The way Americans talk about government efforts to boost birth rates is always odd. Since conservatives want more people to get married and have children, those opposed to conservatives often declare this an unworthy and nefarious goal. But encouraging marriage and parenthood, per se, isn’t the issue. The real problem here is that pronatalist policies, as traditionally understood, just don’t work.
Around the world, we’ve seen pronatalist policies fail. Even those that “succeed”—loosely speaking—tend to only shift the timing of births, not the total number.
And that’s what we need more people to keep in mind as the Trump administration explores new pronatalist policies.
Ideas the administration is reportedly considering include giving women a $5,000 “baby bonus” after each birth and reserving 30 percent of prestigious Fulbright scholarships for people who are married or have children.
These are things that would reward people for being married or having children, sure. But they are not the kinds of things that will move the needle on fertility rates. Even if slightly improved chances at winning a rare scholarship were enough to change childbearing decisions (a dubious idea), the number of people this could even possibly start to sway is vanishingly small.
And while I’m sure mothers may appreciate a check after childbirth, $5,000 isn’t even enough to cover the cost of hospital bills for the uninsured. Even for those with insurance, more than half of that money could be eaten up by labor and delivery costs, after which there are 18 more years (at least) of financial costs to consider. The idea that $5,000 would sway families to have children they otherwise wouldn’t have is absurd.
Common sense and rigorous research both come to the same conclusions here: Decisions surrounding children are highly personal, multifaceted, and not generally swayed by government propaganda or bribes. Raising children requires so much more than just money or pats on the back. And it requires giving up a lot, too—there’s an opportunity cost in having a child, or having more of them.
That doesn’t mean that having children is not worth the cost, for many people. Just the same, many people will not find the necessary trade-offs to be palatable. Besides, even many people who are open to marrying and having children only want to do so under the right circumstances—typically, in a partnership with someone they love, trust, and can see being a good parent. It’s just not possible to wave a wand and manifest these circumstances.
To put it simply: Many of the reasons people are staying single or childless, or having fewer kids, are far beyond the government’s control. (For more on this, see “Government Can’t Fix American’s Baby Bust.”)
This is why we see pronatalist policies fail, time and again.
The left and the right tend to reach for different explanations for falling fertility rates. On the right, you tend to hear cultural explanations, like that nuclear families and stay-at-home mothers are devalued. On the left, you tend to hear financial explanations—that the cost of raising children is too expensive so we need more government programs to help ease the economic burdens of childrearing. But when you look at countries around the world that have tried more of column A, more of column B, or both, you see the same failure to boost births or even stave off further fertility rate declines. (For much more on this subject, see “Storks Don’t Take Orders From the State“.) Returns on big pronatalist policies tend to be small, and often just involve shifting around the timing of births.
Take Hungary, a conservative country that saw birth rate increases after implementing new pronatalist policies last decade. Hungary went from a total fertility rate—the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime—of 1.4 in 2015 to 1.6 in 2021. But by 2024, Hungary’s fertility rate was down to 1.38. (For comparison, the U.S. fertility rate in 2024 was 1.64 and replacement-level fertility is considered to be 2.1.) If the country’s birth-boosting policies worked, it was only for a very short time. And some researchers suggest that the shifts weren’t the result of pronatalist policies anyway; birth rates were especially low for a little bit because of economic crisis, then got especially high for a few years because of all the women who delayed having kids during the crisis time.
Or take European social democracies of the sort touted by American leftists for their expansive government programs for children and working women. These, too, have seen steep fertility rate declines. Both Denmark and Sweden, for instance, have fertility rates around 1.4.
Even France—for years held up as country where pronatalist policies were working—has seen fertility rate decreases since 2011, with the total fertility rate in 2024 at 1.59.
“Coercing women into having children should always be anathema, but we should aim to create a society where people generally feel optimistic enough about the future to want children and secure enough to have them,” writes opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times this week. Her column focuses on big-scale shifts related to gender norms that may influence fertility.
But there are also tweaks in the government’s control that could help make life easier for existing families, and they involve removing government barriers and bureaucracies, rather than creating new ones. Tim Carney details many of these in Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, which suggests that everything from overzealous housing policies to overcautious car seat rules to state-enforced helicopter parenting is making life less pleasant and more difficult for families, especially larger ones.
These are very much not the kinds of ideas that the Trump administration is floating, at least not according to the Times article.
What is reportedly being considered: government-funded menstruation education, to help women better understand when ovulation occurs.
I think it is true that too few girls and young women get a good lesson on fertility while growing up. American society and schools have been much more likely to simply promote abstinence from sex altogether or suggest anyone so much as thinking about sex should get on birth control pills.
But when women are ready to have children, they can easily find information about ovulatory cycles and things like that. It’s unclear how some sort of federal ovulation awareness program would be better than talking to their doctors, or consulting the many books, apps, websites, etc., devoted to this topic.
Besides, there is no evidence that declining birth rates are a result of women being too clueless to understand how ovulation works. And to the extent that there is lack of knowledge, it likely results in unintended pregnancies as often as it does thwarted reproductive ambitions. Better education about menstruation cycles could easily decrease birth rates.
(Now seems like a good time for a reminder that the biggest driver in America’s falling fertility rate is an absolutely massive decline in teen pregnancies.)
Better education about menstruation in sex ed classes could be a good thing, because it’s important information for both getting pregnant and avoiding pregnancy. It’s very weird to suggest—as one doctor quoted in the Times article does—that teaching people about their natural fertility cycle is necessarily rooted in politics and religion rather than science and “actual medicine.”
But better education here is something states or local school districts can handle, without the federal government getting involved. Getting the federal government involved only increases the likelihood of it becoming a big political issue, with each administration trying to put its own spin on something that should have no spin.
We need girls and women to understand their reproductive cycles so they can make their own reproductive choices, not so they can make the particular choices preferred by whoever is in power in Washington at the time.
