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childcare
Report Warns of Anti-Family Pronatalist Movement's Growing Influence on Trump White House
"Underneath shiny motherhood medals and promises of baby bonuses is a movement intent on elevating white supremacist ideology and forcing women out of the workplace," said one advocate.
Aug 13, 2025
The Trump administration's push for Americans to have more children has been well documented, from Vice President JD Vance's insults aimed at "childless cat ladies" to officials' meetings with "pronatalist" advocates who want to boost U.S. birth rates, which have been declining since 2007.
But a report released by the National Women's Law Center (NWLC) on Wednesday details how the methods the White House have reportedly considered to convince Americans to procreate moremay be described by the far right as "pro-family," but are actually being pushed by a eugenicist, misogynist movement that has little interest in making it any easier to raise a family in the United States.
The proposals include bestowing a "National Medal of Motherhood" on women who have more than six children, giving a $5,000 "baby bonus" to new parents, and prioritizing federal projects in areas with high birth rates.
"Underneath shiny motherhood medals and promises of baby bonuses is a movement intent on elevating white supremacist ideology and forcing women out of the workplace," said Emily Martin, chief program officer of the National Women's Law Center.
The report describes how "Silicon Valley tech elites" and traditional conservatives who oppose abortion rights and even a woman's right to work outside the home have converged to push for "preserving the traditional family structure while encouraging women to have a lot of children."
With pronatalists often referring to "declining genetic quality" in the U.S. and promoting the idea that Americans must produce "good quality children," in the words of evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman, the pronatalist movement "is built on racist, sexist, and anti-immigrant ideologies."
If conservatives are concerned about population loss in the U.S., the report points out, they would "make it easier for immigrants to come to the United States to live and work. More immigrants mean more workers, which would address some of the economic concerns raised by declining birth rates."
But pronatalists "only want to see certain populations increase (i.e., white people), and there are many immigrants who don't fit into that narrow qualification."
The report, titled "Baby Bonuses and Motherhood Medals: Why We Shouldn't Trust the Pronatalist Movement," describes how President Donald Trump has enlisted a "pronatalist army" that's been instrumental both in pushing a virulently anti-immigrant, mass deportation agenda and in demanding that more straight couples should marry and have children, as the right-wing policy playbook Project 2025 demands.
Trump's former adviser and benefactor, billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, has spoken frequently about the need to prevent a collapse of U.S. society and civilization by raising birth rates, and has pushed misinformation fearmongering about birth control.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy proposed rewarding areas with high birth rates by prioritizing infrastructure projects, and like Vance has lobbed insults at single women while also deriding the use of contraception.
The report was released days after CNN detailed the close ties the Trump administration has with self-described Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, who heads the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, preaches that women should not vote, and suggested in an interview with correspondent Pamela Brown that women's primary function is birthing children, saying they are "the kind of people that people come out of."
Wilson has ties to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose children attend schools founded by the pastor and who shared the video online with the tagline of Wilson's church, "All of Christ for All of Life."
But the NWLC noted, no amount of haranguing women over their relationship status, plans for childbearing, or insistence that they are primarily meant to stay at home with "four or five children," as Wilson said, can reverse the impact the Trump administration's policies have had on families.
"While the Trump administration claims to be pursuing a pro-baby agenda, their actions tell a different story," the report notes. "Rather than advancing policies that would actually support families—like lowering costs, expanding access to housing and food, or investing in child care—they've prioritized dismantling basic need supports, rolling back longstanding civil rights protections, and ripping away people's bodily autonomy."
The report was published weeks after Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law—making pregnancy more expensive and more dangerous for millions of low-income women by slashing Medicaid funding and "endangering the 42 million women and children" who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for their daily meals.
While demanding that women have more children, said the NWLC, Trump has pushed an "anti-women, anti-family agenda."
Martin said that unlike the pronatalist movement, "a real pro-family agenda would include protecting reproductive healthcare, investing in childcare as a public good, promoting workplace policies that enable parents to succeed, and ensuring that all children have the resources that they need to thrive not just at birth, but throughout their lives."
"The administration's deep hostility toward these pro-family policies," said Martin, "tells you all that you need to know about pronatalists' true motives.”
