The New York Times recently reported on a range of policy suggestions from pronatalist and right-wing conservative groups interested in increasing the U.S. birth rate. Policies suggested ranged from cash via a baby bonus of $5,000, to tax incentives for married women who give birth, to non-cash incentives such as Fulbright scholarships for married applicants with children and a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who birth more than six children. Some of the proposals included medical interventions such as affordable and accessible invitro fertilization—but without any access to comprehensive reproductive care. At the same time, pronatalists are also encouraging the Trump administration to include teaching religious-based unscientific methods of tracking fertility cycles as part of sex education in public schools—a move that would likely increase the teen pregnancy rate.
Instead of focusing federal policy on procreation, we should be focusing on family-sustaining policies that create meaningful change in people’s lives, no matter what that family looks like.
The pronatalist focus solely on birthing ignores that women are more than vessels for carrying babies, or that babies exist in families and society beyond birth. Further, it assumes that decision-making about childbearing is done for prestige (Fulbrights and medals) or one-time financial incentives that do not even cover typical expenses for the baby’s birth and first few weeks of being. All of these policy ideas also presume that all families are similar, instead of recognizing that families always have taken different shapes. These ideas also ignore long-standing inequities in health and wealth that drive decision-making about family size and reproduction. Families come in all different configurations, religions, beliefs, norms, and relationships; yet the policies suggested to the Trump administration seem intended to replicate only one form of family: a church-going stay at home mother, a breadwinning father, and a family conforming to outdated gender roles.
Instead of focusing federal policy on procreation, we should be focusing on family-sustaining policies that create meaningful change in people’s lives, no matter what that family looks like.
Being Pro-Birth Is Not Pro-Women or Pro-Family
At the core of these pronatalist ideas is a belief that women’s value to society is to have children and to stick to the unpaid labor of caring for children, elders, and the home.
Women already provide the majority of unpaid family care, whether to children or adults. Mothers spend more time on child care than fathers, and women spend more time caring for household and nonhousehold members than men, even when employed full-time. Nearly 22 million women provide unpaid elder care to loved ones, and more than one-in-five do so while also parenting a child at home.
Rather than being pro-women, this reliance on unpaid care undervalues women’s contributions to society, reduces their earning potential, keeps women economically insecure, and even threatens their health. This also limits the role of fathers to the sidelines, instead of creating family caregiving structures that enable each person to meet their own potential, regardless of gender. Building policy around this narrow view undermines efforts to ensure that all families have the security and resources they need to raise children.
While the United States still has some of the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world—particularly for Black women—the Trump administration is making it even harder to have a healthy pregnancy in America.
All this unpaid care that women provide means that many women have less time for their own care, education, paid work, and leisure. They experience more stress and stress-related illnesses as a result. Not only are women bearing the brunt of caregiving, they also risk their lives and health when giving birth. While the United States still has some of the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world—particularly for Black women—the Trump administration is making it even harder to have a healthy pregnancy in America. Current threats to Medicaid will have a dramatic impact on women’s health, and most certainly to births, as it covers 40 percent of births in this nation.
The increasing focus on women as childbearers is particularly troubling at a time when the landscape of reproductive health care is rapidly changing. Women’s fear for their own health and their lack of freedom to make their own reproductive decisions is having a chilling effect on women’s willingness to get pregnant. Similarly, maternity care providers are leaving states with abortion bans, worsening the already poor access to medical care in some areas of the country. Attacks on women’s reproductive health, including banning abortion, makes pregnancies less safe. In fact, recent research shows that women are twice as likely to die in pregnancy if they live in a state with an abortion ban.
Further, the Pew Research Center shows that people of reproductive age are thinking twice about having children because they are concerned about the future of the world, the future of the environment, and the future of the economy. Destabilizing the economy has historically led to concerns about the cost of having children, leading to a decline in birth rates.
Focusing on giving mothers a birthing bonus, a medal, or a scholarship isn’t a pro-family policy agenda. Families need financial security, both at the time of birth of a child and ongoing. The cost of raising a child in the United States is hundreds of thousands of dollars. The average financial loss to a woman due to providing caregiving over her lifetime rather than working is also hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cost of child care alone can be 16 percent of a family budget, per child. With the rising cost of living, the cost of parenthood is simply unbearable for many.
There’s Already a Pro-Family Agenda
None of the ideas in the New York Times article actually considered the quality of life for mothers and their families. The good news is, a multitude of policy proposals exist that would take into account the diverse needs of women and families that would increase their health and well-being—and would be more conducive to having children along the way. These policies also recognize that families are not all carbon copies, but rather can consist of households that are multi-generational, single person-headed, adoptive, same-sex, or families in which primary caregivers are not women. Policies such as raising the federal minimum wage, paid leave for all, sick leave, paid time off, pregnant worker protections, and child care for all would have the impact of not just increasing birth rates, but increasing the number of healthy, safe, well-cared-for children and thriving families in the United States.
