Pronatalism Is Not Sending Their Best

Trump and the MAGA movement are not serious about pronatalism any more than they are about any real domestic policy issue except cutting taxes and regulations (and things that help do that). Most of what they do domestically is just grifting, like giving targeted regulatory advantages to oligarchic allies; or political hate-mongering and White-maxxing, to motivate their base and governing coalition — like reducing access to abortion and reproductive healthcare, and mass deportation. Any substantive social policy agenda is a distant memory for Trump and his party. That’s how they treat pronatalism, as another superficial sop to poorly-informed followers and those who exploit their animosities and anxieties.

This is just as well. If they devoted half the attention and resources to pronatalism as they do to mass deportation, for example, the consequences would be devastating. As it is, pronatalism is a mostly a fictional talking point (partly because the abortion bans are so unpopular they don’t want to bring it up in mixed company beyond the occasional reference to a “culture of life”).

Trump gave it about an hour yesterday, in an Oval Office event organized around a minor adjustment to health insurance policy (a draft of a rule for public comment) which would allow companies a tax break for offering fertility treatment coverage as part of their employee health plans, as they currently can with dental and vision benefits (which are of course usually inadequate).

The event was one of those embarrassing things where everyone stands behind the snoozing president and takes turns offering him idiotic praise and lies about some half-baked website or executive order. (In the video, Trump is so bored by the topic that, to help stay awake, he cracks humiliating jokes with the off-camera husbands of the women speaking.)

In the preamble to the event, during his sometimes-revealing unscripted vamping, Trump made it clear how much he has considered the issue of fertility treatment, repeating an old story.

“I shouldn’t admit this,” he said, “but the first time I really heard about the fertility was through Katie [Britt, the junior senator from Alabama]. She said, ‘Sir, we have to do something.’ And I’m a quick study, so I learned everything there is to learn in about three, four minutes [Britt: “That’s right!”], and I became the father of fertility. [Britt: “That is true!”] It just made a lot of sense to me. She explained it well.”

The story refers to a 2024 incident in which the supreme court of Alabama issued a ruling that would have essentially banned IVF, by treating embryos as humans — a natural extension of their anti-abortion ideology, which typical anti-abortion hypocrites want applied only to disfavored categories of women seeking abortions, not married, White Christians using IVF for infertility. The legislature quickly rammed through an exception for IVF in Alabama, to avoid the negative national electoral consequences the overzealous decision threated. Trump falsely believes his post on the subject in 2024 was responsible for the reversal, making him the “father of fertility.” It’s so ridiculous that I should be able to just let a single major media outlet briefly explain it, but because they didn’t yesterday, here I am.

Anyway, I’m only mentioning this today to enter into the record the complete inanity of the two foremost administration officials present: Dr. Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

On birth rates, Dr. Oz went first:

“Let me speak a little bit about the reality that one in three Americans are under-babied. What does under-babied mean? That means that you either don’t have children, or you have less children than you would normally want to have. … We have a crisis that is causing our fertility rate to drop below 1.5. Replacement rate is 2.1. So we’re way below what we need just to replace the people that we have in America…”

No one bothered to define this term “under-babied,” so there is no way to fact-check the statistic. It’s only necessary to understand that women need babies or else they are deficient. Also, the total fertility rate (not the “fertility rate”) is not “below 1.5.” [fertility terms explained here.]

Kennedy followed a few minutes later, and he naturally went right to the issue of precious bodily fluids:

“We have, as Dr. Oz was pointing out, a fertility crisis in this country right now. We just found out that we’ve dropped now to 1.57 percent. The replacement rate is 2.1. A hundred years ago, we were at 3.27, so more than double that we are today. We are approaching the cataclysmic rates that Japan and China are now experiencing, that is threatening their economy. It’s a threat, not only to our economy, to our national security, it’s a direct threat to our Social Security Trust Fund, to the Medicare Trust Fund. President Trump has directed my agency to find out the cause of the fertility crisis, and that is part of this program. We’re looking at the impact of metabolic challenges, which directly affect fertility; of obesity, which affects fertility; of endocrine disruptors, of pesticides — of this toxic soup that our young women are walking around today — to try to figure it out. The fertility crisis for women began in 2007. For men in 1970, men had twice the sperm count as our teenagers do today. This is an existential crisis for our country.  We had a series of presidents that were trying to discourage childbirth and motherhood in this country. We now have a president that is trying to encourage it, and I want to thank you again for your leadership.”

Again, I’m not going to debunk all the things wrong there (although the number 1.57 does in fact correspond to the total fertility rate in 2025, which is not a percent). But most fundamentally he seems to be confusing the fertility with fecundity. In demography, fertility is how many babies a population has; fecundity is the biological capacity to produce babies. When the fertility rate rises or falls, it might or might not be because people are becoming more or less fecund. They might just be changing their contraception choices or sexual frequency. In modern societies, thankfully, fertility rates are much more determined by conscious choices and sexual behavior than by the presence or absence of health conditions that prevent reproduction — a fact that people who promote raw cow’s milk unlikely to appreciate.

A simple way to show that it’s very likely Kennedy is wrong in his assumption — the idea that the birth rate is the result of contaminated precious bodily fluids — is to compare birth rates of married couples and unmarried women. In the recent period of declining birth rates, since 2008 (not 2007), birth rates only declined among single women. You could spin out some hypothesis by which single people’s birth rates are more reflective of fecundity, but it seems very unlikely. Or, theoretically, married couples could have booming sperm counts and clean soup to walk around in, but I haven’t seen any evidence of that. So I think the data undermines the claim.

Here are two ways to look at it, both using the American Community Survey from 2001 to 2024 (data from IPUMS.org). First (updating a previous post), the percentage of women having a birth in the previous year, by marital status, showing the decline starting after 2008 (not 2007), and rising for married women after 2013.

If it was a toxic soup problem, I don’t think it would only affect single women, but maybe I’m missing something.

Single people are less likely to have children, of course. Republicans could complain about that (especially for teenagers), but really what they want is women (including teenagers) to be married and then have more children. Because the whole point is for sex to be an entry into a lifetime of subordination (for women) rather than an expression of human desire (or anything else). And of course, despite their multigenerational effort to reverse the progress of modernity, including by denying welfare support to millions of (disproportionately Black) single mothers, marriage rates have continued to fall. So birth rates are falling because single people are having fewer children, and because more people are single. Here’s a figure attempting to show both trends at once, with some floating explainer text:

Neither Trump nor Kennedy knows or cares about demography, especially family demography. Trump wants to appear rich and sexually virile, and be feared or admired by more virile men; and Kennedy wants to grift over environmental toxins. Their broader coalition includes a lot of people who know more, however, and are prepared to do more directed damage, if they ever get a chance to get their policy agenda going.

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Previously Published on familyinequality with Creative Commons License

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