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This week, news broke that the Trump administration is weighing a bunch of policy proposals from advocates of an emerging “pronatalist” movement, one designed to convince more women to have more children. You could say I fall squarely in its target demo: I’m a 30-year-old woman and engaged to be married to a man with whom I have a secure and loving partnership. I’m also college-educated, financially stable, and have a support network of friends and family—which is to say, I’m immensely privileged. And I’m a fence-sitter on the topic of whether to have kids. But if anything, the baby-boosting policies proposed have swayed me in the opposite direction.
As reported by The New York Times, these policy ideas include reserving a portion of Fulbright scholarships (which are paid by the government) for people who have kids, funding education on the menstrual cycle (presumably so folks better understand when they can get pregnant), and handing out $5,000 in cash as a “baby bonus” to every new mom once they pop out a kid—as if that would make a dent in prenatal care and childbirth expenses or the roughly $20,000 cost of a child’s first year of life, much less beyond that (more on this later). There’s also, laughably, a proposal on the table that would award a “National Medal of Motherhood” to moms with six or more children. Because a fancy thank-you-for-your-service is what will really get people to commit to raising a full volleyball team.
That first one is just a bit of a head-scratcher. It seems far-fetched that a measure of additional access to a particular scholarship would sway many folks to have kids—and more likely that a quota for parents would penalize the single recent grads to whom these scholarships are often awarded. As for the second? I’m all for ramping up menstrual education, given that sex ed in this country is notoriously abysmal. But to suggest that the declining birth rate is largely a function of people not knowing how their bodies work is both insulting and ignorant of the real issue. “Most women we hear from aren’t opting out of motherhood [because they don’t want children],” Erin Erenberg, CEO and cofounder of Chamber of Mothers, a nonpartisan nonprofit advocating for maternal and parental rights, tells SELF. It’s not that they can’t bother figuring out when they’re ovulating. “Rather, they simply can’t afford having kids,” she says.
Which brings us to the $5,000 baby bonus. At first blush, the idea might seem at least like a good start, some money for new moms being better than no money. But when you do the math, that figure starts to feel a bit ridiculous, if not downright offensive.
To start, there are the costs of childbirth, which, if you don’t have insurance, can total roughly $15,000 for prenatal appointments, vaginal delivery, and postpartum care (or about $2,600, on average, with coverage), according to research from The Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF. Delivery with a C-section? You’re up to about $26,000 without insurance or $3,200 with coverage. (Some plans may have you on the hook for a lot more.) And that number spikes by the thousands if you have pregnancy complications or if your baby has to stay in the newborn intensive care unit post-birth. Finally, there’s the mountain of costs associated with raising a kid, estimated to total about $300,000 from birth to age 18 in a recent analysis by LendingTree. It’s a number that makes any possible handout, even a larger one than proposed, feel like small potatoes.
But there’s a bigger issue with the baby bonus concept. This chunk of straight-up cash isn’t just insufficient in quantity. It’s not funding the infrastructure that moms actually need to thrive in this country and that, to quote Erenberg, they’ve been “screaming [for] from the rooftops” for years—namely, paid family and medical leave to heal and bond with their babies; affordable childcare to be able to work outside the home or just do anything that isn’t full-time child-rearing; and better maternal health care to ensure their safety and well-being during pregnancy, postpartum, and beyond. As Erenberg says, “Parenthood doesn’t need to be incentivized—it needs to be supported every step of the way.”
On that front, progress has either been stymied or outright stalled under Trump. There’s been no movement on nationwide paid leave, despite the president’s prior support for various proposals. Erenberg notes that under Biden, we “got a glimpse of it” in the original Build Back Better Act, but ultimately, “it was left on the cutting room floor.” Nada to report on childcare, either, other than the threat that Trump could eliminate the Head Start program, which provides health, education, and support services to low-income kids under age five. But perhaps the grimmest reality for folks considering kids is the ever-rising maternal mortality rate—a report finding that it increased 27% between 2018 and 2022 was recently published right alongside news that Trump had cut grant funding for research in this arena and put folks at the CDC who monitor maternal health on leave. So you’ll have to forgive me if I’m not exactly pouncing at the idea of childbirth in light of potentially receiving a $5K check.
It also wouldn’t address plenty of other reservations I have about having kids (and which others in my shoes have too). There’s the question of whether it’s ethically right to bring more life into a world whose environment we’re actively destroying and into a country where guns are the leading cause of death for children and school shootings are on the rise. Policies designed to mitigate climate change or diminish the plight of gun violence could do more to convince fence-sitters like me to have kids than a one-time check. As could policies to erase the long-standing motherhood penalty, referring to the ways in which people who have kids often pay for that decision at work. As Erenberg points out, research shows that mothers get paid less and are promoted less often as they face things like implicit bias and mismatched school and work schedules that require taking time off for childcare. Stronger enforcement of equal pay laws, pay transparency regulations, a higher minimum wage, policies to align school and work schedules, and, again, paid leave could all make being a working mother a more equitable—and therefore appealing—experience.
The big disconnect between Trump-era ideas for revving up the birth rate and what would actually persuade folks like me to have kids lies in who these policies center: babies, not the people who create them. At their core is the same fundamental disregard for women that has spawned decades of anti-abortion rhetoric and legislation. A baby bonus might be pitched under the sexy new cover of “pronatalism,” but it still incentivizes women to give birth without doing anything to support them or their babies once they’re born. The goal of such a policy isn’t to help women become moms and thrive—it’s to remind us of what Vice President JD Vance has called our “obligation”: to raise kids, whatever it may take. Much in the same way restrictive post-Roe anti-abortion laws remove women’s agency over if or when they’ll start a family. No wonder the administration seems dead set on devising new ideas for boosting the birth rate rather than just listening to the long-stated needs of women…or should I say, childless cat ladies.
Where the Trump administration may seem better poised to pump the birth rate is among folks who do want kids but are struggling to have them. For people who need fertility treatment, the cost of giving birth can be especially steep—a single cycle of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) can set you back upwards of $30,000. In a recent survey conducted by Maven Clinic, 59% of women or their partners reported taking on extra work to pay for fertility care and 32% took on debt. It’s an issue Trump has promised he’d resolve by lowering the costs of IVF. (Exactly how will be the subject of a report his administration is expected to release in May.) But others in the administration, like Vance, as well as the Heritage Foundation (which spearheaded Project 2025) have been less openly supportive of IVF, raising questions about how far pro-IVF policy will really go.
More talk about making motherhood more accessible, however, is a good thing and well overdue. And fears about the declining birth rate are valid: We do need a consistent flow of young people into the workforce to support an aging population and the social safety net. At the same time, women are the ones who ultimately hold the most power over the birth rate—so it won’t be possible to meaningfully raise it without responding to their needs. And thanks to orgs like Chamber of Mothers, these have been made very clear. “We’ve worked with members of Congress on both sides, and they all know that we need paid leave, that we need affordable childcare, that we need to improve maternal health,” Erenberg says. “It’s a matter of priorities. When are we going to invest in this?” The sooner that happens, the more willing fence-sitters like me will be to at least consider crossing over to the baby side.
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