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BABIES. LOTS OF BABIES. As soon as possible.
That’s the goal of the intellectual and political movement that’s come to be known as “pronatalism.” And it has the attention of the White House, according to a report last week in the New York Times, which said the Trump administration has been fielding suggestions from some of this movement’s thinkers on how to reverse America’s declining fertility rate.
The impetus for this is a concern that, as a society, we are not replenishing our ranks quickly enough—that with people living longer and needing more care and support, the number of younger workers who can supply that care and support is diminishing in relative terms.
The concern has a solid empirical grounding. Experts say that a society’s total fertility rate (defined as the average number of births per woman) needs to be above 2.0, more or less at 2.1, in order for a society to maintain its population level, assuming no outside influx of migration.
The U.S. fertility rate was above that threshold until the early 1970s, when it dipped below for about ten years, then rebounded before falling again. Today it sits at around 1.6, the lowest U.S. officials have ever documented.
This isn’t just an American phenomenon. Far from it. The United States was actually something of an outlier for maintaining a high fertility rate for as long as it did. In many economically advanced countries the rate fell earlier or reached lower levels. Among the best-known, most-discussed examples is South Korea, which hit 0.72 before ticking up slightly last year and where the threat of depopulation prompted leaders to declare a national emergency.
Demographically speaking, there were a few reasons the United States held onto a higher fertility rate for as long as it did—among them, the high rates of fertility among some migrant groups, especially Hispanics, and a high rate of religiosity relative to peer countries. But now even those factors don’t seem to be enough to keep the U.S. above the replacement level line.
How (if at all) to respond to America’s falling fertility rate is a complex question, the kind you would ideally want to leave in the hands of policymakers capable of holding complex discussions about policy.
Does that sound like the Trump administration to you?
Right, not to me either. And that’s really too bad.
An intelligent, open-minded conversation about declining fertility rates could reveal some common ground among some normally divided political leaders, and maybe even lead to some helpful legislation as well. Instead, we seem headed toward a conversation that rules out some of the most promising policy responses, while reinforcing retrograde—and in some cases downright creepy—attitudes about gender.
Not only would that fail to make the situation better, it could actually make things worse.
ANY CONVERSATION AROUND FERTILITY RATES WOULD IDEALLY begin by acknowledging some uncertainty and showing a little humility. It wasn’t that long ago that the big topic of discussion was the perceived dangers of overpopulation. The fertility rate was thought to be dangerously high, prompting worries about a future in which too many humans put too great a strain on the planet and its resources.
Plenty of people still make versions of that argument. And you don’t have to agree with them to recognize the unpredictability of our demographic future, especially insofar as the grim economic predictions may not account for factors like the possibility that artificial intelligence will revolutionize the workforce and productivity.
But whatever its implications, the declining fertility rate may be a sign of another problem in American society—namely, a failure to create an environment in which Americans can have the number of kids they want. The best evidence of this problem is in survey data, which consistently shows that most Americans would like at least two children, as they did before.
“I don’t worry about fertility as in, ‘We have got to fix fertility,’” Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan economist and former Obama administration official, told me. “I worry that American families are not thriving, and one symptom of that is we can see them having fewer children.”
So what changed? Here’s where the story gets more complicated and ambiguous, and depends a bit on who you ask.
Historically changes in fertility rates correlated with economic, demographic, and scientific shifts: families leaving farms where they needed kids to tend the fields, sanitation and vaccines enabling more people to survive childhood, and so on. More recently, by most reckonings, the big driver has been the new opportunities for women to work outside the home.
That still-ongoing change has provided the potential to get more than a paycheck. It’s also a chance at a different kind of fulfillment for those who want it. But women still shoulder a disproportionate, if slowly declining share of childrearing even as they’ve taken on wage-earning work. And that’s forced more difficult choices about parenting versus work.
“Most women and men today would, ideally, like to have both a fulfilling career and a family,” Matthias Doepke, an economist with positions at Northwestern University and the London School of Economics, told me over email. “Achieving these aspirations is difficult especially for women . . . because of lack of availability of childcare, career expectations that are not family compatible, and social norms in the home and in the workplace that still expect mothers to do most of the childcare, as was the norm in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Doepke was careful to say he was summarizing the “gist” of the latest research and that it was “not a super straightforward issue.” It can be difficult to figure out the precise mechanisms of how these forces interact, and to understand a transformation that’s still unfolding in real time.
To take one example, data shows birth rates for the youngest cohorts have fallen shortly. But that’s at least partly because of a (generally celebrated) decline in unplanned pregnancies among women under 25. Some of those women may be postponing children until they are in stable relationships, at which point the more nurturing, financially secure environment may lead them to have more children rather than fewer.
“I think the jury is really out,” Stevenson said.
And that’s to say nothing of a whole other set of forces that may be at play, and difficult to measure empirically. Many analysts have spotted what they consider a modern bias against families with children.
It can show up as a cultural message on TV or in literature that parenting is less fulfilling than professional accomplishments. (This has come to be known as “workism.”) It can also show up in policy choices that influence people’s decisions, ranging from the subtle (e.g., car-seat requirements that force families with more than two young children to upgrade to larger vehicles) to the obvious (e.g., a tax structure that for some couples in some income situations works out to a “marriage penalty”).
ANALYSTS WHO FOCUS ON THE PRESSURE mothers face tend to favor policy initiatives that reduce the pressure to juggle parenting and work, and to reduce the costs associated with raising kids more generally. In practice, that can mean the government providing or financing paid leave and childcare, and eldercare too (a responsibility that also tends to fall disproportionately on women). It can also mean direct provision of cash.
