Six Kids, a Medal, and No Childcare: Welcome to the GOP Fertility Plan

This commentary is a repost from “Sex on Wednesdays” by Martha Kempner on Substack. Find her other articles on The Queen Zone here.

White House Courts Pronatalists

It’s time for everyone’s favorite game show, Irony or Hypocrisy, and this time there are prizes. You could win a presidential medal! Made in China of the goldest fake gold, and sporting the smug face of you-know-who, the National Medal of Motherhood is available to all contestants provided they spend 540 weeks pregnant and approximately 28 years raising kids.

What Might Actually Work to Raise Fertility

Before we start the show, let me ask you to name things that might convince Americans to have more children. Here’s a partial list of the ideas that took me approximately 30 seconds to think of:

• Prenatal care that’s inexpensive and accessible
• Relative assurances that we won’t die in childbirth
• Paid time off for parental leave (and not just six weeks)
• Childcare that’s inexpensive and accessible
• Universal pre-K
• Decent public schools for everyone
• Affordable housing
• Affordable college tuition
• Gun control measures (or reassurances that our kids won’t be shot at school)

Policies addressing climate change (or reassurances that our kids’ kids will have a planet) I missed some stuff in there—like the cost of summer childcare or the availability of mental health services because so many of today’s kids are struggling—but you get the idea. If you want to encourage Americans to have kids, make America a good place to have and raise kids.

You May Want To Read: Can You Afford To Give Birth To A Baby In The United States?

What the Trump Administration Is Proposing

According to the New York Times, the Trump administration is hearing suggestions for addressing the plummeting fertility rates in this country. Not surprisingly, making America a great place for kids and parents didn’t make the list. Instead, ideas include a $5,000 push present for mom, a more substantial child tax credit, a program to reserve 30% of Fulbright scholarships and other educational grants for parents, and the aforementioned Medal of Motherhood for women who have six or more kids.

All of these are bad ideas in their own way. Five grand is a joke when you consider diapers cost over $100 a month on average and formula adds another $150 before you even throw in clothes that get too small each week, a stroller, a crib, a car seat, and an endless supply of pacifiers. And that’s just the first year. You’ll notice I didn’t mention day care costs which average over $1,000 a month. That’s because I realize the forces who want us to get knocked up at least six times would rather we moms stay home and out of the work force. (I suppose I should add lost wages, but math is hard.)

The medal is as patronizing as it is worthless. The scholarship idea is bathed in irony because parents of small kids have no time to shower let alone do a post-doc fellowship. It’s also tinged with hypocrisy because Trump’s proposed cuts to the budget would eliminate the Fulbright grant program.

This is just the start of this episode of Irony or Hypocrisy. It gets better. Let’s spin the wheel.

Spin the Wheel: Irony or Hypocrisy

In a statement, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “The President wants America to be a country where all children can safely grow up and achieve the American dream.” This tracks well with Trump’s statement following the shooting at Florida State University last week in which he vowed to protect children, oh no, wait, that’s not what he said he needed to protect, “I have an obligation to protect the Second Amendment. I ran on the Second Amendment, among many other things, and I will always protect the Second Amendment.”

You May Want To Read: What Really Happens During School Shooting Drills?

Another suggestion is that we use sex education to teach women about their cycles. I agree that women should know more about their cycles especially in a political environment where access to real birth control is under threat. Nonetheless there is irony in the fact that the people who are so squidgy about sex they’ve banned textbooks for having pictures of vaginas are now suggesting teachers should show high school kids how to stick a finger way up there to check their cervical fluids (hi, Cecily). We also have to be aware that this pro-menstrual message is itself a threat to contraception. (It’s a viscous cycle. See what I did there. It’s two puns in one.)

You May Want To Read: Top 12 Countries with the Best Sex Education Programs in the World… guess who isn’t on the list?

Enter MAHA: Make America Hyperfertile Again

There is also the suggestion that we go MAHA on fertility. A Heritage Foundation official proposed expanding NIH research on infertility and reproductive health conditions, including endometriosis, so that we could better understand and treat infertility. I love it! That’s a great idea, at least until we get RFK, Jr. involved and start coming up with treatments for infertility that involve cod liver oil, beef tallow, and raw milk (perhaps in the form of a douche).

This suggestion is also dripping with hypocrisy. The Trump administration has been gutting NIH funding right and left. One of the projects cut was studying uterine fibroids, a condition that can cause infertility. The research was likely cut because it used the word “women” in its description which sounded the DEI alarm bells and triggered the DOGE hammer. In fact, NIH staff was told not to approve any new projects that have the words “DEI,” “transgender” or “women” in them. In a world where we are no longer allowed to say “people with uteruses,” how can one write a grant to study infertility without using the word women?

Another thing slashed this month was a CDC lab that tracked cases of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea. The lab—which has been doing this work for 40 years—had 28 employees, 10 fellows, and a repository of 50,000 isolates of gonorrhea. Both the pre-Trump CDC and the World Health Organization say that antibiotic resistance is a global health disaster waiting to happen if we don’t monitor it closely and develop new antibiotics. The bacterium that causes gonorrhea has become resistant to almost every drug we’ve thrown at it since the 1920s. We’re down to one class of antibiotics (with a few more in development). We all remember when Trump wanted us to stop tracking Covid-19 cases so his numbers didn’t look so bad. If we take that approach to antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea there will come a day when some of the estimated 1.6 million cases each year can’t be cured. You know what untreated gonorrhea leads to? Infertility.