Foundational to this pro-family agenda are policies that promote economic security. While a $5,000 baby bonus is a nice idea, people need more than that to feel economically secure when deciding to have a child, not to mention throughout the child’s life. That means that parents will need to be earning a family-sustaining wage, with benefits, in a stable economy. To do so, requires a multi-pronged approach. To begin, the federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009. The Raise the Wage Act calls for raising the minimum to $17 by 2028, while also gradually raising and eliminating the subminimum wage for tipped workers, workers with disabilities, and youth workers.
Furthermore, parents—both mothers and fathers—that decide to have children need policies that ensure they have the flexibility to address prenatal and postnatal care, health insurance to cover that care, and a supportive work environment that accommodates their parenting needs. Currently, eighteen states and the District of Columbia require most employers to provide paid sick time, for shorter-term needs, like prenatal health care visits. Additionally, thirteen states and the District of Columbia have passed paid family and medical leave policies that enable people to seek care without worrying about losing all of their income. These policies also ensure workers can take time to parent or care for an ill child (or other loved one) when needed. For most families, this means a few weeks of paid leave when a child joins their family. For families experiencing a medical crisis, either in labor and delivery, or after the child is born, it can provide a reprieve from financial demands.
Workers also need policies that ensure they have time to rest—including paid time off to vacation with their families, explore ideas, and reinvigorate their energy. While these ideas may seem innovative in the United States, they are standard in other industrialized nations. Members of Congress have introduced bills to ensure that the same access to paid family and medical leave and paid sick time is available to all workers in the United States, such as the FAMILY Act and Healthy Families Act, as well as legislation to ensure that all workers would have some paid time off, such as the PTO Act.
Workers do currently have some federal protections to accommodate needs when they return to work. In 2022, Congress passed, with bipartisan support, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA). This act, which requires that pregnant workers receive reasonable accommodations at work (such as bathroom breaks and drinking water) is enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Yet, in President Trump’s first week in office, he fired EEOC commissioners Charlotte Burrows and Jocelyn Samuels. Meanwhile, the current acting chair has closed EEOC field offices while also halting investigations and pending lawsuits for transgender workers, ensuring that protections for all who are pregnant will not be enforced equally. Proper and equitable enforcement of PWFA is critical to the safety of pregnant workers.
Another very important policy in the pro-family agenda is one that would make child care accessible and affordable to all. While some progress has been made toward this goal at the state level, it has been in fits and starts. Until this policy goal is met, women will continue to exit the workforce, stifling or ending their careers and limiting household earnings. Congress’s lack of swift action in this area gets at the heart of the matter: too often, policy makers still make decisions based on the ideal worker who is not a parent and prioritizes work over all else.
Transformative public investment in child care is essential to ensure that everyone who needs care can find, choose, and afford the child care that meets their families’ needs. In the short-term, legislation such as the Building Child Care for a Better Future Act, is a strong step toward lowering costs for families while increasing the pipeline of child care providers. In the long term, child care and paid family and medical leave need robust public investments in order to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to grow their families as they see fit.
Looking Ahead
The conservative pronatalist agenda relegates women to the role of only being procreators and family caregivers. It does not recognize the value of women living full lives, with full personal agency to do so, nor does it recognize the ongoing wellbeing of children and families.
What makes this pronatalist agenda particularly scary is that it has a sympathetic ear in the Trump administration.
What makes this pronatalist agenda particularly scary is that it has a sympathetic ear in the Trump administration. Both Elon Musk and JD Vance extol the virtues of pronatalism. JD Vance famously quipped that women without children are “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,” reinforcing long held stereotypes about women without children being unhappy and useless. Trump himself has gone so far as to proclaim himself the “fertilization president.” Yet, rather than pursuing a pro-family agenda that would ensure that parents have more resources to undertake raising a family, the current administration is not only designing policy that relegates women to the sidelines, but also proposing a budget that includes “draconian cuts” to child care and early learning, housing assistance, health care, community development, and other parts of the social safety net.
If increasing the birth rate is critical to economic growth, the country will be much better served if policies improve everyone’s quality of life. Women don’t need gimmicks like photo op moments and gold stars. They need policies that reflect diverse family structures, and recognize the importance of a woman’s autonomy in decision-making about health, well-being, education, and career. And they need solid policies that ensure they can afford their lives, have time to enjoy being parents, feel safe, secure, and supported at work, and have hope for their future.
