The staggering hypocrisy of the MAGA baby push

Why the White House's current pronatal rhetoric is more vibes than substance

In 2022, child and family advocates were devastated when, in the wrangling to get Biden’s Build Back Better package through Congress, the American Families Plan got left on the cutting room floor. The AFP included investments in paid family leave, free pre-kindergarten, health insurance subsidies for families, childcare spending, free community college, a plan to rectify teacher shortages, and an extension of the child tax credit.* It was an attempt to build what the administration called the “care economy,” in concert with a framing of “care as infrastructure” – that is, recognizing that the work of parents and caregivers is as essential to a functioning economy as the roads and bridges that we drive on. It was also the most explicitly pronatalist suite of legislation from any presidential administration in my lifetime, if not in U.S. history.**

Joe Manchin was publicly blamed for the demise of the AFP, but the reason that a lone Democratic holdout played such an outsize role in sinking the legislation is that Republicans were universally opposed to it, despite the fact that 60% of Americans supported it. As the New York Times wrote at the time, “Republicans have expressed much less interest in additional spending for education, child care and paid leave than they have for building roads and bridges.”

So forgive me for rolling my eyes when the same newspaper published a story yesterday titled, “White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children.”

Some of the ideas included in the piece: menstrual cycle education; more transportation funds for rural areas; tweaks to the Fulbright program to fund more parents; and a National Medal of Motherhood.*** Not mentioned in the piece: the fact that the United States is the only wealthy industrialized country that does not guarantee paid leave to new parents, the crushing costs of childcare, or the fact that U.S. spends less of its GDP on early childhood (0.3%) than any other country in the OECD, many of whom spend more than 1%. Also not mentioned in the piece: the fact that Trump administration is currently defunding Head Start, the only source of childcare in many rural counties; is canceling research on child development and early childhood education; and is planning major cuts to Medicaid, which covers more than 40% of births in the United States. Many red states are already maternity care deserts thanks to practitioner and hospital shortages, and the Trump budget will compound this problem, forcing women to travel hours to get prenatal care or deliver their babies.

In other words, the Trump administration seems to be grabbing the pronatalist mantle not on the basis of actual policies or solutions, but on vibes.****

If you’re a seasoned pronatalist you might be saying to yourself that all the expensive goodies in the American Families Plan are no guarantee of increased birth rates; after all, Nordic countries that already offer all of these benefits are not beating us by much in the birth rate race. But by that token, none of the gimmicky ideas mentioned in the NYT article are likely to shift the birth rate either. As a Fulbright recipient myself who took my husband and two kids along on my semester in Spain, I should love the idea of earmarking 30% of Fulbrights for parents, an idea advanced by Lyman Stone. I’m a big fan of Stone, who is a thoughtful voice on demography, but about 8,000 Fulbrights are awarded each year, mostly to people with (or en route to) Ph.Ds. It’s hard to imagine that proposal moving the needle on the average American’s fertility decisions compared to whether you can find any childcare in your rural county, or whether there is a hospital within four hours of your home to deliver your infant.

There’s also immigration, which probably deserves its own post, but let me just say this: If you wanted to pick one single policy that would increase the birth rate and make the population more religious (a goal of many pronatalist conservatives), it’d be to encourage immigration. Immigrants tend to be more religious and have more babies than native-born Americans. Before Trump came along and decided that scapegoating immigrants was good politics, both Republicans and Democrats recognized that immigration had a net slightly positive effect on the economy. It’s reasonable to have strong borders and consistent policies, but the Trump administration’s current approach of terrorizing immigrants, including those who are parents of children with U.S. citizenship, is bad not just for birth rates but for our soul and humanity as a nation.

Maybe I’m just clouded by liberal bias and unable to discern all the secretly super pronatalist stuff that Trump is doing behind the scenes. So, as an experiment, I tried asking my buddy ChatGPT. Here’s the full prompt I gave it:

If you analyze all the policies and public positions of the Biden administration and compare them with the policies and public positions of the current Trump administration, which administration's policies and positions are more likely to increase the birth rate in the United States?

ChaptGPT didn’t have too much trouble with this one. It mentioned Biden’s expansion of the Child Tax Credit; the administration’s advocacy for childcare, universal pre-K, and paid family leave; and its policies on healthcare coverage and maternal health. It grouped its responses into four topic areas (unprompted by me), and here’s what it concluded for each one:

1. Economic Support for Families. Verdict: Biden’s policies (if fully implemented and sustained) are more aligned with what research shows supports higher birth rates in developed countries: family subsidies, childcare, and paid leave.

2. Healthcare and Maternal Support. Verdict: While expanding reproductive rights can reduce unintended pregnancies, access to healthcare and maternal support is critical for women to feel secure in having children. Biden’s broader healthcare approach may better support sustained higher birth rates.

3. Immigration (Indirect Effect). Verdict: On this front, Biden’s immigration policy is more likely to support birth rate growth.

4. Cultural and Social Climate. Verdict: Trump’s cultural message may resonate with some potential parents, but without concrete support systems, this has limited impact compared to Biden’s economic and structural policies.

So there you go – ChatGPT agrees with me! Vibes, not policies, represent the bulk of what the Trump administration has to offer.

Of course, what Americans really want is not polarized Republican OR Democratic politics, but bipartisan action. And this is an issue area where the parties could theoretically meet, since the Republicans are now signaling more willingness to get behind the pro-baby policies, like parental leave, that Democrats have been advocating for a long time.

Here's my modest proposal, which I think would make both parties equally happy and unhappy, and be good for parents and children: Universal Basic Income for any household that includes parents (or custodial caregivers) with children under 5. UBIP: UBI for parents. This benefit can be combined with paid work as parents desire. I’ll say more about it in a future piece.

* The cost was covered by an increase in the marginal tax rate for the top 1% of earners.

**This post doesn’t constitute an endorsement of every single thing in the AFP, but if the GOP had any seriousness about benefiting families, they could have come to the table to negotiate bipartisan tweaks to these proposals at any point in the lengthy lead-up to the legislation.

***This last idea was pitched by the Where’s Waldo lady in a bonnet, who was also quoted as saying, “You didn’t hear about kids in the same way under Biden,” a statement that made my entire head burst into flames.

****This whole pronatal thing is just one example of the stunning amount of vibes-based posturing in this administration, by which I mean publicly claiming to stand for something that you are actively undermining. For example: MAHA saying it wants cleaner food and a focus on chronic disease prevention while the administration cuts food safety agencies and NIH research on chronic diseases; Trump saying he wants a return to a manufacturing economy while rolling back the Biden’s investments in clean energy infrastructure, which brought jobs back to manufacturing regions in red states.