Donald Trump this spring dubbed himself the “fertilization president.\u201d<\/p>\n
But some conservative family policy advocates say he\u2019s done little so far to publicly back that up and are pushing to get the White House in the remaining months of the year to prioritize family policy \u2014 and help Americans make more babies.<\/p>\n
A top priority is a pronatalist or family policy summit that spotlights the U.S.\u2019s declining fertility rate. Other asks, which typically run through the White House\u2019s Domestic Policy Council, include loosening regulations on day cares and child car seats, further increasing the child tax credit and requiring insurers to cover birth as well as pre- and post-natal care at no out-of-pocket cost.<\/p>\n
While the Trump administration has advanced a handful of policies explicitly billed as \u201cpro-family,\u201d some conservative advocates are dismayed that the president has not done more on one of his campaign\u2019s most animating issues.<\/p>\n
The lack of movement threatens to dampen enthusiasm among parts of the Republican Party\u2019s big tent coalition, including New Right populists, who worry about the erosion of the U.S. workforce, and techno-natalists, who advocate using reproductive technology to boost population growth, as the GOP stares down a challenging midterm election.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there are people, including the [vice president] and people in the White House, who really want to push pro-family stuff,\u201d said Tim Carney, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who recently wrote \u201cFamily Unfriendly,\u201d a book that has become popular in conservative circles. But \u201cit hasn\u2019t risen to the forefront of the actual decision-making tree in the White House, the people who can put some velocity on things.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s all nascent,\u201d Carney added, but \u201cit is going to be something that Republicans want to talk about in the midterms.\u201d<\/p>\n
White House aides acknowledge advocates’ restlessness, but argue that even as it has yet to take action on the suite of explicitly pro-family proposals advocates want, they have taken a whole-of-government approach to family policy.<\/p>\n
Privately, the White House is deliberating its next moves now that the GOP\u2019s tax and policy bill passed. It\u2019s taking a two-pronged approach: addressing financial pressures and infertility issues that prevent people from having children; and helping couples raise kids in alignment with their values. That latter bucket includes bolstering school choice and parental rights, promoting kin- and faith-based child care, and other actions that can help with the costs of raising children, including health care and housing.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou saw what we were able to accomplish in 200 days. It was a lot. Just wait for the next three-and-a-half years,\u201d said a White House official, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy. \u201cThere’s a lot of opportunity to accomplish a lot through pure administrative action, through the bully pulpit and, of course, if we need to, through working with Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n
The official couldn\u2019t rule out a family policy event hosted by the White House in the future.<\/p>\n
\u201cLook, the president loves to convene stakeholders and thought leaders and policy leaders,\u201d the official added.<\/p>\n
While they understand the White House has had its attention fixed on other issues, like foreign policy, immigration, and trade, pronatalists are anxious for the administration to do something about the declining birth rate. They see it as, quite literally, an existential crisis.<\/p>\n
\u201cDemographic collapse has become the global warming of the New Right,\u201d said Malcolm Collins, who along with his wife Simone, are two of the most outspoken techno-natalists and have pitched the White House on several policies. \u201cAnd this is true, not just for me, but for many individuals within the administration, and many individuals within the think tanks that are informing the administration.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has advanced a handful of policies that conservatives argue will support families and, they hope, encourage people to have children. The president\u2019s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill made permanent the child tax credit first passed as part of Trump\u2019s first-term Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, increased the rate and adjusted it for inflation on an ongoing basis. The legislation also established a one-time $1,000 so-called baby bonus for children born in 2025 through 2028. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy instructed his agency to give preference in competitive grants to communities with higher-than-average birth and marriage rates.<\/p>\n
Critics of the administration note that the megalaw will make it harder for people to keep their Medicaid insurance, the president\u2019s proposed 2026 budget eliminates childcare subsidies for parents in college, and Trump\u2019s CDC eliminated a research team responsible for collecting national data on IVF success rates.<\/p>\n
But family policy advocates say on the whole they see progress, though not nearly enough to reverse the trend of declining birth rates.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom my conversations with folks in the administration, there is definitely interest in doing something visible on the family stuff. They feel like they\u2019re going down the list \u2014 homelessness, crime, obviously immigration \u2014 of different things and families\u2019 time will come,\u201d said Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center who focuses on family policy.<\/p>\n
The U.S. birth rate has been declining since the Baby Boom ended in the early 1960s, falling from 3.65 births per woman in 1960 to 1.599 in 2024, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. There are similar trends across high-income nations, in part the result of easier access to contraception, changing societal values favoring careers over having children and high costs of living.<\/p>\n
