“Policy experts and advocates of boosting the birthrate have been meeting with White House aides, sometimes handing over written proposals on ways to help or convince women to have more babies,” reported The New York Times. Among the ideas circulating are a quota for the share of Fulbright scholarships awarded to parents and federal funding for programs that “educate women on their menstrual cycles” to “teach them when they’re able to conceive.”
Exactly which of these “pronatalist” policies President Donald Trump will embrace is not known, but he is a receptive audience, having pledged as a candidate to “support baby booms.” Similarly, in his first speech as Vice President, J.D. Vance told an anti-abortion rally, “I want more babies in the United States of America” (as if we didn’t already know that after Vance’s open disdain for “childless cat ladies” was uncovered in the 2024 campaign.)
The baby-making push is overtly sold not as a dystopian Handmaid’s Tale-esque plan to shunt women out of the workplace and back into the kitchen, even though, as a separate Times dispatch from a recent pronatalist conference noted, their movement has embraced “misogynists calling for a return to traditional gender roles.”
It is sold as a policy solution to a legitimate societal problem: America’s low birthrate. After all, Americans aren’t procreating enough to maintain our current population level. Without a sufficient base of young workers, generating revenue to support older retirees with Social Security and Medicare will become very difficult.
However, if Trump and Vance were primarily concerned with America’s population levels, they wouldn’t be trying to deport millions of immigrants and make it almost impossible for any new immigrants to arrive.
As the Congressional Budget Office detailed last year, in its 30-year population projections, “Over the next decade, immigration accounts for about 70 percent of the overall increase in the population, and the greater number of births than deaths accounts for the remaining 30 percent. After 2034, net immigration increasingly drives population growth, accounting for all population growth beginning in 2040.” Those projections would not hold if Trump’s mass deportation regime remained in place.
Despite the political beating immigration has taken in recent years, the migrant influx has been helping America avert problems. Politico’s Peder Schaefer explained last July, “While many other developed nations are beginning to battle the demographic effects of a shrinking and aging population, the U.S. has been spared so far because of the role new immigrants play in keeping the population at steady state levels, or in some projections, growing, even as the number of native-born births falls.”
Why the Trump administration wants to boost the population with more Americans, but not immigrants, can only be explained by bigotry. We want more people, but not those people.
Not only is kicking out immigrants stupid, but believing America can offset the loss of immigrants with half-baked government baby-making schemes is stupider.
We’ve been here before, with Republicans grabbing the levers of federal power to promote socially conservative models of traditional families. For example, George W. Bush established the Healthy Marriage Initiative, a marriage promotion program that is still in place and serves more than two million people. Did we experience a marriage boom? No, we did not. Marriage rates declined under Bush and have largely remained stable since.
Alan Hawkins, a professor of family studies at Brigham Young University, sympathetic to the goals of the Healthy Marriage Initiative (preferring to describe it as “relationship education” and not “marriage promotion”), has closely tracked the program and reviewed academic studies of its effectiveness. “So far,” he wrote in 2019, “evidence is mixed on whether these programs enhance relationship stability. Some studies show they have a small effect on helping distressed, low-income married couples increase their commitment and remain married. There is no evidence yet that these programs increase the chances that unmarried couples will marry (but may help some stay together longer).”
These programs may provide some marginal “relationship education” benefit. But anyone who believed a federal initiative would lead to more people making a lifelong vow of marriage did not set realistic expectations.
Similarly, no one should believe that menstrual cycle education, one of the ideas kicking around, will lead more folk to assume the lifelong commitment of parenthood. One idea floated to the Trump administration—giving $5,000 “baby bonuses” to new parents—might be a bit closer to the mark, if abhorrent to fiscal conservatives. (The Atlantic’s Marc Novicoff argued in February that pronatalists risked opposition to any costly proposals because “Most Republicans still want to slash government spending, not increase it.”) However, anyone hesitating to become a parent for financial reasons would likely need more than a single check to overcome their doubts.
Substantial support on an ongoing basis, such as Joe Biden’s short-lived expanded child tax credit, which for one year produced a sharp reduction in child poverty, might be more potent. But Biden couldn’t get any Republicans, or the former Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, to accept the hefty price tag on a permanent basis.
Perhaps Trump could boost birth rates by increasing access to in vitro fertilization. He has even said he wants to be “fertilization President.” Yet this month, he fired a team of health department workers who tracked the effectiveness of in vitro fertilization treatments. Medicaid cuts, which Republicans are expected to include in their budget reconciliation bill, won’t encourage larger families either, considering that the program covers 40 percent of the births in America. So, put me down as skeptical that Trump and his pro-natalist allies are serious about effective policymaking to increase America’s population. They are far more serious about dehumanizing and deporting immigrants and promoting sexist stereotypes about the role of women in society
