Line Up for Your Government Issued Baby
Comes with (1) Fulbright Scholarship
Last week, the New York Times reported on an upcoming push from the White House to encourage Americans to have more babies. Proposals to facilitate this included reserving 30% of Fulbright scholarships to applicants who are married with children, government funding for programs that educate women about their fertility and menstrual cycles, and a $5,000 ‘baby bonus’ issued to new moms in the months after giving birth. Other contributions to this effort include a commitment from President Trump to lowering the cost of IVF and proposed tax credits for married couples with children.
Well gee, Mr. Trump, sign me right up!
Astute observers might note that the tax credits for having children and the proposed ‘baby bonus’ sound suspiciously like the expanded Child Tax Credit from the American Rescue Plan that Republicans let lapse in 2021. They might also note that it is conservative judges that have imperiled IVF treatments in the first place. Furthermore, the idea that there is anyone in this regime capable or qualified to provide any scientifically sound information on fertility, menstrual cycles, and reproductive health is beyond laughable.
But no you’re right, I want a Fulbright scholarship so badly I’m going to change my entire life to get married and have a baby so that I can get it. Sold.
And I would have to change my entire life. No part of the White House’s proposals to increase the birth rate involve better maternal health care, universal child care or paid family leave. I wouldn’t be able to raise a child in the tiny two bedroom apartment I share with my sister, nor could I afford to live near my parents. There’s a housing crisis nationwide so who knows where I’d end up and what my in-person support system would look like. The maternal mortality rate in the United States is much higher than in other wealthy nations, and while I’m a white woman whose privilege would afford her better chances, the state of our maternal health care is deeply disconcerting. Meanwhile scientists are predicting that the measles could make such a comeback that it becomes endemic in the United States, gun violence remains largely unchecked, and the climate crisis promises more and more extreme weather leading to more disruption and displacement.
It’s not just that the Trump regime is preventing us from addressing any of these issues, it’s that they are actively making them worse. They have defunded programs that study reproductive health, and actively encouraged people to avoid vaccines. The Trump tariffs promise to make just about every part of our lives more expensive, and because they plan to defund programs like SNAP and Medicaid, access to food and health care will make the lives of so many babies born under this regime worse. And since the Trump cabal recently deported a 2-year-old American citizen and seems content to keep kidnapping people and sending them to a foreign torture prison without due process, the Trump regime seems determined to make us less safe too.
But it should surprise no one that the Trump regime has not considered any policies that might make the lives of parents and children easier, healthier, or safer. Nor should it surprise anyone that the policies the Trump regime actually has put forth are designed to make our lives harder and more constrained. Because the point was never about the quality of the lives children and their parents lead, nor about safety and freedom. The point is and always has been about control.
There has been a spate of articles since Trump’s inauguration that call out the grip that the pronatalist movement has on this White House, but while the philosophy is more overt in this White House than in the previous Trump term, it is important to acknowledge that the fundamental goals of this movement have been there since the beginning.
Pronatalism, or the idea that we need to increase the birth rate as a matter of survival, has different factions like all philosophies, ranging from the more technical to the cultural, but it’s not hard to identify the strain that has infected this White House - a fundamentally racist modern eugenics movement committed to strict gender roles that demand subservient women support powerful men in patriarchal nuclear family structures.
Concerns about declining birth rates cannot be detangled from the fact that birth rates are actually not declining world wide, but are in fact increasing in many African countries. Nor can they be detangled from the pervasive view among Silicon Valley moguls that they have a responsibility to ensure they “pass on their genius”, and that many design embryos in an attempt to optimize children for specific qualities. Furthermore, the expressed reason for fears of a declining birth rate - labor shortages, and no one to take care of older generations - are easily solved by immigration which Trump and his cronies seem hellbent on stopping. The goal is not to increase the birth rate - it’s to increase the birth rate for a specific kind of people to create a specific kind of society.
And as the Trump administration tries to force trans people all over the world back into the closet, to erase them from public life; as Republicans attempt to pass legislation like the SAVE Act that would make it harder for people, and particularly women, to vote; as DOGE fires people responsible for ensuring access to social security, special education, file taxes, and care for the elderly among many other programs the effect is to increase the burden on women, and codify the traditional gender roles that force a disproportionate burden of household labor onto the shoulders of women.
The entire Trump brand is built upon a foundational nostalgia for an imagined past, a desire to Make America Great Again by returning to a mythical age where men were men and women were women, each with their own specific roles and spheres of influence. Even the call to bring manufacturing back to America comes from this desire for the days of yore when men could work in the factory and earn enough money to keep their wives and children in the home. And so much of Trump’s current economic policies seem designed to constrain the economy enough to force women back into the home where lack of abortion care and financial independence push them into having more children.
The MAGA pronatalist movement does not want to create the conditions that will allow or even encourage people to choose to have children, nor do they plan to enact any policies that will support children and their families and help them thrive. Instead, the MAGA crowd wants to create a world where there is nothing for women to do besides have children, where families look exactly as the MAGA world wants them to, and function just as the MAGA world wants them to. Time and time again this regime reveals that their only goal is to empower and enrich themselves, to create a world that is not only subservient to them but that justifies its own subservience. Their plans to “increase the birth rate” are just that same old regressive, restrictive, oppressive agenda dressed up in the guise of the future.
How to Help Democracy This Week
Set up a monthly donation for an abortion fund. You can find one near you here.
Support news outlets like The 19th, a nonprofit and independent newsroom focusing on gender, policy, and politics. You can follow them on Instagram and other social media platforms, subscribe to their list, and even donate.
Support the parents and babies in your life! Ask them how you can help. Offer to take the kids for an hour, or let them take the kids out while you clean and stock their fridge. If you are a parent, I’m sending you lots of love and good vibes and if you have my phone number please feel free to text with whatever you need.
Check out the Congressional Dad’s Caucus.
Check out Paid Leave for All.
I hadn't seen the Fulbright part of their brilliant idea until now. Just what every parent of young children wants - the opportunity to uproot their family for a year overseas!