“If you look broadly you see things like birth rates are highest in countries that provide a lot of support for childcare and for families, and they’re lowest in countries where there’s a lot of public pressure to have kids but there’s not a lot of support for work and kids,” Stevenson said.
The catch is that these remedies cost a lot of money. The legislative package that former President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress tried to pass in 2021, under what they were calling “Build Back Better,” would have required hundreds of billions of dollars in new federal spending. And that was despite financing gimmicks to hold down the price tag.
That’s one reason these sorts of initiatives haven’t gotten a ton of support on the right. Another reason is that, depending on their design, these initiatives can include regulations and stipulations (like credential requirements for caregivers) that many conservatives oppose. Put those reasons together and you can see why this type of legislation would stand no chance in the current political environment.
But you can imagine a world where left and right came to agreement on some more modest initiatives, in part because it’s happened recently. In 2018 and again in 2020, Democrats and Republicans in Congress worked together to boost spending on the primary federal program that subsidizes childcare for low-income working parents.
A number of conservative Republicans—including, as a senator, Vice President JD Vance—have proposed providing cash subsidies to families that have children. He calls it a “baby bonus” and it’s the kind of idea that in principle could find significant support among Democrats, given their own history of proposing financial support for children.
But even these more limited initiatives would require getting commitments to increase federal spending significantly. And that doesn’t seem to be the Trump administration’s inclination right now. If anything, the administration’s actions have demonstrated an opposition to spending on the low-income families where parents need the most help with basic expenses.
A leaked version of a near-final budget proposal from the administration envisioned massive cuts to services for families and children—including, for example, the complete elimination of Head Start, a program that provides childcare and preschool to several million young children. And among the medical research projects that the Trump administration has axed in the name of combating DEI are studies examining the unusually high rates of maternal mortality among black Americans.
Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, are eyeing hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income Americans that pays for about 40 percent of American births. Republicans have said (and Trump has pledged) they will protect the “truly vulnerable,” so that cuts will only touch “waste, fraud, and abuse.” There are good reasons to treat that pledge skeptically.
If even a scaled-back version of such cuts go through, it won’t matter whether Vance prevails on a baby bonus. The net effect for families with children will be less support—probably a lot less.
A FASCINATING PAPER on the subject of fertility rates came out a few months ago. It’s from Claudia Goldin, a Harvard professor whose research on women and labor markets won her the 2023 Nobel Prize in economics. In order to understand what’s driving changes in fertility rates, she compared countries like South Korea where it has fallen more dramatically than in countries like France.
Relatively generous, government-financed parental leave and childcare were part of the explanation, she found. But the effects were modest and uncertain, with culture possibly playing a bigger factor.
For a variety of reasons including the timing of economic development and country-specific religious attitudes, Goldin found, women in countries like France got access to the workplace—and economic independence—earlier and more gradually. Evidently men in those societies also adjusted, taking on more responsibility as parents and, more generally, aligned their expectations about work and family more closely with their partners.
In countries like South Korea, by contrast, the change in opportunities for women came later and was more sudden—and men didn’t make the same adjustments. That created mismatches of expectations, which in practical terms meant men weren’t as willing to take on parenting and housework, or to see women as equal partners. That left women a lot less interested in having children, or even pairing up at all.
“When nations develop continuously and across a longer time frame, less generational conflict arises and the fertility desires of men and women are more similar,” Goldin wrote. “Household and caring tasks are more evenly divided, and fertility rates are, in consequence, higher.”
The changing fortunes and attitudes of men nowadays is a whole separate discussion, with its own complications. But putting that aside, Goldin’s research suggests that one way to boost fertility could be to promote a type of masculinity that looks more like France’s than South Korea’s.
And to say that doesn’t sound like Trump, well, that would be quite the understatement.
Trump once described his feelings about fatherhood as “I’ll supply funds, and she’ll take care of the kid.” He’s also boasted of never changing a diaper, saying men who do “act like the wife.”
He did select as a vice president Vance, who in some respects presents as a more modern archetype—a husband to an accomplished attorney, a father who (based on public appearances) seems engaged with his kids. But this is the same Vance who has derided women without kids as “childless cat ladies” and called no-fault divorce laws—a legal reform instrumental in giving women more independence—“one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace.”
Vance has also cited as an inspiration the policies of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán, whose push to reward large families (including a full waiving of taxes for families with at least four children) is not just about encouraging births, it’s also about encouraging a certain kind of births. “We do not need numbers,” Orbán said in a 2019 speech, “but Hungarian children.”
Elon Musk is famously obsessed with falling fertility, which he says is a threat to modern civilization and which he is apparently determined to fight with his own sperm. He has fathered at least fourteen children, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal in which some of the tycoon’s acquaintances described his goal as “helping seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence.”
And then there is the universe of right-wing figures who are engaged in their own version of Musk’s birthing campaign, or who talk openly of rolling back the sexual revolution and choices for women that came with it. You can read about some of these people here, here, here, here, and here.
Putting aside the Handmaid’s Tale vibe of it all, this sort of rhetoric and behavior doesn’t look like an especially effective way to avoid the South Korea scenario, as Michelle Goldberg suggested in the New York Times and my colleague Mona Charen noted here the other day. “If you want to encourage family formation and increase the birth rate,” Mona observed, “you can’t treat women as breeder mares.”
To be clear, the center-right intellectuals who make more nuanced policy arguments don’t talk that way. Some have even called explicitly for Republican leaders to keep the more fringe-y elements of the movement at the fringes.
It’s possible these intellectuals could move the political conversation toward broadly popular efforts that would make life incrementally better for all families with kids—big or small, with or without all parents in the workplace. They might even give the American fertility rate a gentle boost in the process.
But first they would have to be the ones leading the conversation. Right now, they aren’t.
Great Job Jonathan Cohn & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.
