I am a woman. But I am also a college student, a sister and a friend. I intend to attend law school and travel. It is only then that I would like to have a child — maybe two if the first one is really quiet.
Unfortunately, this is incompatible with the current “call of duty” for women in the United States. Taking a look within the current administration, Vice President J.D. Vance is quoted saying, “I want more babies in the United States of America,” in his inaugural address to the U.S. people.
Just weeks after his inauguration, President Donald Trump declared, “the importance of family formation and that our nation’s public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children.” Trump’s words were followed by an executive order in February pledging support for in vitro fertilization and a policy change in October to expand its access.
While none of these particular policies are inherently bad, they play into a larger movement for reshaping the expectations of American women. This encouragement of larger families ties back to a once avant-garde ideology known as pronatalism. Increasingly, the pronatalist rhetoric has made its way into the mainstream, warning Americans of an apocalyptic future marked by economic collapse due to falling birth rates.
Currently, this ideology is marked as a token of the far right, denoted as a “Trumpist” belief that falls in line with the ideals of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” And while it’s not entirely untrue that far-right attitudes align with pronatalist philosophies, those who speak out against blatant pronatalism are equally as guilty of building arguments around patriarchal rhetoric.
In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood writes glaring contradictions within the pronatalist practices of “Gilead.” Handmaids must produce more children, but the government of Gilead either killed or demoted all of the doctors trained specifically for treating women.
Similarly, contradictions in the right’s pronatalist push are present in modern America as well. The New York Times notes that policies attempting to incentivize women in “rich” countries to have more children are not likely to succeed. In Russia and some European countries, such programs were notably insufficient in reaching population goals.
If population increases are what pronatalists like Trump and Vance seek, then they should support immigration, which can allay the decline in birth rates. Instead, they have enacted more restrictive immigration policies and cracked down on illegal immigration. The Associated Press reported that immigration crack downs are weighing heavily on the labor market. While this may not directly link to the pronatalist movement, it stands as a contradiction in the policymaking strategies of the administration that endorses both immigration crackdowns and pro-population growth.
Insofar as pronatalism advocates for the commodification of women’s choice to build a family, it is less a protective measure for the family and more about the production of economic growth. Praising the “traditional family” is reflected in policy through the regulation and imposed expectations of women’s autonomy.
As the state cracks down on who is granted entry to the nation, it demands women to fill its empty cradles. However, progress will not come from legislating wombs, but from trusting women to define what fulfillment, family and future mean for themselves.
