As the administration defunds social programs that help families live and thrive, the White House is proposing cash incentives to up the birth rate. It's as creepy as it sounds.
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In 2023, when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was campaigning, he swore: “We will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom … I want a baby boom. Oh, you men are so lucky out there. You’re so lucky.” With evident good fortune for baby-making American men, it seems Trump is serious about at least one of his promises.
Last week, The New York Times reported that Trump has been meeting with advisors suggesting incentives to get Americans to have more children, including $5,000 “baby bonuses” after delivery.
According to the Times, Trump’s advisors on this front include Heritage Foundation policy analyst Emma Waters and senior research fellow Jay Richards. Their birthrate and family recommendations echo Project 2025, published by the Heritage Foundation and which asserts “married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure” and suggests the Bureau of Labor Statistics track marriage and fertility rates monthly. The now-infamous 900-page policy playbook is a formal manifesto of the Christian Right’s decades-long campaign to remake America in its image.
Of course, the current proposal to spur Americans to have more babies isn’t just about population—it’s part of a broader project to tightly define what makes a family, one that reflects conservative values.
Given the affiliation of Trump’s advisors on this issue, it makes sense to look at Project 2025’s first pillar, which aims “to restore the family as the centerpiece of American life.” That is, most specifically, a family “compris[ing] a married mother, father, and their children.”
In this depiction, a family is worthy only when the parents are heterosexual and married. Gender roles are baked in. Using “biblically based” definitions of marriage and family, Project 2025 suggests certain federal grants and programs “should affirm that children require and deserve both the love and nurturing of a mother and the play and protection of a father.”
Docile, loving woman. Male protector and playmate. As many children as possible.
Single and queer parents are erased.
This is not a new set of ideas, but is rooted in an evangelical worldview that informs policy shops like the Heritage Foundation. Their staff is simply working to codify a stringent theocratic worldview for all of us.
For all the coverage of Christian nationalism, its theological kin, Christian patriarchy is sliding into the White House via a side door. Christian patriarchy is a conservative, Christian worldview that mandates male headship over women and children, meaning the man holds authority, is spiritual leader, bread-winner, and ultimate decision-maker in the house. It insists marriage is exclusively, by design, between a man and a woman. These tenets undergird current policy proposals that could reshape which combinations of people loving one another are considered family.
For over a decade, I’ve reported on women from conservative, evangelical communities where they are taught to submit to their husbands and (exclusively male) church leaders. Such gender dynamics are treated as sacrosanct, based in a literalist biblical interpretation claiming women were created to be men’s helpers (Eve for Adam). I suspect this is why queer relationships and the concept of transgender identity is deemed so dangerous by the Christian Right. Such relationships or the existence of people outside the gender binary threaten the claim that in God’s design, women and men each have an immutable role; women are bound to submit to men.
For my book, Disobedient Women, I interviewed women who came of age reading the work of anti-feminist Mary Pride, who argued that women’s crucial role was bearing as many children as God would allow. Some of these women were “quiverfull,” taught that a mother’s spiritual contribution can be enumerated in the quantity of children she produces, each an arrow in the quiver of God’s army. Pride argued having more babies, say six or so, could help Christians out-populate humanists and feminists.
The Duggars, the TV family of Quiverfull Christians comprising Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their 19 children, were icons of the movement and followers of now-disgraced pastor Bill Gothard, who encouraged such big broods. Gothard pressured families who had taken surgical sterilization measures—tubal ligation or vasectomies—to reverse them and stop blocking God’s blessings.
The pastor’s annual homeschool conferences featured “reversal babies” paraded on stage. This reminds me of the “National Medal of Motherhood,” for mothers with six or more children—a reward is currently being floated around at the White House.
The rush to celebrate popping out a half-dozen or more babies ignores the potential toll on a woman’s body of rushing to fill a quiver—regardless of one-time, hypothetical baby bonuses. From women who felt spiritual pressure to have baby after baby, I heard how they ignored previous pregnancy complications and doctor’s warnings, eager to have another child, to prove their willingness to produce more Christian babies. In an interview for my book, Vyckie Garrison, who previously ascribed to quiverfull ideals, explained how, even after a dangerous delivery and another in which she had a uterine rupture, she’d tried to get pregnant again and again. She was willing to die in order to keep having babies for God.
