Trump Wants a Baby Boom

The administration's pronatalist obsession is borne of all the worst impulses—though there may be a silver lining for healthcare

Donald Trump dubbed himself the “fertilization president” last month, claiming delivery of a campaign promise to make IVF procedures more affordable. Not only does his executive order do nothing of the sort (covered here at the Contrarian), DOGE-fueled budget cuts have since eliminated the CDC team of epidemiologists and data analysts leading IVF research across the country.

As of late, the nickname echoes his desire to turbocharge birth rates. The U.S. pronatalist movement, a hodgepodge of activists—the most visible of whom, Simone Collins, describes herself as “intentionally cringe” (she’s not wrong), down to her hipster-meets-handmaid aesthetic—is fueled in part by a series of Heritage Foundation-backed policy proposals.

Among the administration members in on Trump’s promised baby boom: JD Vance, who, in addition to calling for “more babies in the United States of America,” has argued over the years that parents should get to cast more votes. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has recommended that the Department of Transportation favor communities with “marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” Elon Musk claims declining birthrates are a “bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” though statisticians attribute the domestic dip to fewer teen pregnancies.

Including Trump, these four men alone have at least 30 offspring among them (hard to know the actual number for Musk). While their policy positions are consistent with their lives, it’s hard to ignore the white nationalist underpinnings of pronatalism, particularly in an administration that has too often embraced such views.

Now the administration is considering policy proposals to incentivize procreation. Among the possibilities are a “National Medal of Motherhood” award for women with at least six children; prioritization of parents for government-funded Fulbright fellowships; a $5,000 “baby bonus”; and public education about the menstrual cycle so girls and women “better understand when they are … able to conceive.”

The first two are outright bonkers. Inspiration for the motherhood medal is quite literally the stuff of Nazi Germany, where mothers of Aryan broods of eight or more received a Cross of Honor of the German Mother, a swanky swastika-studded badge. And doesn’t setting aside a third of Fulbright annual awards for those married with children smack of a pesky DEI quota?

The remaining two proposals are a little thornier. Yes, they are borne of all worst impulses. However, it is important not to write off their potential intrinsic value.

I was grateful for Gretchen Sisson’s response on Instagram to the “baby bonus.” A sociologist at UC San Francisco and author of Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, Dr. Sisson’s research includes hundreds of in-depth interviews with women who have relinquished infants for domestic adoption over the past 60 years. Among her findings, financial instability is a primary driving factor—and, for many, $5,000 cash would have given the peace of mind and immediate stability they needed to have made a different decision. She points to a trove of evidence of lifelong health benefits that direct cash payments have for families.

As for the menstrual education mandate, the nation’s lawmakers and leaders should be first in line. In my advocacy work, I converse with legislators of all political stripes about the ‘tampon tax’ and providing menstrual products in schools, jails, libraries, and shelters. I know firsthand that collective ignorance about basic biology runs deep.

Take Gov. Greg Abbott. When speaking to the press about the Texas law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, he did not know how to count weeks of pregnancy. He claimed a six-week ban equated to at least six weeks to obtain an abortion, seemingly unaware that pregnancy is measured from the last period, not conception or a missed period (which means a person could have as little as two weeks to obtain an abortion).

As Meredith Blake highlighted at the Contrarian, engineers at NASA—rocket scientists!—had no clue how many tampons a female astronaut would need for one week in space as evidenced by their verbatim query to the legendary Sally Ride, “Is 100 the right number?”

Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and sent abortion rights back to the states, I have argued that menstrual literacy is reproductive self-defense. With abortion outlawed or restricted in more than half of states, and more criminalization of pregnancy outcomes like miscarriage, fluency in menstrual cycles—which at a minimum includes understanding how and when conception can occur—is life-or-death knowledge.

During the Biden administration, I proposed ways that health agencies could help amplify that information. That was then. This is now—where prioritizing how to get pregnant, rather than how to make informed decisions about our bodies, may well be the new normal.

We must respond by “flooding the zone,” as they say, with all the information, support, and resources that enable healthy and just outcomes, and unburdened choices, for all girls, women, and families. Yes, these policies are the dystopian side of the same coin. We have no choice but to bet we can flip it.