Sinister motives behind Trump’s pro-baby push exposed in new report

The Trump administration's push for Americans to have more children has been well documented, from Vice President JD Vance's insults aimed at "childless cat ladies" to officials' meetings with "pronatalist" advocates who want to boost U.S. birth rates, which have been declining since 2007.

But a report released by the National Women's Law Center (NWLC) on Wednesday details how the methods the White House have reportedly considered to convince Americans to procreate more may be described by the far right as "pro-family," but are actually being pushed by a eugenicist, misogynist movement that has little interest in making it any easier to raise a family in the United States.

The proposals include bestowing a "National Medal of Motherhood" on women who have more than six children, giving a $5,000 "baby bonus" to new parents, and prioritizing federal projects in areas with high birth rates.

"Underneath shiny motherhood medals and promises of baby bonuses is a movement intent on elevating white supremacist ideology and forcing women out of the workplace," said Emily Martin, chief program officer of the National Women's Law Center.

The report describes how "Silicon Valley tech elites" and traditional conservatives who oppose abortion rights and even a woman's right to work outside the home have converged to push for "preserving the traditional family structure while encouraging women to have a lot of children."

With pronatalists often referring to "declining genetic quality" in the U.S. and promoting the idea that Americans must produce "good quality children," in the words of evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman, the pronatalist movement "is built on racist, sexist, and anti-immigrant ideologies."

If conservatives are concerned about population loss in the U.S., the report points out, they would "make it easier for immigrants to come to the United States to live and work. More immigrants mean more workers, which would address some of the economic concerns raised by declining birth rates."

But pronatalists "only want to see certain populations increase (i.e., white people), and there are many immigrants who don't fit into that narrow qualification."

The report, titled "Baby Bonuses and Motherhood Medals: Why We Shouldn't Trust the Pronatalist Movement," describes how President Donald Trump has enlisted a "pronatalist army" that's been instrumental both in pushing a virulently anti-immigrant, mass deportation agenda and in demanding that more straight couples should marry and have children, as the right-wing policy playbook Project 2025 demands.

Trump's former adviser and benefactor, billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, has spoken frequently about the need to prevent a collapse of U.S. society and civilization by raising birth rates, and has pushed misinformation and fearmongering about birth control.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy proposed rewarding areas with high birth rates by prioritizing infrastructure projects, and like Vance has lobbed insults at single women while also deriding the use of contraception.

The report was released days after CNN detailed the close ties the Trump administration has with self-described Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, who heads the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, preaches that women should not vote, and suggested in an interview with correspondent Pamela Brown that women's primary function is birthing children, saying they are "the kind of people that people come out of."

Wilson has ties to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose children attend schools founded by the pastor and who shared the video online with the tagline of Wilson's church, "All of Christ for All of Life."

But the NWLC noted, no amount of haranguing women over their relationship status, plans for childbearing, or insistence that they are primarily meant to stay at home with "four or five children," as Wilson said, can reverse the impact the Trump administration's policies have had on families.

"While the Trump administration claims to be pursuing a pro-baby agenda, their actions tell a different story," the report notes. "Rather than advancing policies that would actually support families—like lowering costs, expanding access to housing and food, or investing in child care—they've prioritized dismantling basic need supports, rolling back longstanding civil rights protections, and ripping away people's bodily autonomy."

The report was published weeks after Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law—making pregnancy more expensive and more dangerous for millions of low-income women by slashing Medicaid funding and "endangering the 42 million women and children" who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for their daily meals.

While demanding that women have more children, said the NWLC, Trump has pushed an "anti-women, anti-family agenda."

Martin said that unlike the pronatalist movement, "a real pro-family agenda would include protecting reproductive healthcare, investing in childcare as a public good, promoting workplace policies that enable parents to succeed, and ensuring that all children have the resources that they need to thrive not just at birth, but throughout their lives."

"The administration's deep hostility toward these pro-family policies," said Martin, "tells you all that you need to know about pronatalists' true motives.”