What The Hell America!

A once-fringe ideology centered on boosting birthrates has taken center stage in the Trump administration—fueled by eugenics, antifeminism and a disturbing disregard for reproductive freedom.

A month into President Donald Trump’s second term, Sean Duffy, the newly appointed secretary of the Department of Transportation (DOT), issued a memo declaring that “DOT-supported or assisted state contracts shall prioritize projects and goals … that give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” This move by Duffy—who happens to be a father of seven—tying federal transportation spending to birth and marriage rates was characterized as “disturbingly dystopian” by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and “deeply frightening” by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

Duffy’s directive embraces pronatalism—a once-fringe right-wing ideology that has found a comfortable home in the current administration. (Vice President JD Vance, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have around 22 kids between them.) Pronatalists believe that having lots of children is an urgent social project—at least for those living in the United States and Europe—in order to “maintain population levels, support economic growth, and preserve cultural and national identities.” And although not usually mentioned in the same breath, pronatalism fits cozily aside the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant and antiabortion agenda. 

The founder of the annual Natal Conference, Kevin Dolan, explained in a podcast interview that while “some of the debates that I hear about natalism is like, ‘We can’t have natalism, we have too many stupid people in the world’—in my opinion, the only people who are going to respond to our natalism conference [and] conversations are going to be at the higher end of the distribution.” Dolan is making it clear that pronatalist and eugenic positions are not in opposition; they’re very much aligned. 

Tickets for the sold-out conference in Austin last month were $10,000 for the weekend, and as reported in Wired, included matchmaking events with the option of an onsite wedding, “as part of their greater effort to repopulate the world.” 

Unsurprisingly, few women attended the conference—the movement is not necessarily targeted towards supporting gender equality. In fact, pronatalism is “very much aligned” with antifeminism, according to the self-proclaimed “domestic extremist” Peachy Keenan. As she puts it, “Feminism is how the unpopular and undateable cope with life,” and “liberal feminism” is to blame for declining birthrates.

Kicking off her remarks at this year’s conference, Keenan reminisced, “When I spoke at this conference in 2023, I made the case that the easiest way to raise birthrates was to make motherhood great again. For those of you who only speak NPR, that means convincing America’s uterus-havers to remember that they have uteruses—before it’s too late.”

Dismissing Harris voters, whom she characterized as having “Planned Parenthood punch cards and IUDs cemented to their cervix,” she finds hope for the future in “trad undergrads … at a Christian or Catholic College” where “girls haven’t spent four years getting blow job tutorials on the Call Me Daddy podcast, or in body count competitions with their bisexual polycule.” (Emphasis in original.)

Pronatalism Comes Home to Roost in the White House

While these extreme characters live at the center of this pronatalist movement, it’s critical to understand how these ideas have become central for key administration members who can act on them. 

JD Vance

In 2021, then-Senate candidate JD Vance famously railed that the U.S. was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Seeking to dilute the power of the childless, he proposed that “when you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power … than people who don’t have kids”—because, in his mind, Americans without children “don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country.”

When Vance’s offensive diatribe resurfaced on social media during his 2024 bid for the vice presidency, he acknowledged that the phrasing may have been “dumb” but did not back away from his point: that “our country has become almost pathologically anti-child.” 

While Vance may have cleaned up his language a bit—by dropping epithets like “deranged,” “sociopathic” and “pathological” (his previous insults for childfree Americans)—his pro-baby enthusiasm is still going strong. Notably, he took advantage of his first speech as VP to proclaim, “I want more babies in the United States of America”—a message he reiterated shortly thereafter at the 2025 March for Life, an annual antiabortion rally in Washington.

Donald Trump

During his bid for a second term, Trump announced in his speech at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference that he “will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom. How does that sound? I want a baby boom.”  This exhortation was immediately followed by him telling the men in the audience how lucky they were—three separate times. (This is better left unpacked.)

When a crowd gathered at the March 2025 White House event celebrating women’s history—which, as described in The Guardian, “consisted of the sort of women Trump approves of: very white, and very deferential”—Trump dubbed himself the “fertilization president.” This creepy moniker apparently came to him following his announcement that “we’re gonna have tremendous goodies in the bag for women too.” According to The Cut, the “tremendous goodies” is an apparent reference to the “glorified press release” announcing his plans for increasing access to IVF to push for “more babies and expanding American families.”

Elon Musk

Compared to Trump and Vance, Musk most brazenly identifies with the pronatalism movement. According to Emma Waters, a member of the conservative Heritage Foundation, Musk is “a fearless ally and legitimizing force” behind its pro-baby agenda. Giving voice to this commitment, in 2022, he tweeted, “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much greater risk to civilization than global warming.” Echoing Vance’s sentiments, he more recently tweeted, “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness.”

As Waters and others have written, Musk is closely associated with the elite “tech-bro” wing of the pronatalist movement. As she explains, in contrast to “pro-family natalists” who encourage “people to view children as an extension of marriage in which children may be received as a gift,” Silicon Valley natalists “tend to promote, in practice if not in speech, a selective pronatalism: More babies of a certain kind.” (Emphasis in original.) Many of these pronatalist tech bros have poured money into the fertility technology industry to help ensure “their future children are the healthiest, smartest, and best potential children they can be.” 

Antiabortion Extremism and Pronatalism

While not all natalists are against abortion, many—especially the critical administrative trio—are fiercely antiabortion.

An ongoing legal challenge to the FDA’s approved distribution of the abortion drug mifepristone exemplifies this nexus. It also highlights the interests of the state in promoting population growth, which necessarily translates into its interest in controlling women’s reproductive bodies.

In 2024, The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the antiabortion group, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM), lacked standing to sue the FDA over its approval because AHM was not harmed by these actions. A lower court effectively allowed the states of Missouri, Kansas and Idaho to take over the case, based on their claim that “since each abortion represents at least one potential or actual birth” resulting in a potential decline in birth rates, the dispensing of mifepristone has caused “sovereign injuries to [to their] population interests.”

As we have seen, pronatalism is imbued both with eugenical significance and misogynistic assumptions about women’s essential maternal nature and obligations. Therefore, it is deeply troubling to see it invoked by these states to promote antiabortion sentiment. 

Moreover, as Rolanda Donelson powerfully observed in a recent National Partnership for Women & Families blog post, it is problematic to cast abortion as a legally cognizable source of injury when “the truth is that those declines are much more likely caused by the states themselves … and their policy shortcomings.” Thus, “characterizing abortion as a ‘harm’ to the state increases misogyny and refuses to hold states accountable for the failures they have caused by not providing social support to children and families already in existence.” 

This blame-shifting strategy draws attention away from the fact that abortion-restrictive states also “fail to provide social safety net programs that allow children and families to thrive,” which has a disparate impact on marginalized and vulnerable communities. 

Clearly, the pronatalist movement has gone beyond the confines of the once-tiny Natal Conference and has found a true home in the current administration. And we should be chilled by the prospect that federal spending may well be deployed as an instrument to advance the so-called Fertility President’s appeal for a baby boom.