In March, at a White House event celebrating Women’s History Month, President Trump dubbed himself the “fertilization president,” a moniker meant to emphasize his commitment to expanding access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF. “We’re gonna have tremendous goodies in the bag for women too,” he added.
It's anyone's guess what "goodies" he's referring to, but his administration has reportedly been listening to pitches on potential incentives to increase American birth rates, including a $5,000 “baby bonus,” motherhood medals for women with six or more children, government-funded menstrual-cycle education in schools, and reserving 30% of Fulbright scholarships for candidates who are married or have kids.
Pronatalist policies attempt to encourage people to have more children, including by offering incentives or appealing to a sense of civic or social duty. In March, billionaire and then-Trump advisor Elon Musk, who has fathered at least 14 children with at least four women, told Fox News anchor Bret Baier that if birth rates do not increase, “civilization will disappear.” In 2021, then-Senate candidate J.D. Vance claimed that childless adults (seemingly referring to those without biological children) don’t have the same direct stake in the future of the country as people with children.
At the same time, though, the Trump administration has also made it clear that not all children are welcome. In March, NBC News reported that US immigration agents were planning to target families without criminal histories for detention and deportation. Since then, the administration has even deported several US citizen children along with their parents.
In addition, the National Institutes of Health has cut funding for research on topics the administration deems related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, which scientists worry will stifle their ability to address critical issues like racial disparities in maternal- and infant-health outcomes.
Critical children’s programs are also in jeopardy. In March, the United States Department of Agriculture ended pandemic-era programs that provided $660 million for local food for children at schools and childcare centers to help ensure that kids received nutritious meals. This week, Senate Republicans passed what the Trump administration has called the "One Big, Beautiful Bill," which would slash the federal budget for Medicaid by more than $1 trillion over a 10-year span and cause about 11.8 million to lose their health insurance, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. Medicaid provides health care coverage to children more than any other age group. After narrowly passing in the Senate, the budget bill is back in the House.
All of these proposals and actions have the effect of incentivizing some families to expand while removing access to support and care for others. They are part of a deeply intertwined history of American eugenics and pronatalism that is fueled by anxieties about gender, race, and immigration.
The turn of the 20th century was a period of heightened social and cultural change. Between 1900 and 1915, more than 15 million immigrants arrived in the United States, nearly the same total number of immigrants who had entered the country over the previous 40 years, according to the Library of Congress. At the same time, many women began challenging existing gender norms by entering professional and political life. These changes stoked preexisting eugenicist concerns about how shifting gender roles and racial demographics, along with increasing immigration, would impact the future of the American family.
The American eugenics movement is most often remembered for efforts to limit reproduction by people eugenicists deemed unfit through forced sterilization, restrictive and racist marriage laws, and anti-immigration policies. But eugenicists also encouraged people they considered physically and mentally worthy to have more children.
For 20th-century eugenicists, one of the primary ways of encouraging the creation of more children was education. As one pamphlet from a leading center for eugenics research, the Eugenics Record Office, said, racial progress meant that “those in control must see to it that there shall be fit matings and many children among those richly endowed by nature, and that hereditary defectives and degenerates shall not be permitted to reproduce at all.”
To accomplish those goals, proponents of eugenics called on white women to increase their birth rates, saying it would save civilization. In 1915, Theodore Roosevelt warned the National Congress of Mothers, now known as the National Parent Teacher Association, about the “many and grave dangers” modern civilization posed to the American family. He argued that modern living was eroding family values, cautioned women against prioritizing work or education and putting aside marriage and childbearing. He claimed the “greatest duty of womanhood” was birthing and raising healthy children.
According to Roosevelt, it wasn’t just childless-by-choice women who were the problem — though he described them as “one of the most unpleasant and unwholesome features of modern life”; the former president also took aim at small families, accusing parents with only two children of selfishly decreasing the population. He warned that such choices would push the nation to “the point of extinction.” The solution, he reminded the audience, was more families “of the right kind,” which to him meant Anglo-Saxon.
Theodore Roosevelt helped popularize anxieties about racial extinction. Known as “race suicide,” the term was first coined by sociologist Edward A. Ross in 1901 to describe the idea that low birth rates of white American families with Nordic or Anglo-Saxon heritage would eventually lead to their being outnumbered by incoming immigrants and people of color.
Popular eugenic pronatalist programs aimed not only to prepare women for marriage and children, but to teach them to desire family life. Through women’s magazines, self-help books, mothers’ manuals, and school curricula, women were taught to prioritize marriage and family life, to choose their mates wisely, and to raise their children to be healthy future citizens.
One of the most popular ways eugenicists enlisted women was through “better babies” contests. These contests — especially popular in middle-class, rural white communities — were held primarily at state fairs, where families across the country brought young children to have their mental and physical health judged and ranked by doctors, nurses, and volunteers. Winners were awarded cash prizes or trophies and the honor of being a “better baby.” The contests were frequently accompanied by educational exhibits and informative lectures to teach mothers the skills they would need to beat the competition.
These contests told the public that white, non-disabled people were more worthy of creating American families than others; and they created “winners and losers,” which helped reinforce ideas about eugenic fitness. Hopeful contestants could turn to the informative exhibits and lectures to learn how to pick mates and raise children who had the best chances of winning prizes. By the 1920s, “fitter family” contests rewarded entire families that were able to demonstrate their “good” heredity through competitions that assessed their eugenic fitness. Couples traced their family heritage, ideally back to Anglo-Saxon or Nordic roots.
Eugenic pronatalism didn’t just encourage white women to have more children by idealizing the white, Protestant family; it also relied on racist and ableist fearmongering. Fitter family contests served as a warning about the dangers of allowing the unfit to continue to grow their families.
In 1926, for example, the contests were often accompanied by different versions of an exhibit proclaiming that “some people are born to be a burden.” The exhibit used a flashing light to indicate how often someone was born who "will have the ability to do creative work and be fit for leadership." Another light flashed every 15 seconds to denote how frequently "$100 of your money goes for the care of persons with bad heredity such as the insane, feeble-minded, criminals and other defectives.”
Like the eugenicists of the 20th century, a new wave of pronatalists is calling on us to save the country by creating healthy, traditional families. The American pronatalist movement is telling us stories about women’s duty, women’s choices, and women’s failings. The pronatalist policies the Trump administration is reportedly considering aim to increase childbearing without addressing any of the well-documented social, economic, and medical factors that shape people’s reproductive choices. They are relying on women to buy into a vision of an American future that uses birthing incentives to reinforce traditional gender roles. Instead, though, we can demand policies that enhance everyone’s reproductive autonomy.
