Alex Cooper is pregnant. That doesn't make her a hypocrite. | Opinion

I’ve given birth to four babies and loved being pregnant.

That’s why I was delighted to see the news that Alex Cooper, the charming, gorgeous host of the podcast “Call Her Daddy,” announced on Instagram on May 17 that she is expecting her first child with husband Matt Kaplan.

But not everyone was excited, including many of my fellow conservatives. Some blasted Cooper for encouraging her mostly female audience to embrace careerism and singleness before prioritizing marriage and kids, even though she ultimately chose the opposite path herself.

I understand the temptation to pile on. If Cooper’s critics are right about the message she’s been sending, why should she get to have her cake and eat it too? But if conservatives are serious about reversing declining birthrates and encouraging more women to marry and have children, they should applaud a woman who made that choice, not smear her because she took a different path – and because she's highlights liberals like former Vice President Kamala Harris on her platform.

Conservatives should celebrate motherhood, not sneer at it

I was disappointed to see how many of my fellow conservatives threw stones at Cooper following her pregnancy announcement.

The Daily Wire, a right-leaning organization spearheaded by Ben Shapiro, responded to the news with this post on X: “Tell them marriage is stupid and life is about sleeping around with strangers. Then get married and have a baby.” The site also promoted a column about it titled, “Alex Cooper Told Women To Delay Settling Down. Now She’s Having The Fairytale Ending.”

“… [S]he tells her audience to be promiscuous and have sex with strangers," political commentator Link Lauren posted on X. “Meanwhile, she’s living the white picket fence dream with a traditional family. She needs the young girls who follow her to stay single and immature, otherwise her entire business model collapses. She’s a fraud."

Conservative influencer Isabel Brown said on social media that she was happy for women to experience motherhood but bemoaned the fact that "many influential women in America today have built multimillion dollar empires encouraging promiscuity, abortion, and avoiding marriage at all costs […] All while falling in love, getting married, and having babies themselves."

The right purports to be pro-marriage, pro-life and pro-natalist. I support this platform for many reasons, including because the U.S. fertility rate has hit a record low. But if we're trying to persuade or convert young men and women to see the beauty and necessity of these ideas, why would we choose to smear a woman when she does exactly this? It seems counterintuitive and condescending.

The hypocrisy argument goes only so far

Cooper’s critics are not entirely wrong. There is a real tension between the lifestyle she promoted for years and the life she now appears to want for herself.

Cooper launched "Call Her Daddy" with a cohost in 2018. A 2021 profile in Time described her as “arguably the most successful woman in podcasting,” noting that she drew on her own experiences with men to give sex and relationship advice. Cooper met Matt Kaplan in 2020 and the couple married in 2024 when she was 29 years old. But she was hardly mum about it – the wedding was profiled in Vogue. Now she's pregnant and announced it happily.

I understand why conservatives criticize the normalization of casual sex among younger generations; I don’t think it’s wise either. I also agree that encouraging women to prioritize career advancement while assuming they can easily marry and start families in their late 30s or 40s ignores biological realities. But the path to marriage and motherhood isn't always as straightforward as conservatives wish it were. If a woman hasn't met the right person for her in her 20s, she should support herself and delay both marriage and motherhood.

Conservatives can disagree with Cooper's views on casual sex. But ultimately, she did what many suggest women do: marry the man who was right for her and start a family.

I don't think Cooper is a hypocrite. If anything, she seems both confident in what she wants in her own life and savvy enough to know what her female audiences want to hear. Dating and sex advice has always been popular; Cooper just repackaged “Sex and the City” for the podcast era. She was simply intelligent and fortunate enough to meet the right man sooner than Carrie Bradshaw did.

Cooper's pregnancy announcement is less a show of hypocrisy and more a demonstration of exactly the kind of model she's espoused on her show: Have a career, find a high-value man and get pregnant. The right's smear campaign is disingenuous, patronizing and reactive: We'll never convince women to get married and have babies if we criticize them when they do just that, regardless of whether they always lived according to conservative ideals.

Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist with USA TODAY. She lives in Texas with her four kids. Sign up for her newsletter, The Right Track, and get it delivered to your inbox.