GOP policies have already pushed and proposed to push us there. Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, devastating news stories have emerged about women dying, or coming close to it, because they could not access medically necessary or timely abortion care. Trump essentially axed the Centers for Disease Control’s Division of Reproductive Health, which was tasked with improving women’s health and the lives of children and families. Black women already suffer two to three times the risk of pregnancy-related complications as white women, and the Trump administration has cut grants for maternal health studies and research on disparities between different populations. Proposed cuts to Medicaid would also likely disproportionately affect maternal mortality, especially for Black mothers. What a time to ask women to belly up.
Some pronatalists, like Elon Musk, advocate wide-scale baby-making via any method, including in vitro fertilization, and are less concerned about the trappings of marriage. But Musk is a relative newcomer to a movement that has burgeoned within the Christian Right for decades.
Trump’s so-called “baby bonus” comes without paired policies for supporting a nation of increased numbers of children. It is all about the government trying to control people’s reproductive choices while denying programs to help those raising the resulting children with accessible healthcare, ample maternity and paternity leave, a stable economy, and thriving public schools.
Most parents know a $5,000 perk at birth won’t last. Depending on where a family lives and their medical coverage and childcare needs, they will spend between $20,000 and $50,000 in the child’s first year of life. The existing child tax credit helps, but is obviously being undermined by Trump, who has ordered the closure of the Department of Education–when 49.6 million American children rely upon public school access for their education. The loss of the DOE will disproportionately impact low-income and disabled kids. Over 24 million disadvantaged and disabled students are supported through Title I funding; DOE’s Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) supports 7.5 million kids. The National Disability Rights Network predicts the millions of children who receive disability services will see massive staffing and support reductions, leading to school removals, restraint and seclusion in school, and being placed in more restrictive settings with other disabled children.
Cuts to SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) have been proposed in order to cover tax breaks for the wealthy. Such cuts would lead to increased hunger for millions of people—families.
The Trump baby boom relies on a gauzy version of family, where the “baby bonus” is a perk for families who don’t require assistance for healthcare or whose children can be educated privately or at home and who will always have enough food and where able-bodied women are eager to have baby after baby and do most of the labor of raising them.
It’s a day-one philosophy when parenting is for life.
Having many children would more likely impact the life of American mothers. Childcare disproportionately falls to mothers in heterosexual marriages—even when women out-earn their husbands.
To its credit, Project 2025 does suggest funding for on-site childcare and to offset lost wages for parents who stay home with children (if only as a way of sidestepping universal childcare). But values behind Project 2025 cultivate the kind of American family led by a male breadwinner.
Quiverfull families, for example, usually live on one income earned by the male head of household cycles of pregnancy, nursing, and more pregnancy keep the woman busy). These churches dictate that a woman’s godly role is as a wife and mother, one who does not work outside the home. The woman is submissive and financially dependent. Too often, in such families, the logic of dominion results in abuse. For some women, it results in a quiet life of desperation; for others, like A Well-Trained Wife author Tia Levings, such submission leads to a life subjected to violence—including spankings as a form of marital discipline—and fleeing to save your own life and that of your children.
It comes as little surprise our wannabe authoritarian president has found kinship with a worldview that defines women’s purpose as reproduction. A chicken in every pot (if you can afford it without government help) and, for the unlucky, a tyrant in every home.
Such a restrictive model of marriage is a trap.
Vice President JD Vance, along with a cohort of manosphere bloggers and conservative Christians, have also been advocating to restrict or eliminate no-fault divorce—the freedom to end marriage without trial to prove wrongdoing—which is a daunting and risky proposition for someone enduring an abusive marriage. No-fault divorce correlates with reduced female suicide, domestic violence and spousal murder. It can also lead to other forms of family—single parents or new, blended families.
Trump’s appeal to pronatalism aims to exert influence over the most intimate decisions people can make. As a 2022 British Medical Journal article noted, globally, pronatalist policies tend to combine a “‘mission’ to raise birth rates with a promotion of conservative family values, where women have a duty and responsibility to bear children and thus secure the future of the nation.” Such policies, spanning locales as wide-ranging as Poland, China, Turkey, Iran and Russia, tend to reverse progress on gender equity and attack the rights of sexual and gender minorities. As noted in the BMJ, target birthrate policies, “are often embedded within an authoritarian and ethno-nationalist propagandist discourse.”
Do not be fooled. None of this is about children. It is about the power to remake America, starting from within your home.