As the Trump administration rolls out “The One Big Beautiful Bill”(OBBB) and in vitro fertilization (IVF) subsidies, advocates warn that pronatalist policies are dictating who is “fit” to reproduce.
With birth rates declining nationwide, a conservative movement called pronatalism is advocating for the state to actively encourage childbirth through policy. Reproductive justice advocates say it would reward certain forms of reproduction while placing a greater risk on Black women.
Dorianne Mason, Esq., the senior director of Health Equity and Contraceptive Access for the National Women’s Law Center, has challenged the public to look at who the administration is encouraging to have more children.
“When pronatalists encourage people to have children, they are not thinking about brown and Black bodies having those children,” Mason stated. “It is about advancing patriarchy and ensuring that there are more white Christian children that are being born.”
Project 2025, a conservative agenda authored by a coalition of former and current Trump officials, opens with a pledge to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life.” While the administration hasn’t confirmed its alignment with any explicit pronatalist agenda, anonymous reports from the New York Times last year allege that White House aides were assessing ways to “persuade women to have more children.”
One proposal the White House shared with aides would target America’s flagship federal exchange program, the Fulbright Scholarship, reserving 30 percent of the slots for applicants who are married or have children. Another would provide government-funded programs that educate women about their cycles so they can better track their fertility.
Congress passed a $1,000 federal “Trump Account” for every child born between 2025 and 2028 in his OBBB. Families can claim the accounts when filing their 2025 taxes this year. The act also passed an increased Child Tax Credit that permanently accounts for inflation, so the bonus for having a child grows every year while other tax breaks remain at a flat rate.
Last month, the government also launched TrumpRX.gov, a portal that includes discounted IVF medication. This comes just months after the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) received $1.5 million dollars from the administration to create an infertility training center that will teach over 3,000 Title X family planning clinics to shift their focus from contraception to finding treatments for infertility.
During an event last year for Women’s History Month, Trump made his plans to increase childbirth known.
“I’ll be known as the fertilization president, and that’s okay,” said the president. “We want more babies, to put it very nicely. We need great children, beautiful children in our country,” Trump said.
The pronatalist movement’s agenda is simple: keep population levels high to prevent slowed economic growth and reduce reliance on taxpayer money by elderly dependents.
According to Carolette Norwood PhD., head of sociology and criminology at Howard University, declining fertility is a relatively recent development, concentrated largely in wealthy and industrialized nations.
“In agrarian economies, having many children made economic sense . . . In contrast, in wealthy industrialized societies, children are more likely to be understood as a financial liability,” said Norwood. “Women are no longer compelled to bear as many children as in previous eras.”
Elon Musk, one of the most vocal proponents of pronatalism, has spearheaded high-tech fertility solutions like the TrumpRX portal. Project 2025 architect Russel Vought, who worked directly in the administration as the former Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has openly praised Christian nationalism and has influenced government policy to prioritize infrastructure funds for high-birth-rate communities.
Norwood also argues that some pronatalist ideals have become entangled with racial anxieties, stirring fear of declining white births in comparison to population growth in Black and brown populations. Even though demographic data also shows a decline in fertility rates of Black women, stereotypes of Black women being hyper-fertile and fears of immigration have stoked fears of “the great replacement theory.”
The great replacement theory frames increased diversity as an active threat to the white race and argues that the low birth rates among white people are a driving factor. The movement’s focus on childbirth is less about sustaining the economy than about controlling who is encouraged to reproduce and covertly punished for not doing so.
According to the CDC, Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. They also note that over 80 percent of U.S. pregnancy-related deaths are considered preventable. In this context, Mason asserts that policies promoting childbirth without addressing maternal mortality disparities prioritize patriarchal agendas at the expense of Black women’s lives.
Mason argues that pronatalists working to restrict access to healthcare coverage and abortion care do not actually value all lives equally.
“Pronatalism is more about having more children in this country that look like the types of children that they want, while also making it dangerous for Black women to have children,” Mason said.
Sweeping Medicare and Medicaid cuts have passed directly alongside pronatalist policies. The erosion of federal protections like the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) in several jurisdictions has stripped away one of the last safeguards for doctors performing emergency abortions in states with restrictive bans.
Mason contends that Medicaid cuts are an example of how pronatalist policies cannot coexist with laws that make reproduction more dangerous. Medicaid funds 65 percent of births from Black mothers, and new laws, like the Budget Reconciliation Act of 2025, will leave millions of women without lifesaving access to prenatal and postpartum care.
Scholars on reproductive and sexual health justice, such as Norwood, argue that the state has always been invested in who does and doesn’t give birth — pointing to the eugenics movement of the 20th century that surveilled, sterilized and regulated “unfit” populations like Black women and women with disabilities. Black women like Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist, suffered through nonconsensual hysterectomies so often that coercive sterilization practices like that of Hamer’s earned the shorthand “Mississippi appendectomy.”
When medical racism becomes embedded into policy, Norwood argues, no one wins.
“Here is the thing about white supremacy,” Norwood said. “It is a dangerous and deeply dehumanizing ideology that presumes the authority to decide who has the right to exist . . . It is cannibalistic — sustained by the exclusion and diminishment of others.”
Copy edited by Kennedi Bryant