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'Are You Worried the Billionaires Are Going to Go Hungry?' Warren Asks Mamdani Critic
"Do you know how many working families are chased out of New York City every day because they can't afford housing, they can't afford groceries, they can't afford groceries?" said the Democratic senator.
Aug 04, 2025
Before joining New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani at an event focusing on childcare in the largest city in the U.S., Sen. Elizabeth Warren appeared on CNBC where she feigned concern for New York's richest residents—those who aren't being centered in Mamdani's campaign focused on making housing, groceries, and other essentials more affordable for the city's working class.
"Oh dear, are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry?" the Massachusetts Democratic senator asked anchor Dan Faber when he inquired whether raising taxes on the richest residents is how Mamdani's far-reaching economic justice initiatives should be funded.
Faber responded that rich New Yorkers will leave the city if Mamdani becomes mayor and succeeds in establishing city-owned grocery stores and universal childcare by raising the corporate tax rate to 11.5%—the rate that already exists in neighboring New Jersey and that would raise $5 billion—and instituting a 2% tax on households earning above $1 million annually.
"Do you know how many working families are chased out of New York City every day because they can't afford housing, they can't afford groceries, they can't afford groceries?" Warren asked Faber.
She later added that billionaires have repeatedly threatened to leave the city at various times. Real estate brokers have expressed doubt that wealthy New Yorkers like Gristedes magnate John Catsimatidis and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman will follow through on their threats, and state tax data has shown that recent shocks like the coronavirus pandemic and tax code changes have not pushed the rich away.
Data also backs up Mamdani's warnings that more and more families in New York are having an increasingly hard time affording life in the city, with Columbia University and the anti-poverty group Robin Hood reporting earlier this year that 1 in 4 New Yorkers can't afford essentials like housing and food.
"You want to have a workable city?" asked Warren. "You want to have a city that's vibrant, you want to have a city where the streets are full, where there are things for sale 24 hours a day, then you need people who can live here and work here."
Warren's comments preceded her appearance with Mamdani, currently a state assemblymember who represents parts of Queens, at the headquarters of District Council 37, the city's largest public employees union, where they spoke about childcare challenges for families in New York. Parents in the city pay nearly $3,000 per month on average for full-time childcare, and more for an infant.
"We know that it is our responsibility to move beyond the broken politics of the past, of our city and our state, and start to offer an alternative across this country to what it could look like to be a people that fight for the families that raise us," said Mamdani at the event.
The progressive candidate has pledged to make childcare free for all New York City families with children aged 6 weeks to 5 years.
Warren said at the event that following Mamdani's surprise victory against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary in June, the city "is the place to start the conversation for Democrats on how affordability is the central issue, the central reason to be a Democrat, and that delivering on it in meaningful, tangible ways that will touch working families is why we're here."
The senator endorsed Mamdani days after his primary victory—a step that powerful establishment Democratic figures in the assemblyman's home state, such as U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Gov. Kathy Hochul—have yet to take.
"The way I see it, Zohran ran a campaign that inspired people, that actually got people on their feet," said Warren on Monday. "And the issue he focused on? Affordability."
Mamdani's primary success, said Warren, raises the question: "Why are billionaires and Wall Street CEOs pouring millions of dollars into a race to stop Zohran?"
In an article in Rolling Stone, the senator noted that Mayor Eric Adams—who is running as an independent and is currently in fourth place in general election polls, with just over 12% of the vote compared to Mamdani's 35%—"raised $1 million in a single night from donors with ties to big law firms, commercial brokerages, and big real estate developers who could lose their iron-fisted grip on New York in a Mamdani administration."
Ackman has also played Cuomo and Adams against each other, she wrote, holding "back-to-back meetings" so the candidates could "tap dance for the 'hundreds of millions of dollars' he has said he will spend" to defeat Mamdani.
"In a democracy, billionaires should not be able to buy our elections and control our politicians," wrote Warren. "Elected officials should work for their constituents, not use their government offices to hand out favors to a well-connected few."
Mamdani, she said in a video posted on social media, is "not afraid to take on the billionaires and the giant corporations to make New York more affordable."
