Ellen Coyne: Donald Trump and the right-wing pronatalists want to help women have more babies – is that really such a bad idea?
This was a different kind of trad fest than we're used to. 'NatalCon', which took place in Austin, Texas, in March, was only in its second ever year but it attracted the attention of national and international media.
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The Guardian
5 days ago
- The Guardian
Making America pregnant again: the pro-natalist movement
Why is pro-natalism – the idea that society should focus on producing children – a growing movement in the US? The Guardian US columnist Moira Donegan tells Helen Pidd: 'This is not something that average people in the US are crying out for. People are having the number of children that they desire and think that they can support, right? 'What we have instead is a pro-natalist movement that's getting a lot of attention and perceives themselves to have allies in the new Trump administration, and particularly in the form of Vice-president JD Vance and the world's richest man and presidential adviser, Elon Musk.' The second annual natal conference, or NatalCon, was held in April in Austin, Texas. It brought together the various groups who want there to be more babies in the US – and they were an unusual collective. Doneghan says: 'So you have folks who we might think of as sort of the traditional old-school pronatalists, right? Like traditionalist Catholics who are very invested in a cultural model in which marriage is the sole legitimate expression of sexuality and in which that sexuality is sort of unmediated by any use of birth control or non-reproductive practices. 'But there's also people who have a different approach. So there's a lot of these techno-futurists, who are advancing the use of artificial reproductive technology, including things that are very frowned on by the Catholic church, such as IVF. These are also people who tend to be very into gene editing. Something I think is really important to hammer down about the pro-natalist movement is that they're not just looking for more babies, they're looking for more of what they consider higher-quality babies … which is a judgment that they're making that might have, I think frequently does have, racial connotations.' Support the Guardian today:
Vogue
03-05-2025
- Vogue
The Dark History of the Far Right's Natalism
I had my first child in December; he will also be my only child. I'm going one-and-done with kids for the same reasons many women in the United States are having fewer babies, and later in life. Faced with economic uncertainty, climate change, and vanishing reproductive rights, it feels like a prudent choice. Most importantly, it's what I want. The Trump administration is trying to figure out how to change my mind, and doing a terrible job of it. On April 21, The New York Times published an article about various incentives the White House is kicking around in hopes of reversing the country's historically low birth rate. Among them are a $5,000 'baby bonus'—cash in hand for each infant delivered—and a 'National Medal of Motherhood' bestowed on women with six or more children. The public response to the Times story was fast, and much of it was furious. Social media was flooded with references to The Handmaid's Tale. Bewildered parents wondered who could be convinced to have a baby for $5,000. (A recent study found that it costs nearly $300,000 to raise a child in the United States.) Why not enact policies, such as paid family leave and universal preschool, that would actually ease the burden of parenting? The simple fact is that many of the pronatal voices with Trump's ear either don't care about this burden, or don't see it as a burden at all. Among them are Vice President J.D. Vance, who has suggested that parents should have more voting power than other citizens, and Elon Musk, who has fathered at least a dozen children he seems to play little part in raising. Behind these men is a chorus of pronatal activists desperate to kickstart a baby boom. Many of them recently attended NatalCon, the subject of another viral Times article. A running theme of that event, held in Austin, Texas, in March, was that bearing children is a woman's obligation. 'Women need to take their jobs seriously,' one female attendee told the Times reporter. 'Not their jobs. Their duty.' This sentiment should terrify women—not least because we've heard it before, emanating from some of history's darkest chapters and ugliest corners. The natalism promoted by the Trump administration and its allies echoes insidious forces and regimes. In the United States, the far right has long insisted that motherhood is not only a woman's deepest desire and biological destiny, but also a role she must inhabit to avert the collapse of Western civilization. The 14 Words, a popular white-nationalist slogan, is a pronatalist rallying cry: 'We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.' The Turner Diaries, a racist novel published in the 1970s that served as inspiration for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and January 6 insurrectionists, depicts white women as racial soldiers charged with replenishing the world.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Yahoo
Baby boom push meets skepticism in Republican Party
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. 1. TRUMP 2028 WATCH: Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), who is leading a longer-than-a-long-shot constitutional amendment that would allow Trump to run for a third term, joined the Republicans for National Renewal's Third Term Project on an X space this week to talk about the push, which was a longtime goal of the group. Ogles claimed he's gotten 'overwhelming' support from Republicans on the proposal, but it still doesn't have any cosponsors. 2. CRYPTO CRINGE: While the cryptocurrency industry is optimistic about the environment for crypto under Trump, my colleague Miranda Nazzarro reports that they did not appreciate the meme coins launched by the president and his family: 'The Trump family's various crypto projects, specifically the launch of two personalized meme coins, led to some frustrations from the industry given concerns about how the coins could benefit the president's family.' They worried 'it could undermine industry's attempts to be taken seriously in Washington.' 3. WORLDS COLLIDE ON WHCA WEEKEND: Rising star Natalie Winters of Bannon's War Room snapped a pic with a masked Taylor Lorenz — the subject of near-constant hate from the right — over the weekend. Who had that on their bingo card? Not 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
