Stephanie Armour and Amanda Seitz
Maddy Olcott plans to begin a profession as soon as she graduates from faculty. But the junior on the State University of New York-Purchase College is to this point not planning to begin a household — even with the Trump administration dangling inducements like thousand-dollar “baby bonuses” or cheaper infertility medicine.
“Our country wants us to be birthing machines, but they’re cutting what resources there already are,” mentioned Olcott, 20. “And a $1,000 baby bonus? It’s low-key like, what, bro? That wouldn’t even cover my month’s rent.”
The Trump administration needs Americans to have extra infants, and the federal authorities is debuting coverage initiatives to reverse the falling U.S. fertility charge. In mid-October, the White House unveiled a plan to increase access to in vitro fertilization remedy. President Donald Trump has heralded such initiatives, calling himself “the fertilization president.”
But reproductive rights teams and different advocacy organizations say these efforts to buttress the start charge don’t make up for broader administration priorities aimed toward slicing federal applications similar to Medicaid, its associated Children’s Health Insurance Program, and different initiatives that help girls and kids. The pro-family focus, they are saying, isn’t nearly boosting procreation. Instead, they are saying, it’s being weaponized to push a conservative agenda that threatens girls’s well being, reproductive rights, and labor drive participation.
Some predict these efforts might deter parenthood and result in will increase in maternal mortality.
“The religious right wants more white Christian babies and is trying to curtail women’s reproductive freedom in order to achieve that aim,” mentioned Marian Starkey, a spokesperson for Population Connection, a nonprofit that promotes inhabitants stabilization via elevated entry to contraception and abortion. “The real danger is the constant whittling down of reproductive rights.”
The White House didn’t reply to repeated interview requests.
A slate of federal applications which have lengthy helped girls and kids are additionally being focused by Trump and Cabinet members who say they champion pronatalist insurance policies.
Medicaid work necessities, as an example, put in place by the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a price range legislation enacted in July, will result in further paperwork and different necessities that, in accordance with the Congressional Budget Office, will trigger millions of eligible enrollees to lose protection. Medicaid covers greater than 4 in 10 births within the U.S.
The measure additionally cuts federal funding for a nationwide program that gives month-to-month meals advantages. Almost 40% of recipients in fiscal 2023 had been kids.
GOP spending cuts and staffing freezes have hampered Head Start, a federal schooling program that gives day care and preschool for younger, low-income kids, whilst U.S. adults implore the federal government to curtail ballooning child care costs.
And the GOP halted Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood of America for one yr as a result of it supplies abortion companies, forcing roughly 50 clinics across the nation to shut for the reason that starting of 2025. Planned Parenthood supplies a variety of ladies’s well being companies, from wellness exams to breast most cancers screenings and initial prenatal care.
Groups that advocate for ladies’s well being and reproductive rights say the actions by the administration and congressional Republicans to assault these applications are making it tougher for households to get the help and medical care they want.
“There is a lot of rhetoric about who is worthy of public assistance, and to many policymakers, it’s not the single mother,” mentioned Allyson Crays, a public well being legislation and coverage analyst on the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.
The pronatalist perspective typically helps authorities intervention to encourage procreation and is rooted in a perception that fashionable tradition has didn’t rejoice the nuclear household. The motion’s supporters additionally say insurance policies to encourage childbearing are an financial necessity.
A Declining Birth Rate
The national birth rate has largely been on a downward trajectory since 2007, with the variety of births declining by a median 2% per yr from 2015 via 2020, in accordance with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though the speed has fluctuated since.
The ideas that form the motion will be present in Project 2025, a political initiative led by the conservative Heritage Foundation that has seen lots of its proposals adopted by Trump. The doc asserts that children fare best in a “heterosexual, intact marriage.”
“Married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them,” it says.
Project 2025 additionally consists of many proposals that critics say aren’t pleasant towards girls’s well being. For occasion, it requires eliminating entry to mifepristone, a drug generally utilized in abortions in addition to within the administration of miscarriages, and encourages states to dam Planned Parenthood services from receiving Medicaid funding.
The “more babies” mantra is being embraced on the highest ranges of the federal authorities.
“I can’t remember any other administration being so tied to the pronatalist movement,” mentioned Brian Dixon, Population Connection’s senior vice chairman for presidency and political affairs.
