Trump sees budget bill promoting a baby boom. Others say more is needed.
In America and other developed countries, the drop in birth rate rates arouses concerns that a decrease in population will lead to economic stagnation and drain social protection systems.
This draws the attention of a transversal section of groups stimulating alarms on the collapse of the population and the promotion of policies to encourage procreation. The pro-natalist movement has a foot at the White House, President Donald Trump calling for a baby boom, vice-president JD Vance and former adviser Elon Musk defending large families and the administration policy aligning with anti-abortion defenders.
The American senators now debate the Trump budget bill, which targets a number of family issues such as children’s tax credit and the funding of the college.
Why we wrote this
A birth rate in the United States, records, triggers a movement to encourage people to have more babies. A challenge is to unlock why people have fewer children than they say.
Groups who want Americans to have more babies to promote a wide range of reasoning. But there is a common concern around a gap between the number of children that people want and the number they have. Most (73%) idealize with two or three children, according to a Gallup survey; But the fertility rate (the number of living births per female reproductive age) is a record of 1.6.
“The fact that the desires of people have children remain high but that birth rates fall is proof that our society is not built in a way that allows people to achieve their fundamental desires to have a family,” explains Karen Guzzo, director of Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Many political experts, including those who say that there is an urgent need of more babies in the United States, agree that what is in the budget bill will not do much to stimulate births. Larger efforts are necessary, they say.
The budget invoice
The Senate bill would increase children’s tax credit 10%, bringing it to $ 2,200. The increase in credit has bipartite support. The invoice also includes payments of $ 1,000 to savings accounts, called “Trump accounts”, for children born between 2024 and 2028.
“I’m glad the congress undertakes to raise the [child tax credit] … but I would like to see them do even more, “said Lyman Stone, director of the Pronatalist initiative of the Institute for Family Studies, which promotes traditional family structures.
The emphasis on the family is something on which progressives and conservatives agree, explains Patrick Brown, a scholarship holder of the Center for Ethics and Public Policy who defends policies that encourage more births. He aims to “[make] It is so that the family is at the center of what we do rather than simply saving individuals. »»
This understands the ease of people to marry and start a family, and to allow parents to raise their children “in a way that does not feel so isolating or individualistic”, explains Mr. Brown.
The budget, he says, is “not my version of a pro-family program”.
It is not that experts say that financial incentives, in the sense of an extended children’s credit, are not useful and necessary for parents. Is that financial incentives alone are not enough. The Bill of Republicans also offers discounts of spending – in particular in social protection programs such as Medicaid and the support program for additional nutrition – which directly strikes the finances of many low -income families.
And despite the spending discounts, the non -partisan congress budget office provides that Mr. Trump’s bill will add 3.3 billions of debt dollars over the next decade.
“They essentially try to reduce the net safety advantages to help cover the cost of your tax discounts for people [in] The upper income side of the distribution, ”explains Mr. Brown.
Melanie Stetson Freeman / Staff
The budget also leads to major reductions in the federal loan program for students and admits kindergarten expenses to the 12th year, including tuition fees for private schools, for before tax savings accounts, which are now limited to costs related to college. The bill included a path of “school choice” proposed for the education of kindergarten in the 12th year, but which faced a setback on Friday when the Senate parliamentarian said that he was part of several elements that violate the procedural rules and had to be considered separately from the megabill.
Politicians comply with a report by the Conservative Heritage Foundation. Heritage refused to speak with the instructor of this story.
In addition to the budget bill, senators are considering a bipartite proposal that would eliminate family costs for childbirth by obliging health insurers to cover the entire bill. President Trump has announced access expanded to in vitro fertilization treatments. The White House has not published details.
The country’s demographic trend is not yet a crisis, explains Catherine Pakaluk, director of political economy at the Busch School of Business of the Catholic University of America. But it is on a collision trajectory with the government’s economic commitments. In the short term, she says, political decision-makers must try economic security by balancing the budget-a task, she says, which is not “remotely”.
