Long before Donald Trump said he wanted to be known as the “fertilization president,” Hungary was trying mightily to promote traditional families and raise its lagging birthrate. “We are living in times when fewer and fewer children are being born throughout Europe,” its prime minister, Viktor Orban, said in 2019. Immigration, he argued, was no answer to this demographic shortfall. “We do not need numbers, but Hungarian children,” he said. “In our minds, immigration means surrender.”
He then announced a seven-point “family protection action plan” meant to encourage marriage and baby-making. It included government loans of 10 million Hungarian forints (at the time almost $35,000) to women under 40 when they married, which would be forgiven if they had at least three children. Large families would receive help buying cars and houses, and women who had at least four children would be exempt from personal income taxes for life.
Hungary became the intellectual center of the global pronatalist movement, hosting right-wing thinkers from around the world at biannual “demographic summits” in Budapest. In 2021, giving a speech in Virginia about the “civilizational crisis” of low birthrates, JD Vance lauded Orban’s family policies and asked, “Why can’t we do that here?”
Now that Vance is vice president, the administration might be about to try. “The White House has been hearing out a chorus of ideas in recent weeks for persuading Americans to get married and have more children,” The New York Times reported on Monday. Proposals include baby bonuses for American mothers and a new affirmative-action program that would set aside almost a third of Fulbright scholarships for people who are married or have kids. Malcolm and Simone Collins, oft-profiled pronatalists hoping to seed the future with their elite genes, reportedly sent the White House a draft executive order establishing a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women with at least six children. (Similar prizes existed in both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.)
But if Trump really wanted to arrest the decline in America’s fertility rate — which reached a historic low of 1.62 births per woman in 2023 — the best thing he could do is resign in concert with his entire administration. The crude chauvinism his presidency represents is a major impediment to the creation of healthy families.
There are plenty of people on the left who find fear of falling birthrates unseemly. I don’t blame them; the pronatalist milieu is rife with misogyny, white supremacy and eugenics. But rapidly declining fertility really is a problem. It’s likely to lead to stagnant, geriatric societies without enough young working people to maintain, let alone expand, the social safety net.
In a better world than ours, our demographic troubles could easily be solved by immigration. But as Sasha Polakow-Suransky wrote in his important 2017 book, “Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy,” rapid immigration reliably sets off nativist reactions, which in turn leads to the rise of terrible governments like our own. Indeed, shrinking, aging societies, with their depressing lack of dynamism, may be particularly bad at absorbing newcomers.
Coercing women into having children should always be anathema, but we should aim to create a society where people generally feel optimistic enough about the future to want children and secure enough to have them. Fertility rates in most developed countries may never again reach what demographers call “replacement level,” in which the average couple has 2.1 children, enough to keep a population stable. But there is a big difference between countries where the fertility rate is falling gradually, as in France, and those where it’s collapsing in a way that threatens society’s future, as in South Korea, whose work force could shrink by 50 percent over the next four decades.
There’s a common factor in countries where birthrates are cratering: They are almost always places that are both modern and highly patriarchal. Last year, the Nobel Prize-winning Harvard economist Claudia Goldin published a paper called “Babies and the Macroeconomy,” aiming to understand the difference between developed countries with moderately low birthrates, like Sweden, France and Britain, and those with very low ones, like South Korea, Japan and Italy. The lowest-fertility countries, Goldin found, modernized so recently and rapidly that social norms around gender equality didn’t have time to catch up. That left women with far more economic opportunity but not much more help from their husbands at home. Between 2009 and 2019, for example, the average woman in Japan spent 3.1 more hours a day on domestic work than men. The average Swedish woman spent 0.8 more hours than men.
In the most unequal countries in Goldin’s analysis, men wanted to have more children than women did. That makes intuitive sense, given that women would have to shoulder most of the burden of child care. “If fathers and husbands can credibly commit to providing the time and the resources, the difference in the fertility desires between the genders would disappear,” wrote Goldin.
Many women, it appears, simply don’t want to get stuck with all the domestic drudgery that comes with raising children, and there’s little evidence that state subsidies can make traditional social arrangements more appealing. Hungary spends more than 5 percent of its G.D.P. on its family policies, a greater percentage than America spends on defense. But while the fertility rate rose a bit in the years after the new policy was instituted in 2019 — when the total fertility rate was 1.55 children per woman — it has since sunk to 1.38.
According to a Pew poll last year, 57 percent of American young men say they want children someday, compared to only 45 percent of young women. Unfortunately, these men are getting the wrong message from our leaders about how to make themselves attractive prospects as fathers. The administration is led by an old-fashioned sexist who has bragged that he has never changed a diaper. “I’ll supply funds, and she’ll take care of the kids,” Trump once boasted to a radio host. Elon Musk has taken this notion to grotesque lengths; a Wall Street Journal exposé describes him hitting up women on the internet to incubate the legion of children he hopes to breed in advance of a coming apocalypse. While he has 14 known children, The Journal reports, the real number could be much higher.
Meanwhile, the anti-feminist influencers who form the White House’s informal brain trust and echo chamber tell their listeners that spending too much time with one’s own children is effeminate. “Everyone should look at their father like a superhero,” said Andrew Tate, a high-profile misogynist with powerful allies in the administration. “It’s hard to be a superhero if you’re home every day arguing with your wife changing diapers. That’s not what a man should do.”
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that in one 2022 survey, a majority of young women said they probably wouldn’t date a Trump supporter. The most recent season of the reality show “Love Is Blind” dramatized this political mismatch, with two progressive women ditching their fiancés over their politics. Growing alienation between the sexes will naturally make it harder for them to pair up and have kids.
One way Trump could help heal this rift is by going away.
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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
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