Baby boom push meets skepticism in Republican Party

Yahoo

01-05-2025

Don't count on Republican lawmakers to light the fuse to a new baby boom just yet.
The pronatalist movement may be having a moment as it pitches policies that seek to increase the nation's birth rate — with the latest boost being President Trump saying a $5,000 baby bonus 'sounds like a good idea.'
But after some poking around on the prospects for the pronatalist policies that seem to be gaining steam, I found skepticism from Republican lawmakers on multiple fronts, as well as fractures in the pronatalist movement itself.
Some don't buy into the core premise that fertility rates need a boost to prevent catastrophic economic consequences caused by population collapse. (There were 1.6 births per woman in 2024, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released last week — slightly higher than 2023, but well below the below population replacement level of 2.1 births per woman.)
'With a significant housing shortage and the growing potential for AI to displace jobs, it's difficult to justify aggressive federal incentives aimed at fueling population growth at this point in our nation's trajectory,' one GOP lawmaker told me.
Another Republican lawmaker had not thought deeply about population issues, but was more inclined to support policies to increase legal immigration.
The latest burst in the pronatalism movement came from a article on the Trump administration fielding ways to encourage women to have more children, including the $5,000 baby bonus idea or reserving 30 percent of Fulbright scholarships for those who are married or have children.
But baby bonus incentive programs in other countries have been criticized as largely unsuccessful. Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, estimated that a $5,000 baby bonus would have a small effect on births.
'I would say that would probably increase fertility less than 1% — which doesn't mean it's not worth doing, because families with a new kid could use a windfall,' Stone said, adding that he prefers an increase to the Child Tax Credit (more on that later).
The various policy ideas are the latest example of how the pronatalist movement has been gaining steam in the last few years. The second Natal Con took place in Austin, Texas, in March and included a number of right-wing speakers, including the Trumpworld-connected commentator Jack Prosobiec.
Many of them are encouraged at friendliness to their cause in the Trump administration. Vice President Vance, who famously chastised 'childless cat ladies' (and later expressed regret about that phrasing), has long voiced concern about the nation's birth rate.
Trump adviser Elon Musk, a father of at least 14 children from four different women, is the most prominent and connected voice for spawning a 'legion' of children to combat declining birth rates, as the recently reported.
But Musk's 'harem drama' — as one of the mothers of his children, Ashley St. Clair, put it — not only makes family-values traditionalists squirm, but his focus on pure births has gotten criticism from others interested in boosting the birth rate. Stone and Brad Wilcox wrote in last week that 'no matter how many tutors you hire or compounds you build, evidence suggests children are more likely to struggle if one of their parents is absent.'
Aside from Musk, perhaps the most prominent pronatalists are Simone and Malcolm Collins, parents of four who have invented a religion called Techno-Puritanism 'designed to combat fertility collapse' and have been profiled many, many times. Simone Collins wears 'techno-puritan' clothing that she told NPR was 'intentionally cringe.'
Even for some Republicans who would like to see more babies and larger families, the whole pronatalist push is cringe in a bad way.
'I think the term pronatalist is a little odd,' Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah) told me. 'We should just be talking about being pro-family. There's nothing in my core belief system [that] would suggest that we should just be having babies. You need to have families. You need to have dedicated parents in all these situations.'
'It's not a numbers game. It's a strength in numbers game,' Moore added.
When it comes to policy, the idea related to boosting birth rates that has the most traction among Republicans is adjusting the Child Tax Credit, currently set at $2,000 per qualifying child.
Asked about the pronatalist policies being explored by the Trump administration, Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) pointed to his Family First Act, which would in part expand the Child Tax Credit to $4,200 for kids under 6 and $3,000 for other children, as well as creating a new one-time $2,800 tax credit for pregnant mothers. Moore is leading the legislation in the House.
'Getting married and starting a family are key to the American Dream. But for too many young people, that dream feels out of reach,' Banks said in a statement. 'Congress has a role to play in fixing this and we can start by putting money back in the pockets of hardworking parents.'
But in a party full of deficit hawks, the politics of getting such a proposal through is dicey. Republicans opposed a temporary expansion that Democrats ushered through in 2021.
'The guys that are most likely to prioritize family formation are Republicans, obviously, but they really don't like increasing the Child Tax Credit,' explained Terry Schilling, president of the conservative American Principles Project and father of seven. He is more optimistic about prospects for education reform initiatives that can help families.
Schilling added: 'It's incredibly important that all of the things that we discuss — all the economic incentives around children — are tied to marriage, because we don't want to get into a situation like we did with the Great Society programs, where you create, inadvertently, these loopholes that incentivize fatherless homes.'SCRAMBLE ON TAX CUT CRAFTING: Free-market advocacy groups are consumed with the biggest activity dominating Capitol Hill right now — the partisan tax cut bill that will serve as the vehicle for Trump's ambitious legislative agenda.
Advancing American Freedom, the group founded by former Vice President Pence, is out with a memo warning that 'not all tax cuts are created equal.'
Its ranking: 'Best bang for buck' are individual income tax cuts, corporate tax cuts, capital gains tax cuts, and reinstating full expensing; expanding the Child Tax Credit is 'dubious'; and 'actually harmful' are exempting tips and overtime from taxes (two campaign promises from Trump), as well as increasing the State and Local Tax deduction.
Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity is up with a new ad the Washington, D.C., market calling to eliminate green energy tax credits enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act under President Biden — which the group calls 'Green New Deal giveaways' — as a way to pay for extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cuts signed into law during the first Trump administration. The ad says of the idea: 'It's simple.'
That will be politically difficult, however, given more than a dozen more moderate Republicans have called to preserve the tax credits.
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