Large tent, large differences, a goal
People who are suitable that the United States needs more babies can also disagree. In March, the second annual Natalcon brought together IVF specialists, anti-abortion activists, demographers and extremists from the far right concerned about minority populations exceeding whites.
IVF is a point of discord. Those who consider the conception of the beginning of life oppose the elimination of embryos, which is a common part of the IVF process.
Another group, from the technology industry, wishes to apply technology to the creation of babies, including the use of IVF and genetic tests to detect potential intellectual or health problems.
Serious conversations on the American fertility rate occur among the researchers and pro-child groups who distanted themselves from the positions linked to racism, sexism and eugenics.
For example, policies to encourage more births would lead to more births among non -white communities, according to Mr. Stone. “And we totally agree with that.”
Like the organization of Mr. Stone, many people who support a higher birth rate also promote the idea that traditional families – heterosexual couples married to children – are ideal.
This ideal does not need a woman to abandon education or a significant career, explains Mr. Brown. Women should be able to “exercise their talents in the same way as men can,” he said. “The release of this trap in which we are in the reorientation of our economy, to welcome all people with a family and professional life, rather than to include men to women.”
But there are concerns that focusing on fertility could further limit women’s reproduction options. The 2022 Supreme Court reversed the federal recognition of a right to abortion when it canceled Roe v. Wade; Since then, more than half of the American states have increased restrictions on practice.
Any strategy aimed at fertility will ultimately be implemented reproductive options, explains Leigh Senderowicz, who studies fertility policies as a demographer and public health researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We only have decades and decades and decades of evidence that is the case.”
People “balance competing goods”
A collection of studies indicates anxieties concerning the cost of living, career activities, the shortage of housing and a rupture of community supports contribute to the slowdown in birth rate. The birth rate of America is lower than the world average.
A survey on the Pew Research Center shows that almost two thirds of adults think that free childcare services would encourage more people to have children; Half say that family leave paid and more tax credits for parents would help, and 45% say that a monthly allowance would do it.
Mr. Brown and Mr. Stone, whose work often crosses, connect the fertility rate to a drop in the marriage rate. Another PEW survey shows a third of adults who never had children said it was because they did not find the right partners. Twelve percent said it was because they couldn’t afford it.
Education also counts. Mr. Brown says that the United States should take notes from European higher education models, who take fewer years for professionals who need higher level schooling. This means that a person can go earlier in their career and family, he said.
But most European countries have even more fertility rate than the United States, including Nordic countries, that Americans generally praise their family policies and institutions.
People have fewer children because that’s what they really prefer, explains Dr. Pakaluk, whose book “Hannah’s Children: The Women Debey quietly defying the birth shortage” explores why some women choose to have more children than others.
“Most people do something where they balance competing products in their lives,” she says.
Today’s children are a need, not a need, she adds, and the best way to influence values is with information campaigns-for example, communities stories that want more children on what is to be a parent.
“Because information is the most powerful changer in people’s choices,” she adds.
Amanda Stevenson, a demographer from the University of Colorado Boulder who directs the Colorado fertility project, says that population changes do not need to cause an alarm.
Politics and demography are constantly influenced, and the population is still changing, she said. Other parts of society are in flow, such as the place where people live and who take care of older children and adults, and people will find infinite means of responding to population changes.
“We have to work there together,” said Professor Stevenson. “We will respond in another way, and it will not only be climbing this [population] panic.”
Dr. Guzzo stresses that birth rates are decreasing, but the population of the United States and the world is still increasing.
“The collapse of the population is not imminent,” says Dr. Guzzo. The number of people in the United States should grow up to 2080 around 2080, then tray or refuse “super slowly over time”. Beyond that, she says, the hypotheses lose their hand.
The number and types of jobs, for example, will change as artificial intelligence replaces people in the workplace.
“We cannot predict many things because humans are remarkably resilient and inventive,” she says.
