By Annie Piscitelli
Pronatalism, the political ideology that seeks to urge women to have more children, is on the rise, stoking misplaced alarm over declining birthrates and aging demographics. The decline is clearly real in many parts of the world (though not all, and global population is still growing). In the US, new CDC data confirms that after two decades of decline, birth rates are at historic lows.
What’s less clear is why this is cause for alarm, why lawmakers in Ohio, Oklahoma, Nevada, and other states are decrying the “consequences” of slower population growth, or why new numbers on birthrate decline in Australian cities are getting sensationalized as leading to “human catastrophe.”
Playing on such overhyped fears, the Trump administration’s aggressive pronatalism uses both carrots and sticks to bribe or constrain women into having more children. Trump declared himself the “fertilization president,” issuing an Executive Order to expand access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) and pledging to lower IVF costs.
His new budget bill establishes federally-funded “Trump Accounts” for children born in the next three years. Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services is seeking to redirect Title X funding away from birth control and toward an “infertility training center.” Instead of helping women avoid unplanned or unwanted pregnancies, the new plan is to teach them how to leverage their fertility and have more children.
In other words, the Trump administration is working concertedly to push women like me—and you—off our university campuses, out of our offices, and back into the home to be mothers, as if it’s our duty to provide society with more babies. Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk said the quiet part out loud at the Young Women’s Leadership Conference in Dallas, where he argued women should go to college not to study, but to find husbands, while his wife (whom he met in college) advises young women to get off the career track and have babies as soon as possible.
So far, such gestures have been largely symbolic, more of a culture war signal to roll back women’s rights and foreclose our choices than a coherent policy agenda designed to actually lower barriers to choosing motherhood. The U.S still has no federally guaranteed paid parental leave, no universal childcare, and persistent gender wage gaps. Fifteen years after graduating college, mothers earn about 42% less than fathers. Whereas men returning to work after parental leave often get a “fatherhood premium,” i.e. a raise or promotion, women earn less with every child they have until, eventually, the cost of childcare exceeds their income.
That leaves many with little choice but to stay home, raise children, and depend on their husbands, which is how pronatalists want it, though not for all women. In their view only a select group should stay home and procreate: white, native-born, educated women raising children in heterosexual, nuclear homes. Ringing alarm bells about “population collapse” and enlisting this particular cohort of women to fight it by having more babies is inherently sexist, anti-feminist, patriarchal, and misogynistic, but more than that, it is also blatantly racist.
If pronatalism were really about boosting overall fertility rates or population growth, it would welcome immigration, which accounted for three-fourths of all U.S. population growth from 2000 to 2019. Yet the Administration has expanded mass deportation. But pronatalism’s real agenda is darker: curating who can be part of our growing numbers and who can’t, while constraining women’s reproductive choices and pressing them into service.
Fear-mongering about the supposed evils of declining birthrates are also part of this semi-covert sexist, nativist, racist agenda. The truth about declining birthrates is they are signs of progress, often indicating women are more empowered to make choices about their reproductive lives due to higher levels of education, workforce participation, and family planning access. When women have more autonomy, they tend to have fewer children and space out births. That is not a “problem” for policymakers to “solve.” On the contrary, declining birthrates confer strategic advantages and policy opportunities governments would do well to embrace.
Pronatalism is rebranded anti-feminism. It does not liberate women; it constrains them and seeks to rob them of their power to choose. There is no shame in choosing to be a stay-at-home-mom, and there should be none in choosing a career, a non-traditional family, or not having children at all. True pro-family policy would respect and support women’s self-determination, including in our reproductive lives, rather than bribing us with investment accounts or reeducating us with “training centers” to corral us into giving up our power.
Instead, we should affirm our power, and use it to demand affordable childcare, paid family leave, wage equity, comprehensive reproductive healthcare, and immigration reform. That’s the path to achieving the stated goal of empowering women to have as many – or as few – children as they choose.
Annie Piscitelli is a Stanback Fellow at the Population Institute and a rising junior at Duke University. Follow Population Institute on Facebook and Linkedin.
