Yes, America Should Make It Easier to Have Children

But the Trump administration doesn't want to help families. It wants to punish single women and childless people.

Photo by Dexswaggerboy on Unsplash

The Trump administration wants to juice the birthrate. This isn’t surprising: Vice President JD Vance is an ardent pro-natalist. So is shadow president Elon Musk, who seems to be working on populating Mars with his own progeny. Abortion opponents, who make up a solid chunk of Trump’s base, want to see women have more babies whether we like it or not. Republicans and the Christian conservatives who elect them have generally been on the “be fruitful and multiply” side of things.

What’s different this time around, though, is that the Trump team is looking at carrots, not just sticks, in their baby-boom strategy. While the old way was to restrict abortion and make contraception harder to get, some of the proposals on the table now include things like cash for kids, mommy medals, reserving scholarship program spots for young people who are married with children, and (somewhat bizarrely) menstrual cycle education so women can figure out when they’re fertile and a national medal for motherhood for women with six or more children.

One of these ideas is a good one: A cash bonus for kids. Kids are expensive; societies should support families. Handing over $5,000 to new moms sounds like a great idea to me.

But note that what isn’t on the list are the basic things that actually enable parents (and especially mothers) to parent and also have lives and jobs: Paid leave and affordable childcare. Also not on the list are the basic things that would help underprivileged women survive pregnancy and early motherhood, and would help their babies survive infancy and childhood: Investments in rural maternal health, Native maternal health, and Black maternal health.

This is not by accident. There is a difference between using the power of the government to support families in choosing to have more children, and using the power of the government to compel women into childbearing and punish women who don’t comply. The Trump team is picking the latter.