The American conservative movement has long worked to put the nuclear family at the center of cultural and economic life. Lately, it has added a twist. It wants to make those families bigger.
As fertility rates have declined, a “pronatalist” cluster on the right wing has been making the argument that public policy should encourage more childbearing. With President Trump’s return to office, this group appears to have gotten closer to the center of power than ever before.
Broadly speaking, they want measures like more support for families with several children; speedier and cheaper options for higher education that would allow Americans to start procreating earlier; help for those having trouble conceiving; and initiatives that elevate childbearing to a national service.
Steps like the move by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a father of nine, to direct federal funds toward places with high marriage rates and birthrates are exactly what many have in mind.
Movement on their priorities, however, has been slow. And in some cases, pronatalists have found the White House’s actions counterproductive.
“So much has happened, and so much has been such a mixed bag,” said Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center who is focused on family policy. “That’s going to be the tension, that angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. At this stage, the devil seems to be winning out.”
The first two months have been crowded with efforts to fulfill Mr. Trump’s campaign promises: mass deportations, steep tariffs, retribution against his perceived enemies, sharp funding cuts and an aggressive deconstruction of the administrative state.
There hasn’t been much time left for family policy. Pronatalists cut the administration a lot of slack, hoping that their time will come, too. But they also have a messaging challenge: The movement does not speak with one voice, and even the term “natalism” means different things to different people.
Vice President JD Vance has long criticized the childless and explicitly endorsed “more babies in the United States of America,” as he put it at this year’s Right to Life March. The billionaire Elon Musk, a top Trump lieutenant, has fathered at least 12 children with at least three partners as part of his belief that depopulation is the biggest threat to human civilization; he posts frequently about “population collapse” on his social media platform X.
Although they might sound aligned, Mr. Vance and Mr. Musk represent two distinct and sometimes conflicting factions within the movement.
A Philosophical Divide
Mr. Vance’s camp, motivated by religious values and present in several socially conservative Beltway think tanks, focuses strongly on the family unit as the essential building block of society. “If you don’t have families, those are the bedrock of our entire civilization, we don’t have a real country anymore,” Mr. Vance said in 2021.
This group also cares not just about the number of children, but also how families are created. Some pronatalists have celebrated Mr. Trump’s actions to stamp out transgender identity, saying that enforcing traditional gender norms is important to family formation. Many are skeptical of in vitro fertilization as a way to help infertile or same-sex couples, for example, or single women who want to raise a child on their own.
“It should not be babies at all costs, because babies aren’t to be treated as commodities,” said Roger Severino, the vice president for domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, who adds that Mr. Musk should not be held up as a familial role model. “Some on the pronatalist side lean in that direction, which loses the necessary context for human flourishing, which is that stable family unit.”
The Vance camp also opposes abortion, but tends not to mix that subject with the birthrate conversation except to say that with all the new restrictions on reproductive choice, it would make sense to do more for young mothers financially.
The other camp is more aligned with the viewpoint Mr. Musk has articulated. Rather than religious belief, they are motivated by a fear that humanity will not replace itself, strangling economic dynamism as a dwindling work force strains to support the growing elderly population. They dismiss immigration as a remedy, arguing that it can weaken the culture of the receiving country.
This group, which embraces assisted reproduction, is most visibly identified with Malcolm and Simone Collins, a media-friendly couple with four children born through I.V.F. They favor using genetic selection to pick embryos with desirable characteristics, an approach that Christian groups typically oppose.
“We’ve done our best to try to be inclusive with people who like to play ball,” Mr. Collins said. He said he and his wife had stood down as organizers of a conference this month so those with a traditional religious perspective would feel comfortable attending. “We specifically — despite generally being known as like, leading the pronatalist movement — didn’t want to be the ones running the conference,” he said.
The Collinses said they recently composed a suite of suggested executive orders and sent them to allies in the White House. They include deregulating child care businesses to bring down the cost, and loosening car seat laws, which can now require buying larger vehicles to accommodate more than two children. Another would create an award for women who have six or more children, versions of which exist in a handful of countries, including France.
Mr. Vance and Mr. Musk did not respond to requests to discuss their positions, but the White House says it’s interested in such policies. Asked whether Mr. Trump cares about raising fertility and what he is doing to support families, a White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, said the administration was “empowering Americans to have and raise the families of their dreams — helping couples struggling with infertility, strengthening family budgets by tackling inflation and creating jobs, and enabling parents to raise and educate their children free from the corrosive ideologies and lifestyle preferences of the left.”
But no overarching advocacy group unites the two branches of the pronatalist movement. They have no common platform, scorecard to grade to politicians on their voting records, or political action committee to hold the White House accountable for its promises.
What Could Raise Birthrates?
Pronatalists agree on many ideas, such as tweaking tax policies and safety net programs to equalize benefits for married couples and single people. They also support removing barriers to home construction, although they differ on whether it’s important that new housing come in the form of single-family places in the suburbs. They are pushing to make the child tax credit more generous, and favor a “baby bonus” for new parents to help with infant care needs. (Child care subsidies are less popular, as they are not seen as benefiting stay-at-home parents.)