You May Want To Read: Teen STD Rates Are Surging: Is Your Child At Risk?

More Cuts: Goodbye, Head Start

Trump’s love for parents and children also showed this week when he proposed eliminating funding for Head Start. The federally funded program started by Lyndon B. Johnson not only provides free pre-school to low-income families so that parents can work, it also provides two meals a day to children as well as medical care, dental care, and other social services. Over the last six decades, Head Start has been proven to work both in the short term and the long term. (For more than two of those decades, my mother ran the Head Start program in our county.)

Research has shown that Head Start children perform considerably better on cognitive and social-emotional measures in kindergarten, had fewer attention problems, and exhibited fewer negative behaviors than children who stayed home with parents. Moreover, Head Start participants are 12% less likely to live in poverty as adults and 29% less likely to receive public assistance. Funding Head Start and even expanding access (say to people who make too much money to qualify but not enough to pay the high cost of day care and preschool) might actually convince more people to have kids.

But that’s not what the pronatalist forces want. For one thing the majority of Head Start kids are not white. In 2022, 37% were Hispanic and 28% were Black. For another, 13% of kids in the program have disabilities. Also, the program is designed to help parents work. The “please, please procreate” folks come at this from a bunch of different directions. Some of them are hoping for a new generation of June Cleavers (Project 1955 2025) while some (cough, Elon, cough) are trying to seed the population with mini-mes. Make no mistake though—all of them of them are racist, sexist, and ableist.

The Real Agenda Behind Pronatalism

There are legitimate reasons for a country to be concerned about falling fertility rates. The workers of today will need to rely on the workers of tomorrow for goods, services, and care, and to keep the safety net of Social Security and Medicare running (if either survive Trump 2.0). The fewer babies born now, the fewer workers there will be in 20 or 30 years. (Unless of course we import them from other countries through an immigration plan.) But the pronatalists who have the administration’s ear have more in common with eugenicists than economists.

Pronatalist influencers Simone and Malcolm Collins once explained to an undercover reporter that they have a special IVF procedure that screens for IQ. “The studies let us know what our genetic predilection for IQ is. We will never choose a child who is less privileged in IQ than either of us.” Umm, that’s not how it frigging works (and I don’t think you’re using the word predilections correctly). Malcolm has since shrugged off that comment saying they sometimes try to be extra crazy to get attention, which could also explain Simone’s sexy glasses and Amish bonnet look. The idea for the motherhood medal apparently came from Simone who is 27 and already has five children. (Though to be fair, both Hitler and Stalin thought of it first.)

Enter Elon Musk: Tech Mogul Turned Super-Breeder

Then there’s our unelected co-President Elon Musk who some believe to have far more children than the 14 we know about. A new Wall Street Journal exposé focuses on his obsessive spawning. The tech billionaire has said that population decline is a bigger threat to civilization than global warming. He has also reportedly told people close to him that he’s concerned that the “third world” will outbreed the West.

Musk seems to think he can singlehandedly fix that by fathering “legions” of high-IQ children. (I wanted to coin the phrase singledickedly, but alas most of most of his children appear to have been conceived via IVF, so singlehandedly remains accurate.) According to the WSJ, Musk gave sperm to a high-profile woman in Japan at the request of officials in that country, told one of his baby mamas that they should consider surrogates to pump out kids faster, and DM’d cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong offering her money to have his baby despite having never met her. (When she said no, he acted like the mature grown-up that he is and stopped following her on X.)

You may want to read: Pronatalism in the Spotlight: Elon Musk, Falling Birth Rates, and the Global Fertility Crisis

Project 2025: Pronatalism with a White Picket Fence

The more mainstream version of pronatalism is represented by the Heritage Foundation and spelled out in Project 2025. These supporters would not approve of Musk heavy breeding because he keeps his harem at bay. The Project 2025 gang swears the goal isn’t just more babies it’s more families, specifically more heterosexual married couples with at least 2.5 kids and a minivan. (The white part is implied.)

It’s this version of pronatalism that brought us the Dobbs decision and strict abortion regulations across parts of the country. It’s this version of pronatalism that is using the Mifepristone case to argue that preventing teen pregnancy is bad for states because they’ll lose population and the privileges (votes and funding) that come with having more people. And it’s this version of pronatalism that is seeding a seemingly home-grown movement against hormonal contraception.

Other than calling himself the fertilization president, Trump hasn’t done much to promote procreation. Still, a government that is actively pushing for people to have more children feels like a cross between The Handmaid’s Tale’s Gilead and Hitler’s Germany. Trump’s hero Viktor Orban, who dragged his country into a dictatorship, offered married, Hungarian women under 40 loans worth $35,000 that would be forgiven if they had at least three children. He also put in incentives for larger families. The programs briefly raised fertility rates, but the changes were not permanent.

It’s About Wombs, Not Women

Remember, the goal isn’t just more children, it’s “more, better people” as one pronatalist matchmaking group puts it. That may just mean more rich, white kids or it may mean more kids who are neither transgender nor autistic (see RFK, Jr’s horrifying description of autistic people from last week). Either way, the pronatalist movement sees women as less important than their wombs. They probably haven’t even noticed the new stats that show pregnancy-related death rate rose 28% in recent years. They don’t care. They’re busy passing laws to ban abortions even in medical emergencies and give fetuses equal rights. These policies harm women in the name of the children pronatalists so desperately want [some of] us to have. This is anti-woman, not pro-family. Let’s not let them dress it up with cash and prizes.