Just days after he was sworn in, Vice President JD Vance declared, “I want more babies in the United States of America.” He has additionally criticized the decision-making of ladies and men who choose to not begin households.
The White House in October did announce a reduction on sure medicine utilized in IVF treatments via TrumpRx, a yet-to-debut authorities web site that goals to attach customers with lower-priced medicine. Mehmet Oz, who heads Medicare and Medicaid, heralded a potential way forward for “Trump babies,” ensuing from the lower-priced infertility medicine.
The administration additionally introduced it will encourage employers to maneuver to a brand new mannequin for offering fertility benefits as a stand-alone possibility by which staff can enroll. But that’s removed from Trump’s earlier pledge to make infertility therapies free and might not be sufficient to beat different long-term monetary worries that usually information choices about whether or not to have kids.
Angel Albring, a mom of six, says her dream of getting an enormous household at all times hinged on her potential to work and keep away from youngster care prices. Her profession as a contract author enabled her to take action whereas nonetheless contributing to the household’s revenue, working throughout nap occasions and at evening, whereas the remainder of her family slept.
“The whole thing of ‘sleep when the baby sleeps’ never applied to me,” Albring mentioned.
Some of her associates, although, aren’t so lucky. They worry they can’t afford kids due to climbing prices for day care, groceries, and housing, she mentioned.
Delivering on ‘Baby Bonuses’?
The Trump administration, in the meantime, has superior one other coverage aimed toward giving kids a future monetary enhance.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act establishes a tax-advantaged “Trump account” seeded with $1,000 in federal funds — typically known as a “baby bonus” — on behalf of each eligible American youngster. The preliminary deposits are scheduled to begin in 2026 with the federal authorities routinely opening an account for youngsters born after Dec. 31, 2024, and earlier than Jan. 1, 2029.
Parents might contribute as much as $5,000 a yr initially to the account, with employers capable of yearly contribute up to $2,500 of that quantity. The accounts reportedly could be automobiles for long-term financial savings. Details are nonetheless being ironed out, however funds couldn’t be withdrawn earlier than the kid turns 18. After that, the accounts would doubtless turn into conventional IRAs.
On Tuesday, billionaires Michael and Susan Dell of Dell laptop fame mentioned they’d give $250 to 25 million kids age 10 and below within the U.S. The donations can be aimed toward encouraging participation within the Trump accounts.
Pronatalism extends to different elements of the federal authorities, too.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has nine children, instructed his division to prioritize federal funds for communities with high marriage and birth rates, although it has not but introduced any tasks instantly associated to the initiative. For a time, the administration thought of bestowing national medals on moms with six or extra kids.
Except there’s one hitch: Data suggests the insurance policies and applications the Trump administration has proposed received’t essentially work.
Other nations have provided extra sturdy applications to encourage childbearing and ease parenting however haven’t seen their start charges go up, famous Michael Geruso, an economist for the University of Texas-Austin who hopes to see the worldwide inhabitants enhance. Israel, for instance, has provided free IVF remedy for roughly three many years, but its start charges have stayed statistically stagnant, at just below three kids for each lady, he mentioned.
France and Sweden have intensive social safety-net applications to help households, together with paid day without work and paid paternity and maternity depart, and sponsored youngster care and well being care, however their fertility charges are additionally falling, mentioned Peggy O’Donnell Heffington, a University of Chicago assistant senior educational professor within the historical past division who wrote a ebook on non-motherhood.
“Nobody yet knows how to avoid depopulation,” Geruso mentioned.
Some level to a special answer to reverse the United States’ declining inhabitants: boost immigration to make sure a youthful labor drive and stronger tax base. The Trump administration, nonetheless, is doing the other — revoking visas and creating an surroundings by which immigrants who’re within the U.S. legally really feel more and more uncomfortable due to heavy-handed insurance policies, analysts say.
The nation’s immigrant population this yr fell for the first time for the reason that Nineteen Sixties, in accordance with a Pew Research Center evaluation.
Meanwhile, to critics of the administration, the deal with encouraging childbirth permits the Trump administration and Republicans to sound as in the event that they help households.
“You’re not seeing policies that support families with children,” mentioned Amy Matsui, vice chairman of revenue safety and youngster care on the National Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit centered on gender rights. “It’s a white, heterosexual, fundamentalist Christian, two-parent marriage that’s being held up.”