Leah Libresco Sergeant is laser-focused on getting more money to families. She’s a senior policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a think tank that describes itself as supporting free markets and effective government, and has been working on the tax bill being hashed out in Congress. Republicans should at least increase the child tax credit enough to make up for recent inflation to prove their pro-family bona fides, she said — and increasingly, according to polling and surveys, it’s what conservative voters want.
“I think it’s going to be hard to make the case for a real, lasting realignment if families don’t see evidence of that next April,” Ms. Sergeant said.
In designing policy requests for federal legislators, however, pronatalists run into a problem: There’s little evidence that subsidies and protections have substantially raised the number of children women have over their lifetime. It’s not for lack of trying by low-fertility countries including Norway, Japan and South Korea. The few nations that have arrested their declines, like Hungary and the Czech Republic, adopted more sustained and generous incentives than appear politically viable in the United States.
Democrats support many of these policies as well — for the purpose of improving living standards for parents and children, not encouraging more reproduction. But families have been leaving blue states with generous policies, not moving to them. And when the left-leaning groups try collaborating with conservative groups on family policy, efforts tend to fall apart around familiar ideological fractures.
“I think there’s a lot of agreement in theory on the concept that families need more support,” said Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who has advocated paid leave and child care assistance for years. “But what that support looks like, what the role of the government is, and whether public funds get invested always seem to be a point of disagreement.”
That’s why, for the purpose of adding babies, there’s an emerging understanding that cultural factors are crucial. The most fertile country in the developed world is Israel, at 2.9 children per woman, with its hard-to-replicate combination of intense nationalism and widespread religiosity.
An agenda that prioritizes large families makes plenty of people queasy. Groups like Population Connection worry that the tactics required to raise birthrates can verge on authoritarianism, and believe that the consequences of population loss aren’t as catastrophic as pronatalists make them out to be. And increasing numbers of young people do not want to burden the planet by having children of their own.
Nevertheless, pronatalists want the administration to establish a commission to elevate and study the subject, as well as to infuse their priorities across the federal government. The Biden administration screened many policies and grant applications for their impact on climate change and racial equity, they point out; the same could be done for procreation.
“I think the administration, without even going to Congress, should put the government in the position of saying ‘OK, family formation is a priority, how is our action affecting that?’” said Tim Carney, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute whose latest book is about how America makes it difficult to have children.
Such a commission — or even a czar, as some favor — might also coordinate more efforts like the Transportation Department funding memo. Pronatalists were pleasantly surprised by the provision, but say they have not heard of similar measures at other agencies yet.
Unintended Consequences
At the same time, the implications of Mr. Trump’s broader agenda are not uniformly positive for larger families, or the incentive to build them.
Some pronatalists argue that the Department of Government Efficiency’s broad cuts are diminishing resources that could instead be diverted toward their priorities. The Education Department, for example, could encourage instruction about declining birthrates and how childbearing gets more difficult with age. The Department of Health and Human Services could support more research on reproductive health problems, and redirect some funding under Title X, the federal family planning program, from contraception toward fertility services. All of that requires staff support.
Another way in which Mr. Musk may be making it more difficult to raise children is return-to-office mandates for federal employees, ending an era of workplace flexibility that helped parents with desk jobs juggle work and children.
“Certainly telework is pronatal,” said Daniel Hess, a father of six who writes about fertility on X under the handle @morebirths. “I do think that the left has a lot of important things to say that the right is a little bit blind about, and work from home is a great example.”
While some pronatalists celebrate Mr. Trump’s crackdown on immigration as a step toward safer communities, lower housing costs and potentially higher paying jobs for Americans, economic evidence suggests those are unlikely outcomes. Moreover, slowing the flow of immigration may depress birthrates because foreign-born residents both tend to have more children (at least for now, as birthrates fall in Latin America). And immigrants often help American citizen parents take care of their children.
“The people being deported are disproportionately likely to be low-cost child care workers, low-cost yard service providers, low-cost providers of things families buy,” said Lyman Stone, a demographer who directs the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. “On the whole, if we were to deport three million people, that would not boost fertility, possibly reduce it.”
But the biggest factor may be economic instability and rising prices. Mr. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff policies have roiled markets and battered consumer confidence, which historically has not been a climate conducive to starting families.
Catherine Pakaluk differs from most pronatalists in that she doesn’t believe that the government should be trying to raise the birthrate. The director of the political economy program at Catholic University, a mother of eight and the author of a book about women who have large families, she believes family size is a personal choice. But if the government decides that higher fertility is in the national interest, she also thinks policies that increase costs won’t help.
“The tariff policy at the moment is the most significant economic item on the agenda, and I’m definitely concerned that it’s not going to be broadly pro-family in terms of keeping the cost of everything people need to provision their families affordable and in supply,” Dr. Pakaluk said. “There’s your intentions and there’s your outcomes, and they’re not necessarily the same.”
