appears to be standing in a field of tall grass, the kind you can get ticks in. The photo is flanked on either side by chubby infant footprints – one pair in pink, another in blue – a clear nod to the anti-abortion movement’s preferred symbol of what they call “precious feet”. A banner at the top declares that the site, “Moms.gov”, which was launched by the White House on Mother’s Day, offers “Resources, Information, and Help for New and Expecting Mothers”, and advertises that it is “addressing the needs of mothers and fathers who face difficult or unexpected pregnancies” – that is, those who would often seek abortions. In fact, the site does little besides link to Option Line, a referral network of Christian anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers run by the anti-abortion group Heartbeat International.

The launch of Moms.gov was accompanied by an uncomfortable Oval Office press conference on Monday, in which members of the Trump administration and some of the more aggressively anti-choice Republican members of Congress gathered to tout the new website and cheer on the Trump administration’s pronatalist stance. Dr Mehmet Oz, the wellness influencer and one-time television personality who now holds a position in the Trump health department as the administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, lamented that Americans are, in his creepy personal parlance, “under-babied”. “One in three Americans are under-babied,” Oz asserted. “That means that you either don’t have any children or you have less children than you would normally want to have.” Oz asserted that the fertility rate has fallen below 1.5 (a Johns Hopkins study indicates that it is in fact a bit higher, and that the US population is not shrinking) and predicted a coming wave of “Trump babies”.

Health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, meanwhile, took the opportunity to offer his own unsettling opinions on what he called the “fertility crisis”. “In 1970, men had twice the sperm count as our teenagers do today,” he said, another questionable claim. “This is an existential crisis for our country.” At times during the press conference, Donald Trump, who was seated at his desk wearing a long purple tie, appeared to close his eyes or lose focus.

The pronatalist push is not new from the White House, which has shown an uncommonly consistent commitment to ideological misogyny and which has attempted to wield its policy discretion in ways that encourage women’s financial dependence on men, their early and frequent childbearing, and their confinement to the home, while discouraging their aspirations to work, education, self-determination or equal dignity.

But the launch of the website, which features no mention of contraception or paid family leave, and only mentions abortion and childhood vaccination in terms of limits and exemptions, also reflects the Trump administration’s attempt to reconcile with an anti-abortion movement that has complained of feeling discarded or taken for granted in the post-Dobbs era.

After the June 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe, when Republican-controlled states quickly banned abortion and sent waves of healthcare-seeking women fleeing across state lines to Democratic territories, Republicans saw worse-than-expected turnout in the fall midterm elections – a result that many attributed to outrage over the Dobbs decision and the chaos and suffering that it unleashed. In the aftermath, as a wave of popular referenda reaffirmed the popularity of abortion rights across many Republican-controlled states, Trump seems to have taken the lesson that abortion restrictions were a political loser, and that the anti-abortion movement, to whom he had already delivered the end of Roe, was not entitled to more favors. In the first months of his second administration, there was palpable discontent from many in the anti-abortion movement that Trump was not moving more quickly and aggressively to further restrict abortion or ban the procedure in states where it remained legal.

This may be changing. As the 2026 midterms approach, the anti-abortion movement seems poised to rack up more of the victories that they have been impatient for since overturning Roe in 2022. An appellate court recently curtailed mail access to the abortion drug mifepristone, which is used in a large majority of American abortions and which has been crucial in preserving abortion access for women in Republican states, as pills have been easily and frequently mailed from elsewhere; the supreme court temporarily preserved access. Meanwhile, the Trump administration just dispensed with its one-time FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, who was criticized by the anti-abortion movement for slow-walking a review that was designed to find a safety pretext for removing mifepristone from the market. He is likely to be replaced by someone more friendly to the anti-choice cause.

Moms.gov, meanwhile, provides little in the way of actual support for pregnant women. It links them, instead, to anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers, Christian organizations that pose as clinics in order to confuse and trap pregnant women who would otherwise seek abortions. Crisis pregnancy centers often provide pregnancy tests and even ultrasounds, but routinely overstate gestational age, misleading women into believing that they are past the legal limit for abortions, and frequently promise aid, like diapers or cribs, that is not forthcoming or turns out to be contingent upon religious education for expectant parents. They are not medical centers, and they are not reliable: they are meant to deceive women, to trick them into giving up control over their bodies and lives, and to condescend to them, treating them as resources to be extracted from rather than persons endowed with dignity and entitled to the truth. In that sense, they’re a decent metaphor for the Trump administration itself.

• Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist