Politics

Could Incentives Convince Americans to Have More Kids? Trump Administration Pushes for Baby Boom

President Donald Trump is pushing for a baby boom.

Both of his terms in the Oval Office have so far been largely defined by legislative missions aimed at conception and reproductive rights — from putting the conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court who wrote the Dobbs decision to expanding access to in vitro fertilization.

Now, amid falling birth rates, the administration is thinking up potential incentives for future mothers that include: a $5,000 postpartum baby bonus; government-funded programs to educate women on their menstrual cycles; and a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who have more than six children.

“These proposals are really mismatched from the complex reasons why people aren’t having kids,” said Peggy Heffington, a University of Chicago history professor and author of “Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother.” “Society already does reward women in sort of superficial ways for having children, but it doesn’t back that up with the real, material support that they need — things like parental leave, postpartum support, Head Start.”

Heffington notes that some other Western nations like France and Scandinavian countries have supportive parental policies yet their fertility rates are on par with the United States.

“The right question is not necessarily, ‘How do we get people to have more children?’” Heffington said. “I don’t know if there’s policies that have proven effective at really moving the needle. I think a far better question is: How do we support parents? How do we make the act of parenting a happier and easier endeavor?”

Millennials and Gen Zers are postponing marriage and having children. According to figures from the National Center for Health Statistics, the provisional number of U.S. births in 2023 was 3,591,328 compared to 2022’s 3,667,758 births, a 2% difference.

And the number of births between 2015 to 2020 declined at a rate of 2% per year.

Those figures are concerning to pronatalist figures like Vice President JD Vance who believe low birth rates are an existential threat to civilization. At this year’s March for Life rally, the second in command said he wants “more babies in the United States of America.”

The U.S., however, is in a unique position compared to other low-birth countries. Heffington said that while birth rates are down, which follows a similar trend in other developing nations, there is still a large population of young people abroad who would like to immigrate to the U.S. and have families here.

“While declining populations may be a problem in the future for various places in the world, that does not have to be our problem,” Heffington said. “It doesn’t have to only be fertility that solves that.”

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