Dr. Oz Just Made An Alarming Comment About Fertility Rates That Sounds Straight Out Of 'The Handmaid's Tale'

Dr. Mehmet Oz, President Donald Trump's administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, made an alarming comment about fertility rates, declaring that 1 in 3 Americans are "under-babied."

In the United States, infertility affects roughly 9% of men and 11% of women, while globally the figure is estimated at about one in six people.

And Oz creeped out critics with the following remark:

"Let me speak a little bit of the reality that 1 in 3 Americans are under-babied. What does under-babied mean? That means you either have no children or you have less children than you would want to have."

"We have a crisis that's causing the fertility rate to drop below 1.5. Replacement rate is 2.1. We're way below what we need just to replace the people that we have in America."

You can hear what he said in the video below.

Oz's comments inspired comparisons to The Handmaid's Tale, a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood that was written at the height of the Reagan administration and satirized political, social, and religious trends of the 1980s.

The book, published in 1985, was inspired at least in part by the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. The overthrow of the Shah's rule saw a theocracy established that subjugated women in a strict patriarchal society, gutted female agency and individuality in addition to reproductive rights, and limited all the other ways women can assert their independence.

The book was then famously turned into a critically acclaimed series on Hulu at the beginning of Trump's first presidency. The Testaments, a sequel written by Atwood, has also been adapted by Hulu, premiering earlier this year.

Others have condemned the proposal, pointing out that the economic reality for many Americans means they're not thinking about having children while contending with a nationwide affordability crisis and a host of other issues that have led many people to believe the U.S. is an increasingly inhospitable place to raise children.

Oz isn’t the only official in the Trump administration emphasizing family growth.

Vice President J.D. Vance echoed similar sentiments, stating in a speech last year that he wants Americans to have more babies. This focus on boosting the country’s birth rate aligns with broader policy shifts that prioritize families in federal funding decisions.

Vance said the U.S. needs “a culture that celebrates life at all stages, one that recognizes and truly believes that the benchmark of national success is not our GDP number or our stock market, but whether people feel that they can raise thriving and healthy families in our country."

Last year, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration "has been hearing out a chorus of ideas in recent weeks for persuading Americans to get married and have more children" and that one proposal shared with aides "would give a $5,000 cash 'baby bonus' to every American mother after delivery."