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We Don't Face Crisis of Scarcity or a Population, But a Crisis of Capitalism
We must explicitly name the culprits that are creating an environment rife with both climate catastrophe and conditions hostile to children and families—corporate power and concentrated wealth.
Jul 25, 2025
Mounting concern over declining birth rates, the devastation of the climate crisis, and a rising conservative pronatalist movement have led to a renewed focus on population. People across the political spectrum express show up on both sides of the debate, whether about the economic challenges of an aging population, our planet’s destruction (and its very real human toll), or pushing a regressive agenda.
Late last month, The New York Times published “Depopulation is Coming, Don’t Expect it to Solve Our Problems.” I read it eagerly. Economists Michael Geruso and Dean Spears do make important points. They write: “Confronting climate change requires that billions of people live differently. It does not require that billions of future people never live.” Here, here! And, in making their argument against depopulation, they also share a vision for the future where systemic barriers driving birth rates down, like the high duress placed on mothers, are no longer so prominent.
Those are great points, but they don’t tell the whole story and we need to be honest about the real crisis.
These questions bring me back to the beginning of my life’s work. The authors reference Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), which argued that, if the population kept growing, humanity would implode from famine or disease due to a lack of resources. It came out when I was a young woman and took the world by storm.
When we discuss population, we must take care to clearly identify the constellation of social and economic factors at play.
I wondered, “Is this true?” The resulting research led me to write my first book, Diet for a Small Planet (1971), which proved that our growing population was not the problem. Instead, concerns over scarcity—at least in the realm of food—pointed to a larger culprit: Concentrated corporate power and extreme economic inequality which together promoted meat-centered diets.
In a moment when population is again in the limelight and meat-based diets are increasingly valorized, I want to return to the argument I made then. It feels more important than ever.
About three-quarters of the world’s agricultural land is devoted to livestock that provide only about 11% of our calories. And just four corporations—JBS, Tyson Foods, and Cargill, and National Beef—control over three-quarters of the global beef market. In pork, three firms account for two-thirds.
We can see concentrated power still hard at work here. Meat is the most inefficient way to feed ourselves.
Here’s the key point: Meat production is not only wasteful, it’s incredibly destructive. For one, it furthers destruction of carbon-absorbing rainforests while adding cattle-emitting methane—a particularly intense greenhouse gas. According to one report, “Cows pack such a punch that, if they were a nation, ‘cow country’ would rank as the world’s sixth worst greenhouse gas emitter.” And, tragically, cattle farming alone is responsible for 41% of tropical deforestation.
These mega-corporations—with their substantial hold on the meat market—have no real reason to slow or stop their production; instead, they profit, while we bear the brunt of the destruction.
Let’s return to the question of population. We know that the meat industry—as one of the big drivers of our climate crisis—is a huge part of creating scarcity-based depopulation rhetoric. At the same time, we know that depopulation is no longer an idea simply made mainstream by Ehrlich et al., but a reality driven by declining birth rates.
The decline in birth rates is a phenomenon across the West, but the U.S. has a distinct landscape. In a 40-country comparison, we come in 38th—third worst—for childcare affordability. For single parents in the United States, a gargantuan 32% of income is spent on childcare. According to The Guardian, in Massachusetts, infant care costs almost $27,000 per year on average--“21% more than the average rent, and 83% more than in-state tuition at a public college.”
While the cost of childcare is mind-boggling, it’s not a stand-alone issue: We are in a full-blown cost of living crisis. The U.S.’ median income is just over $80,000 a year, yet to live comfortably in Mississippi—the U.S.’s most affordable state--a family of four would need to make around $190,000 in 2025. All of this in a nation where the richest 1% of Americans make 139 times as much as the bottom 20%.
When we discuss population, we must take care to clearly identify the constellation of social and economic factors at play. This means explicitly naming the culprits that are creating an environment rife with both climate catastrophe and conditions hostile to children and families—corporate power and concentrated wealth.
We face neither a crisis of scarcity nor a crisis of population. Rather, we face a crisis of capitalism.
The solution is a democratic economy with rules against monopoly and an adequate safety net that provides the resources we all need to thrive.
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