Last year, Elizabeth Bruenig wrote a piece at the Atlantic arguing that policymakers should make birth free. This call was picked up by a couple of antiabortion organizations last week and managed to attract the attention of at least one Senator.

In our current health care system, pregnancy and delivery come with quite high out-of-pocket expenses. The average privately insured person pays $2,854 to give birth. One in six new parents pays over $5,000. Creating a system that takes this amount of money from people right as they embark upon the already expensive task of caring for an infant is a mind-boggling decision unless your goal is to disincentivize having children.

So far, people who have written about making childbirth free have mostly focused on the rationales for doing so. These rationales span various ideological perspectives, including conservative natalist perspectives, liberal perspectives concerning women’s equality, and leftist perspectives about the importance of free universal health care. In theory, these kinds of overlapping rationales could provide fertile ground for policymaking. In practice, such overlap often ends up causing anger because people don’t just want their policy preferences enacted. They also want their political opponents to be unhappy about it.