The issue came to the fore during the campaign when Trump promised government-funded in vitro fertilization in an effort to allay concerns over his anti-abortion stance. A few months later, then-Sen. JD Vance doubled down on controversial comments about the country being run by \u201ca bunch of childless cat ladies\u201d and argued for more babies in the U.S. Elon Musk, perhaps the most prominent pronatalist, was Trump\u2019s biggest financial booster during the campaign and a key adviser in the early days of the administration.<\/p>\n
There is no agreed-upon solution to the problem of a declining birth rate. Hungary is held up as a model by pronatalists for its family friendly policies but its birth rate remains low, despite exempting women with four or more children from paying income tax, among other incentives. The birth rate also remains low in Nordic countries like Sweden, Norway and Finland that have generous paid parental leave and heavily subsidized childcare.<\/p>\n
Still, advocates in the U.S. have a list for the Trump administration they believe will make a difference, arguing that even if they fail to increase the birth rate, they would support families.<\/p>\n
Some policies that pronatalists hope the Trump administration will pursue are more typically associated with the left, such as expanding child tax credits, which Trump did in the GOP megalaw, and reducing the costs of child care. But others have a home in the libertarian wing of the GOP, such as cutting regulations on day care and curbing car seat rules. Some of these proposals, pronatalists acknowledge, come with more risk but would overall result in more births.<\/p>\n
For decades, social conservatives led the GOP\u2019s charge on families, arguing in support of policies that promote two-parent, heterosexual families. But declining birth rates, coupled with a broadening of the GOP coalition, has broadened the lens to focus on increasing the birth rate, a new pronatalist tinge.<\/p>\n
In an effort to keep their nascent and fragile coalition unified, neither social conservatives nor the techno-natalists are pushing policies at the extremes \u2014 like banning IVF or creating\u00a0genetically modified super soldiers<\/u>.<\/p>\n
That helps explain why the president has not taken action on one of his most concrete promises, making IVF free, despite receiving a report on it in May. A second White House official, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said expanding IVF access for families remains \u201ca key priority,\u201d but declined to offer specifics on the status of any policy moves.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis issue is a winner for the Republican Party, it\u2019s a winner for women, it\u2019s a pro-life issue,\u201d said Kaylen Silverberg, a fertility doctor in Texas who has consulted with the White House on IVF. \u201cThis will result in more babies, period.\u201d<\/p>\n
But social conservatives are morally opposed to IVF both because of a belief life begins at conception and because they don\u2019t think that science should interfere with the natural act of procreation. The proposal would also be quite costly.<\/p>\n
Instead, they want the White House to support something called reproductive restorative medicine, which can include supplements and hormone therapy, that they say will help women naturally improve their fertility.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe point of President Trump\u2019s campaign pledge was to help couples with infertility have children. There\u2019s a way to do that that\u2019s cheaper, faster, less painful and more preferable to couples,\u201d said Katelyn Shelton, a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center\u2019s Bioethics, Technology and Human Flourishing Program who worked at the Department of Health and Human Services during the first Trump administration.<\/p>\n
While most of the family policy conversation has been concentrated on the right, it\u2019s also starting to grow on the left, alongside the so-called \u201cabundance\u201d movement focused on reducing government bureaucracy. Both the National Conservative Conference and the Abundance Conference this week in Washington hosted panels on family policy.<\/p>\n
Reducing barriers to building housing is \u201cgood for families,\u201d said Leah Libresco Sargeant, a senior policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a think tank that describes itself as supporting free markets and effective government, who co-moderated the Abundance Conference\u2019s family policy panel. \u201cThat\u2019s not kind of a family centered policy per se, [but] it\u2019s a good policy that\u2019s good for families.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ultimately, many conservative family policy advocates argue there is only so much government can do to address what they see as a fundamentally cultural and religious problem. It\u2019s a posture that the GOP\u2019s historically small-government contingent takes as it pushes back on their new populist bedfellows.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do not think that the problem of people not having enough kids is a problem of economics. I think that is very often a line that is used in order to promote a larger government populism,\u201d said conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. \u201cThis is a predominantly religious problem, it\u2019s a cultural problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pronatalists have a lot of hope in the future of the GOP in part because of Vance, the administration\u2019s most prominent and ideologically committed proponent of family policies, to carry the mantle, either during Trump\u2019s presidency or as part of his own 2028 presidential bid.<\/p>\n
They love that Vance brings his children on official trips and is open about carving out time during the day to spend with them.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur political leaders are inherently cultural leaders,\u201d Carney said. \u201cBringing his kids with him to Europe and at the inauguration \u2014 where the little one, she was sucking on her fingers, so they had put Band-Aids on some of them so she wasn\u2019t sucking all of them at once \u2014 all of those things that show a loving family and that kind of stuff, I think that can be culturally really productive.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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