Tags: family policy, working families, care economy, mothers
Mothers Want Pro-Family Policies, Not Coercive Incentives to Give Birth
The New York Times recently reported on a range of policy suggestions from pronatalist and right-wing conservative groups interested in increasing the U.S. birth rate. Policies suggested ranged from cash via a baby bonus of $5,000, to tax incentives for married women who give birth, to non-cash incentives such as Fulbright scholarships for married applicants with children and a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who birth more than six children. Some of the proposals included medical interventions such as affordable and accessible invitro fertilization—but without any access to comprehensive reproductive care. At the same time, pronatalists are also encouraging the Trump administration to include teaching religious-based unscientific methods of tracking fertility cycles as part of sex education in public schools—a move that would likely increase the teen pregnancy rate.
The pronatalist focus solely on birthing ignores that women are more than vessels for carrying babies, or that babies exist in families and society beyond birth. Further, it assumes that decision-making about childbearing is done for prestige (Fulbrights and medals) or one-time financial incentives that do not even cover typical expenses for the baby’s birth and first few weeks of being. All of these policy ideas also presume that all families are similar, instead of recognizing that families always have taken different shapes. These ideas also ignore long-standing inequities in health and wealth that drive decision-making about family size and reproduction. Families come in all different configurations, religions, beliefs, norms, and relationships; yet the policies suggested to the Trump administration seem intended to replicate only one form of family: a church-going stay at home mother, a breadwinning father, and a family conforming to outdated gender roles.
Instead of focusing federal policy on procreation, we should be focusing on family-sustaining policies that create meaningful change in people’s lives, no matter what that family looks like.
Being Pro-Birth Is Not Pro-Women or Pro-Family
At the core of these pronatalist ideas is a belief that women’s value to society is to have children and to stick to the unpaid labor of caring for children, elders, and the home.
Women already provide the majority of unpaid family care, whether to children or adults. Mothers spend more time on child care than fathers, and women spend more time caring for household and nonhousehold members than men, even when employed full-time. Nearly 22 million women provide unpaid elder care to loved ones, and more than one-in-five do so while also parenting a child at home.
Rather than being pro-women, this reliance on unpaid care undervalues women’s contributions to society, reduces their earning potential, keeps women economically insecure, and even threatens their health. This also limits the role of fathers to the sidelines, instead of creating family caregiving structures that enable each person to meet their own potential, regardless of gender. Building policy around this narrow view undermines efforts to ensure that all families have the security and resources they need to raise children.
All this unpaid care that women provide means that many women have less time for their own care, education, paid work, and leisure. They experience more stress and stress-related illnesses as a result. Not only are women bearing the brunt of caregiving, they also risk their lives and health when giving birth. While the United States still has some of the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world—particularly for Black women—the Trump administration is making it even harder to have a healthy pregnancy in America. Current threats to Medicaid will have a dramatic impact on women’s health, and most certainly to births, as it covers 40 percent of births in this nation.
The increasing focus on women as childbearers is particularly troubling at a time when the landscape of reproductive health care is rapidly changing. Women’s fear for their own health and their lack of freedom to make their own reproductive decisions is having a chilling effect on women’s willingness to get pregnant. Similarly, maternity care providers are leaving states with abortion bans, worsening the already poor access to medical care in some areas of the country. Attacks on women’s reproductive health, including banning abortion, makes pregnancies less safe. In fact, recent research shows that women are twice as likely to die in pregnancy if they live in a state with an abortion ban.
Further, the Pew Research Center shows that people of reproductive age are thinking twice about having children because they are concerned about the future of the world, the future of the environment, and the future of the economy. Destabilizing the economy has historically led to concerns about the cost of having children, leading to a decline in birth rates.
Focusing on giving mothers a birthing bonus, a medal, or a scholarship isn’t a pro-family policy agenda. Families need financial security, both at the time of birth of a child and ongoing. The cost of raising a child in the United States is hundreds of thousands of dollars. The average financial loss to a woman due to providing caregiving over her lifetime rather than working is also hundreds of thousands of dollars. The cost of child care alone can be 16 percent of a family budget, per child. With the rising cost of living, the cost of parenthood is simply unbearable for many.
There’s Already a Pro-Family Agenda
None of the ideas in the New York Times article actually considered the quality of life for mothers and their families. The good news is, a multitude of policy proposals exist that would take into account the diverse needs of women and families that would increase their health and well-being—and would be more conducive to having children along the way. These policies also recognize that families are not all carbon copies, but rather can consist of households that are multi-generational, single person-headed, adoptive, same-sex, or families in which primary caregivers are not women. Policies such as raising the federal minimum wage, paid leave for all, sick leave, paid time off, pregnant worker protections, and child care for all would have the impact of not just increasing birth rates, but increasing the number of healthy, safe, well-cared-for children and thriving families in the United States.
