Republican Pro-Birth Agenda Evokes Past Regimes

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15-05-2025

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President Donald Trump is reportedly entertaining policy proposals to incentivize American women to have more children. But the proposals don't include basic and undeniably effective ideas like subsidized child care or paid parental leave. Instead, the Trump administration appears to be considering a $5,000 cash 'baby bonus' and a 'National Medal of Motherhood' for any woman who has six or more children.
The policy proposals are part of a larger push from conservative Republicans to boost the United States' declining birth rates by persuading families to have more kids. The proposals fall squarely into what's known as the pro-natalist movement — an ideology created to raise declining population rates that has historically been co-opted by far-right misogynist groups, including fascist and authoritarian regimes.
The contemporary pro-natalist movement has found a leader in Trump, who has aligned himself with some of the ideology's most extreme advocates, including far-right influencer Jack Posobiec and billionaire Elon Musk. Musk, who was never far from Trump's side at the start of his second term, has fathered 14 children and routinely voices concerns about 'population collapse' due to declining birth rates. Vice President JD Vance famously made fun of 'childless cat ladies' during the campaign and recently urged Americans to have 'more babies.' And Trump has proudly appointed himself 'the fertilization president.'
At the same time, the president has literally made it more dangerous to be pregnant and give birth in the US He has bragged about his role in dismantling federal abortion protections and commented that 'it's a beautiful thing to watch' states ban abortion. Dozens of pregnant women have nearly died due to those state-level abortion bans because they're so vague that they also criminalize miscarriage care. Trump has also slashed the social safety net, attacking vital family planning resources for low-income women and implementing policies that target immigrant and LGBTQ+ children.
It makes you wonder who, exactly, his administration is telling to have more kids and why.
Medals for women who give birth to a lot of children and cash bonuses are not new ideas from the Trump administration, said Denise Lynn, a professor of history and director of gender studies at the University of Southern Indiana. Fascist and authoritarian regimes of the past have used similar pro-natalist ideologies to restore conservative family values within society and relegate women to the home, where their sole duty is to bear children.
Germany's Adolf Hitler, Chile's Augusto Pinochet, and Italy's Benito Mussolini all employed pro-natalist policies to encourage specific types of married couples to produce children for the state. In Nazi Germany, white women were awarded a bronze medal for having four children, silver for six and gold for eight children. The Nazi Party also gave out financial loans to white families; couples could have more children in order to decrease how much money they would owe back to the state.
One of the first things many fascist regimes did was ban abortion and restrict birth control. Trump has proudly claimed responsibility for repealing Roe v. Wade, which led to a dozen or so abortion bans in states around the country. Republicans in the current administration are continuing to attack access to contraception and roll back access to general sexual and reproductive health care.
'There's been lots of studies that have shown that with access to higher education, with access to health care and prenatal, postnatal and perinatal care, and all of these other things, everyone's standard of living increases in a culture,' said Lynn, whose research focuses on the American Communist Party during the Great Depression and the Cold War, specifically around anti-fascism sentiments during those eras.
'So, feminist policies actually benefit everyone, including men, and yet we persist in pushing policies that are going to hurt all of us in the long run.'
HuffPost spoke with Lynn about the history of pro-natalism in fascist regimes and some of the through lines she sees to the situation today in the US.
How do you define pro-natalism?
It's a pro-birth political position that has historically revolved around fears about declining populations. Generally, when the party in power shares that pro-natalist view, it can appear in public policy. So, for example, anti-abortion laws are pro-natalist, anti-birth control or birth control stigma is pro-natalist. I would even argue that abstinence-only programs are pro-natalist because many pro-natalists see the heterosexual married relationship as the epitome of citizenship, and thus enforcing it in education is a necessary part of a pro-natalist political position.
The fundamental idea behind it is that states depend on women's reproductive labor to reproduce [their] citizenry, and so reproductive bodies are expected to serve the state by producing citizens.
From your research, how have pro-natalist policies and ideologies worked in tandem or within authoritarian or fascist regimes?
Within authoritarian or fascist regimes, reproductive labor becomes a state obligation specifically for women. So it's an obligation that is in service to the state.
In Nazi Germany, it was framed as producing future soldiers and laborers to build the nation and, in the 1930s at least, to fight wars for progressing the creation of Hitler's 'lebensraum' or living space. The pro-natalist movement was really strong in Europe after World War I. I would argue that it was still present in the United States, but the imperatives were different because there was so much human loss after World War I that there were countries that saw deep demographic declines. But in Nazi Germany, which also had huge population loss — which, of course, means fewer men to marry, fewer children to have — they saw this as jeopardizing their future security. And then, of course, in Nazi Germany, it's coupled with racial imperatives that they needed to perpetuate the white Germanic stock. That's when we saw the 'racial hygiene' laws become part of state policy in Nazi Germany.
Some of your research focuses on anti-fascism and the American Communist Party, specifically how women in the Communist Party fought back against pro-natalist policies. You wrote in one research article that 'in Hitler's Germany and other fascist states such as Italy, Spain,, and Austria, communists believed there was an effort to 'nationalize' women's maternity in service to the state.' Can you talk to me more about that?
The people I studied feared women would lose all autonomy and would be quite literally owned by the nation — their bodies would be owned by the nation, their children's bodies would be owned by the nation. That bodily sovereignty would not belong to women anymore, and that all decision-making was now influenced by national concerns, and certainly not influenced by personal concerns or even medical concerns. It's framed as an imperative for women to have babies for the nations and not for their own emotional, mental, physical, well well-being.
