The Trump administration has been soliciting ideas on ways to encourage Americans to get married and have more children, according to a new report in the New York Times.
Some of the proposals have ranged from ridiculous (reserving Fulbright scholarships for married applicants or those with children) to unnerving, like awarding a “National Medal of Motherhood” to women with six or more children, a tradition once embraced by Nazi Germany. Most of the economic proposals face serious headwinds given that Republicans are focused on cutting at least $1.5 trillion from the federal budget. Still, if the self-described “fertilization president” throws his weight behind one or several “pronatalist” ideas, Republicans might very well scramble to accommodate.
One idea Trump might be more likely to endorse is a lump-sum “baby bonus” — the Times floated a proposal for a $5,000 payment to mothers after giving birth — which Trump recently said “sounds like a good idea.” This wasn’t the first time he expressed support for the concept: At the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump declared that he would “support baby bonuses for a new baby boom.”
While the mix of recent pronatal proposals has ignited fierce debate and skepticism on the left — one prominent progressive advocate called them “state-sponsored coercion in a milk-maid dress” — a baby bonus itself is hardly radical; countries around the world use them to support new parents. What’s at stake in the US isn’t whether these relatively small payments might nudge birth rates upward or provide some short-term financial relief, but whether embracing them here and in this moment would bolster a political agenda focused on traditional gender roles and reproductive oppression, while ignoring deeper societal investments parents actually need.
How baby bonuses work
There are different versions of the baby bonus idea floating around US policy circles right now; in addition to the $5,000 payment, the Niskanen Center think tank recently pitched a $2,000 baby bonus (with the federal budget constraints clearly top of mind) and the American Compass think tank has been pitching a version that would give $2,000 to single parents but $4,000 to married couples, part of a broader conservative push to incentivize marriage.
During the presidential campaign last year, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris pitched her own iteration of the idea: a $6,000 tax break for new parents. Harris stressed that the benefit would go toward easing financial pressure on families during the first year of their child’s life and supporting a critical period of newborn development. (It wasn’t clear if Harris’s proposal would have been issued in one lump sum or via 12 monthly installments.)
Baby bonuses do provide quick relief that’s more flexible to new parents during a period when they often have to reduce their working hours and cover new caretaking expenses. The Urban Institute found that having a baby in the US causes a 10.4 percent income drop on average in the month the baby is born, compared with before the pregnancy. Another study affirmed that American households see a significant dip in their income in the months after giving birth, especially for single mothers living alone. Unlike the existing Child Tax Credit (CTC), a baby bonus would arrive immediately rather than forcing new parents to wait around until tax season for financial aid.
Whether in the form of lump-sum payments, monthly stipends, or a mix of cash and baby supplies, baby bonuses have been backed by governments around the world for decades. Finland pioneered the idea back in 1938, when the Nordic country started to offer low-income mothers the choice of either a cash benefit or a box with essential baby items, known as a “maternity package.” By 1949, Finland expanded the program to be universal for all expectant mothers who attended prenatal care before their fourth month of pregnancy. This program inspired over 60 other countries to advance their own “maternity packages” in the decades since.
Today, for example, Australia provides new parents with payments of about $1,700 in US dollars over the first 13 weeks, while Singapore spreads its baby bonus of roughly $8,000 over 6.5 years. Germany provides regular child stipends (about $275 per month in US dollars) on top of its universal childcare system. Japan, meanwhile, combines a lump-sum baby bonus (about $3,200 in US dollars) with monthly payments (about $100 per month for each child under three).
In 2019, the left-wing People’s Policy Project proposed establishing a similar idea in the US, where every family would receive a care box of items three months before the birth of a child as well as a $300 per month allowance once the child was born until age 18.
Baby bonuses don’t boost fertility very much
On its own, giving parents a few thousand dollars isn’t enough to fuel a “baby boom.” Studies from around the world show that, while these policies generally have a positive impact on fertility, the effect tends to be fairly modest and can vary a lot depending on the country and the specific group of people receiving them. In some cases, baby bonuses may just help slow the rate of fertility decline; a recent study found South Korea’s total fertility rate would have been 4.7 percent lower in 2015 without its post-birth cash transfers.
Leah Libresco Sargeant, who authored the Niskanen Center’s $2,000 baby bonus proposal, stresses that she neither sees the idea as a “bribe” to convince people to have kids, nor large enough to “strongly shift” someone’s fertility plans. Sargeant adds she does think a baby bonus could help some people decide to carry a pregnancy they otherwise may have ended for financial reasons.
More broadly, though, Sargeant believes the policy could help Americans in an unusual period of life, whether that’s by paying a grandparent to help out, or allowing parents who are eligible for job-protected leave under the (unpaid) Family and Medical Leave Act to actually take time off. This, she points out, helped inform some of the original advocacy behind Australia’s baby bonus, which was introduced in 2004 partly to support moms ineligible for employer-funded paid leave.
Trump and his allies may prove bad messengers for an otherwise good idea
Democratic lawmakers and progressive advocates may agree in the abstract on the worthiness of a baby bonus, but most view current discussions as a distraction from the Trump administration’s broader agenda, including tariffs that could dramatically increase the cost of raising children as well as sink the economy into a recession.
Adding insult to injury is the fact the White House recently gutted federal teams focused on maternal health and reproductive medicine, proposed to eliminate funding for the federal preschool program that cares for nearly 800,000 low-income children, and has seemingly nothing to say about America’s lack of paid parental leave and the often exorbitant out-of-pocket costs of giving birth, especially for those uninsured. House Republicans will soon be voting on cuts to Medicaid, a move that could strip health insurance away from millions more people. (Trump claims he would veto such cuts.)
“Once ‘pronatalist’ Musk and Trump are finished slashing the country’s already inadequate safety net, the United States is likely to suffer a baby bust, not boom,” Joan Walsh wrote recently at The Nation.
Beyond the economic agenda, there’s also real suspicion about the underlying goals of those in the pronatalist movement, where many leading voices openly oppose abortion rights and embrace a return to more traditional gender roles. The Heritage Foundation, one of the organizations pitching the Trump administration on pronatal policies, called last year to reduce federal subsidies to higher education, so as to discourage young people from spending more time in school instead of starting families. While the Niskanen Center is neutral on abortion, Sargeant, who authored their baby bonus idea, opposes it. And Elon Musk, perhaps one of the most notorious champions of boosting birth rates, wants to specifically create more “highly intelligent” people. (Some conservative pronatalists have distanced themselves from Musk.)
For now, despite the pronatalism movement’s knack for generating headlines, fiscal conservatives’ drive to slash federal spending makes even a modest baby bonus unlikely to materialize. As Kevin Corinth, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise argued last week, increased spending on child benefits could exacerbate “the urgent problem” of a ballooning federal debt, which Corinth said would make it even harder to raise a family due to higher taxes and lower economic growth.
Conservatives generally tend to favor expanding child tax credits (which reduce tax liability) over refundable credits or direct payments, and they tend to favor benefits tied to employment rather than welfare they allege could promote having children outside of marriage. In Congress, some Republicans have been putting forward ideas to expand the CTC and introduce new tax credits for pregnant women.
Even conservative writer and mother of six Bethany Mandel wrote in the New York Post over the weekend that leaders need to do much more for parents than a one-time payment. The $5,000 baby bonus idea, she said, felt like, “a symbolic gesture in the face of a sinking reality.”
As policymakers and activists continue to debate birth rates, budget priorities, and reproductive rights, American families find themselves caught between competing political agendas while their immediate needs for support go unmet.
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