Foundational to this pro-family agenda are policies that promote economic security. While a $5,000 baby bonus is a nice idea, people need more than that to feel economically secure when deciding to have a child, not to mention throughout the child’s life. That means that parents will need to be earning a family-sustaining wage, with benefits, in a stable economy. To do so, requires a multi-pronged approach. To begin, the federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009. The Raise the Wage Act calls for raising the minimum to $17 by 2028, while also gradually raising and eliminating the subminimum wage for tipped workers, workers with disabilities, and youth workers.
Furthermore, parents—both mothers and fathers—that decide to have children need policies that ensure they have the flexibility to address prenatal and postnatal care, health insurance to cover that care, and a supportive work environment that accommodates their parenting needs. Currently, eighteen states and the District of Columbia require most employers to provide paid sick time, for shorter-term needs, like prenatal health care visits. Additionally, thirteen states and the District of Columbia have passed paid family and medical leave policies that enable people to seek care without worrying about losing all of their income. These policies also ensure workers can take time to parent or care for an ill child (or other loved one) when needed. For most families, this means a few weeks of paid leave when a child joins their family. For families experiencing a medical crisis, either in labor and delivery, or after the child is born, it can provide a reprieve from financial demands.
Workers also need policies that ensure they have time to rest—including paid time off to vacation with their families, explore ideas, and reinvigorate their energy. While these ideas may seem innovative in the United States, they are standard in other industrialized nations. Members of Congress have introduced bills to ensure that the same access to paid family and medical leave and paid sick time is available to all workers in the United States, such as the FAMILY Act and Healthy Families Act, as well as legislation to ensure that all workers would have some paid time off, such as the PTO Act.
Workers do currently have some federal protections to accommodate needs when they return to work. In 2022, Congress passed, with bipartisan support, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA). This act, which requires that pregnant workers receive reasonable accommodations at work (such as bathroom breaks and drinking water) is enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Yet, in President Trump’s first week in office, he fired EEOC commissioners Charlotte Burrows and Jocelyn Samuels. Meanwhile, the current acting chair has closed EEOC field offices while also halting investigations and pending lawsuits for transgender workers, ensuring that protections for all who are pregnant will not be enforced equally. Proper and equitable enforcement of PWFA is critical to the safety of pregnant workers.
Another very important policy in the pro-family agenda is one that would make child care accessible and affordable to all. While some progress has been made toward this goal at the state level, it has been in fits and starts. Until this policy goal is met, women will continue to exit the workforce, stifling or ending their careers and limiting household earnings. Congress’s lack of swift action in this area gets at the heart of the matter: too often, policy makers still make decisions based on the ideal worker who is not a parent and prioritizes work over all else.
Transformative public investment in child care is essential to ensure that everyone who needs care can find, choose, and afford the child care that meets their families’ needs. In the short-term, legislation such as the Building Child Care for a Better Future Act, is a strong step toward lowering costs for families while increasing the pipeline of child care providers. In the long term, child care and paid family and medical leave need robust public investments in order to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to grow their families as they see fit.
Looking Ahead
The conservative pronatalist agenda relegates women to the role of only being procreators and family caregivers. It does not recognize the value of women living full lives, with full personal agency to do so, nor does it recognize the ongoing wellbeing of children and families.
What makes this pronatalist agenda particularly scary is that it has a sympathetic ear in the Trump administration. Both Elon Musk and JD Vance extol the virtues of pronatalism. JD Vance famously quipped that women without children are “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,” reinforcing long held stereotypes about women without children being unhappy and useless. Trump himself has gone so far as to proclaim himself the “fertilization president.” Yet, rather than pursuing a pro-family agenda that would ensure that parents have more resources to undertake raising a family, the current administration is not only designing policy that relegates women to the sidelines, but also proposing a budget that includes “draconian cuts” to child care and early learning, housing assistance, health care, community development, and other parts of the social safety net.
If increasing the birth rate is critical to economic growth, the country will be much better served if policies improve everyone’s quality of life. Women don’t need gimmicks like photo op moments and gold stars. They need policies that reflect diverse family structures, and recognize the importance of a woman’s autonomy in decision-making about health, well-being, education, and career. And they need solid policies that ensure they can afford their lives, have time to enjoy being parents, feel safe, secure, and supported at work, and have hope for their future.
Tags: family policy, working families, care economy, mothers