Traditionally, we think of childbirth in the past as children were used as laborers for the family, that their existence was seen as something that would help a family. In the pro-natalist state, children are laborers that serve the state.
One of the things that I discuss in my more recent research focuses on anti-Korean War activism among Black radicals. One of their big concerns was that they were basically being told they needed to produce cannon fodder for the state's future wars. This bond between their children transformed into: the state needs me to produce soldiers.
I want to talk about whether you see any through lines from that point in history to what's happening in the US today.
I'm covering the attacks on the abortion pill, mifepristone. In the updated complaint from three anti-choice states trying to restrict access to the pill, they use pretty barefaced pro-natalist terminology that makes me think of what you just said: 'Defendants' efforts enabling the remote dispensing of abortion drugs has caused abortions for women in Plaintiff States and decreased births in Plaintiff States. This is a sovereign injury to the State in itself.'
Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's a great example of pro-natalism.
You wrote in that same article: 'In Nazi Germany, improved economic conditions led to an increased birth rate. But pro-natalist policies helped to encourage this rise, particularly the laws prohibiting abortion and allowing for the prosecution of those performing and receiving abortions.'
It's hard not to think of what's happening in the US when I read that. The fall of federal abortion protections in 2022 has led to nearly half the country criminalizing care, and physicians are being prosecuted, and pregnant people are dying.
The Dobbs decision [overturning Roe v. Wade] was a pro-natalist policy. I like the language of the current movement, the language of forced birth policies, because by banning abortion, they really do take away women's autonomy.
One of the problems in the United States is that not only are we limiting access to abortion and birth control, but we have forced birth policies in a country that has aggressively rejected things like maternity leave, Medicare for all, adequate prenatal and postnatal care, and affordable childcare. These things have not been remedied even when Roe was in place.
One of the arguments behind pro-natalism is that the state needs people to do labor — right now we are heading toward a demographic cliff with an aging population and fewer younger people to do the work needed for society and to take care of the aged. Of course, this could be solved by immigration and creating pathways to citizenship, but the very same people committed to pro-natalism take hardline stances against immigration. This just further demonstrates that pro-natalism's primary goal is to enforce second-class citizenship on women.
Are there any pro-natalist policies from Nazi Germany or other fascist regimes you've studied that stand out or are similar to the ones that the Trump administration is entertaining?
I was having a conversation with one of my colleagues the other day about the proposed $5,000 allowance for someone who has a child. That reminded me of the loans that Nazi Germany afforded to white Aryan families. That is very similar. It's also a joke — $5,000 isn't going to do much.
Under Nazi Germany's racial hygiene laws, they gave out loans to families, specifically to the husband, that promised you could reduce your payback amount with every subsequent child. One of the big things that the women I studied — and they talked about it well into the Cold War — is the fascist triple K: Kinder, Küche, Kirche, which means 'children, kitchen, church.' This pro-natalist ideology sought to confine women, essentially, to second-class citizenship.
I keep thinking about the idea to award a ' National Medal of Motherhood ' to women who have six kids and the similarity to Nazi Germany's motherhood medals.
It really reduces women to breeders. It ignores the deep complexity of childbirth. You have a uterus and ovaries, but that doesn't mean you have the ability to have children. But if you can't have children and you have a uterus and ovaries, do you no longer have status in your own country? It marginalizes fathers and fatherhood. There's so many layers of issues.
How does pro-natalism intersect with race and eugenics?
In United States' history, pro-natalist policies were directly linked to eugenics. Eugenics emerged in the US when middle- and upper-class white women were having fewer children, while immigrants and people of color continued to have more children. A lot of that has to do with access to birth control information, and eugenicists wanted to flip that script completely and encourage white birth rates. But only appropriate white birth rates.
One of the doctors involved in the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell was given a citation by the Nazi government. It was about this woman, Carrie Buck, who had been confined to a mental health institution. It's likely she was probably raped by a doctor there, but became pregnant with a second child out of wedlock and she was accused of being an ' idiot,' which was a eugenics term for someone who might have had a second to fourth grade mentality.
Carrie Buck was white, but eugenicists were like, 'Well, we don't want idiots to have children either, and the Nazi government is going to learn from that case.' Essentially, the Nazis really liked our racial hygiene cases because it glorified not just white births, but appropriate white births.
Of course, as the 20th century goes on, eugenics itself becomes stigmatized, but it still lives on. So Black women, Latinas, and Indigenous women faced forced sterilization, while white women were often refused permanent sterilization until they had a specific number of children.
Do you see any of that today?
We can definitely still see the eugenicist language today. I don't think it's a coincidence that forced birth policies jeopardize people of color the most because white nationalists have no interest in their birth outcomes. They're only concerned about producing more white babies.
There was a senator from Louisiana who basically said, 'We have a great maternal mortality rate if you don't include Black women.' And that was only a couple of years ago. Our policies around forced birth do disadvantage people who are already disadvantaged, and I don't think that's coincidental.
Where do we go from here?
One of the things that I think about a lot is the question around health. Politicians don't talk about reproductive care as an issue of health. We see conversations on social media that say, 'Well, birth is a natural part of life.' And, sure, but maternal mortality rates were very high until the 1950s, and one of the things that changed was access to care for the reproductive body.
Those poor birth outcomes weren't that long ago. I worry that we're heading towards a future that's gonna look a lot like our past. I just hope it doesn't last very long.