Mykle Parker/Zuma
On Monday, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is mulling a suite of initiatives aimed at encouraging Americans to have more babies. Some of the suggestions for these programs came from pronatalists, a loose network of activists who believe that the humanity is basically doomed unless people have more kids. A few weeks back, I hung out with some of them in Austin near their conference, which is called, naturally, NatalCon. To say that most of the conference goers leaned right would be an understatement; some of the topics under discussion were the ethics of gene-editing embryos to endow them with desired traits, how having more babies could save “the West,” and why most women should forego careers to be mothers.
Some of the pronatalist proposals that the White House is said to be considering include are practical in nature: issuing a baby bonus of $5,000, reserving 30 percent of Fulbright Scholarships for applicants who are parents or are at least married, and offering classes to women to help them identify the most fertile times in their menstrual cycle.
Other proposals, meanwhile, seem aimed at changing cultural attitudes toward childbearing. A prime example of this is the idea of bestowing a special medal on mothers of six or more children. This suggestion came from Malcolm and Simone Collins, a Pennsylvania couple who seem to have appointed themselves heads of the pronatalist movement and were the belles of the ball at NatalCon. The medal was part of a collection of draft executive orders on pronatalism that the Collinses recently sent to the Trump administration.
But the Collinses 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. (Naturally, Jews were not among the 3 million women who received the medal between 1939 and 1944.) 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.
As I noted in my piece, the Trump administration has shown signs of enthusiasm for a pronatalist agenda. DOGE head Elon Musk, a father of 14, posts regularly on social media about the need for Americans to have more babies; he has also promoted NatalCon on X. Vice President JD Vance has proposed the idea of a weighted voting system, in which the votes cast by parents would be valued more highly than those by the childless. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy (a father of nine) signed a memo recommending that his department prioritize “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” Last month, during a Women’s History Month event at the White House, Trump said, “We’re gonna have tremendous goodies in the bag for women too. The women, between the fertilization and all the other things we’re talking about, it’s gonna be great. Fertilization. I’m still very proud of it, I don’t care. I’ll be known as the fertilization president and that’s okay.”
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. Nevertheless, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told the New York Times that Trump “is proudly implementing policies to uplift American families.”
