I Want to Make America Healthy Again, Too

I COULD FIT right in with crunchy “MAHA” moms.

I wore my babies in patterned baby carriers, puréed organic squash and bananas for their first foods, and obsessed over toxins and microplastics in everything. I daydream about backyard chickens and growing enough tomatoes and cucumbers to last through the winter storedin neat rows of mason jars in my pantry. I, too, want cleaner water, soil, air, and food for my children.

The “Make America Healthy Again” movement is a strange “horseshoe alliance” of far-right and far-left hippies, homesteaders, vaccine skeptics — maybe even some who make their own granola. At its heart is a growing mistrust in the scientific establishment and a shrinking definition of health — from something we work toward together as a society to something we defend and purchase for ourselves and our families.

As a person with resources, I feel the easy draw of that narrowed mentality. If the air or water is polluted, I can buy fancy purifiers. If the soil is contaminated, I can pay to haul in garden dirt or move to land farther from polluting sources. But there are fewer and fewer places to go to avoid wildfire smoke, hurricane damage, or toxic emissions. Seeking my children’s health requires more than individualistic self-protection. It requires seeking the health of all people and the entire planet.

Maybe the renewed focus on American health can be an opening for conversation and collaboration, an opportunity to expand our society’s vision of health. Disability scholar John Swinton notes that the closest word for “health” in the Bible is shalom, a state of wholeness and universal flourishing. Shalom is only possible when the weakest and most vulnerable among us are taken care of. Shalom is a collective state, not an individual one. I can’t be healthy, in the fullest sense, when my neighbor lacks access to health care, nutritious foods, or clean water.

Health-conscious moms who voted for Donald Trump because of their support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his MAHA agenda have become unlikely bedfellows in the new administration’s mishmash of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot policies that profess a desire for public health while simultaneously crippling agencies like the EPA that regulate contaminants damaging to human health.

While action on the national level feels stymied, maybe it’s possible in this moment to join with unlikely bedfellows at local and state levels to protect the air, water, and lands in our neighborhoods. As climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has written, the words “climate change” may throw up a wall for some, but who doesn’t want pure drinking water or safe food? This year’s Super Bowl ad by the group Science Moms took this strategy to encourage pro-environmental action: Motivated by love, we can take steps to better our children’s health and their futures.

I’ll keep showing up in spaces where I can find some common ground with MAHA moms, however precarious. I hope these connections can lead to a sense of shared purpose, and maybe even a more expansive and loving enactment of health for all of us.