The fertility crisis: can Trump make America breed again?

In 2021, J.D. Vance gave a speech in Virginia about the "civilisational crisis" of low birth rates. Praising Hungary's pro-natalist policies, he asked, "Why can't we do that here?" Now that Vance is vice-president, America may be about to try, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times.

Donald Trump, the self-styled "fertilisation president", has been soliciting ideas on how to get Americans to have more babies. Among the proposals floated are giving women a $5,000 bonus for every birth, lowering the cost of IVF treatments, and reserving 30% of Fulbright scholarships for married people or parents. One pronatalist adviser even suggested emulating Nazi Germany by establishing a "National Medal of Motherhood" for women with at least six children.

None of these ridiculous "benefits" would entice me to breed, said Robin Epley in The Sacramento Bee. But there are other ways to make motherhood more attractive. America could, for instance, join every other "industrialised nation" by mandating paid parental leave. It could make childcare more affordable: even the Department of Labour says that childcare is now "an almost prohibitive expense" for families.

And the government could make pregnancy safer. America's maternal mortality rate exceeds that of every other rich country; the figures are particularly bad for black mothers, who in certain states are 3.3 times more likely to die during pregnancy as their white counterparts.

Trump has for once stumbled on a worthy cause, said Mona Charen in the Chicago Sun-Times. But if his boorish administration adopts this agenda, it will turn it "rancid" by making it seem like a patriarchal Nazi-style obsession. This is a job for the Democrats, said Elliot Haspel in The New Republic. They can't just sit on the sidelines mocking conservatives and making "predictable references to 'The Handmaid's Tale'". They, too, need to tackle this problem, which threatens to sap the nation's dynamism.

There is a persistent gap in the US between the number of children that people say they want and the number they end up having. The birth rate among married couples has remained relatively stable, but the proportion of people getting hitched or cohabiting has dropped sharply. The Democrats must take up the family cause and make the "non-judgmental yet affirmative case for having children". The future of America may depend on it.