President Donald Trump's administration is eyeing new ways to encourage people to start families — and one floated by pronatalists calls for dangling a medal for people who have six or more children.
Among the ideas the administration is considering: so-called "baby bonuses" — a $5,000 infusion to every American mother who has a baby — reserviing scholarship money to applicants who are married or have children and educating women on their menstual cycles so they're informed when they're most likely to conceive, The New York Times reported.
Simone and Malcolm Collins, however, have pushed the White House to consider executive orders, including one that would establish a “National Medal of Motherhood” to mothers with six or more children.
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“Look at the number of kids that major leaders in the administration have,” Collins told the Times, adding: “You didn’t hear about kids in the same way under Biden.”
Kiera Butler, a senior editor and reporter at Mother Jones, flagged the concept for its roots with authoritarian regimes.
The Collinses, she wrote Monday, "can’t take full credit for the idea of a motherhood medal."
"France has issued a similar medal since 1920, but the idea really picked up steam when Adolf Hitler first conferred a similar honor on German mothers of eight or more children in 1939, calling it the Cross of Honour of the German Mother."
Butler noted that 3 million women received the medal from 1939-1944. Jews were excluded.
And that's not the only such regime to try the idea.
"The fascist Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin followed suit, offering a similar medal in 1944. The highest honor went to mothers of nine or more children, though mothers of seven and eight children were also recognized. Since then, the motherhood medal has been especially popular in authoritarian regimes the world over, including in Hungary, Kazakhstan, and Russia," she noted.
Butler also flagged the proposal for what it didn't include.
"Noticeably lacking from the pronatalist proposals discussed in the New York Times piece were policies that would help families manage the demands of parenting—things like childcare subsidies, expanded access to healthcare, and more support for caregivers of disabled children."
