President Donald Trump has proclaimed himself the “fertilization president.” It might be tempting to call that declaration hyperbolic, but two UC San Diego researchers actually found evidence that birth rates climbed eight years ago during Trump’s first term.
Economics professor Gordon Dahl and assistant professor of finance William Mullins looked at birth certificate data in Republican-dominated counties as well as Democratic majority counties. They found that after voters elected Trump to his first term as president in 2016, there was a distinct jump in birth rates in red counties and there was a simultaneous drop in births in blue counties.
“We get a range of estimates that range between about 1.5% of the U.S. fertility rate, all the way up to about 3% of the U.S. fertility rate,“ Mullins said. “That's essentially saying that the Republican counties saw a big increase relative to Democratic counties. The size of that difference is about 3% of the U.S. national fertility rate in our main analysis.”
This did not make up for the overall decline in fertility across the country, and Dahl does make the point that Republican women have always had higher fertility rates than Democratic women.
”But Trump's election widens the gap between Republicans and Democrats by about 17%,” he said.
Republican women had more babies than Democrats during Trump's first term largely because of hope, Dahl said.
”There's economic optimism, like where's the future of the economy going? And there's also optimism about where's society going,” he said. ”And so if you look at the election of Donald Trump, which was a surprise, most people predicted Trump was not going to win. He wins unexpectedly. And what you see in terms of measures of economic optimism is they flip almost overnight.”
But birth rates across the country are still low — around 1.6 children per woman, which is below the 2.1 rate needed to keep the population even.
Now, the Trump administration is also mulling over ways to induce women to procreate, including promises of cash upon delivery. Incentives include setting aside 30% of Fulbright scholarships for applicants who are married or have kids, funding reproductive education and giving $5,000 to a woman after she delivers.
But many believe the times are far from ideal for women to give birth. That includes Poway resident Parrish Glass, a mother of two young children. She said those ideas are insulting.
”It's a joke. I mean it's silly, $5,000 to anybody that's already had a child knows that that is chump change when it comes to getting the supplies that you need,” she said. ”Bassinet, crib, diapers, and then once the child gets here, you have all of these expenses like childcare.”
Childcare costs in San Diego County range from $1,200 a month to even above $4,000. Plus, there are other pressures on potential parents, including starting careers, paying off student loans, meeting someone to start a family with and buying a home, which usually requires two incomes.
Courtney Baltiskyy of the Children's First Collective, which pushes for better access to affordable child care, said Trump needs a full pro-family agenda to boost birth rates.
”As an advocate for children and with working families, I don't see comprehensive public funding for childcare,” she said. ”I don't see enough public funding for our education systems, and I don't see a commitment to paid family leave.”
Finances aren't the only reason women are having fewer children. A survey by the Pew Research Center last year found just over half of women have zero desire to have kids.
UC Davis Law Professor Mary Ziegler, who specializes in the politics of reproduction, said in states where abortion is illegal or restricted, it’s also dangerous for a woman to be pregnant.
“Because there's ambiguity in the meaning of abortion that complicates not just access to abortion for people who are seeking it, but access to miscarriage management and stillbirth management for people with pregnancy complications,” she said.
Pro-natalists, meaning the people who want women to have more babies, overlap with pro-choice opponents in some ways. Ziegler said GOP-led Idaho, Missouri and Kansas have actually argued in court papers that internet savvy teenage girls’ ability to obtain abortion medication online is harming the states because it’s reducing their birth rates.
“Which is a really weird thing to say because one of the kind of points of bipartisan consensus for a long time, even among people who are generally pro-natalist, was that teenagers shouldn't be having babies,” she said.
There is also explicit talk among some groups of trying to get more native-born Americans to have kids so as not to be replaced by immigrants’ children. At a natalist conference in Texas in March, there were eugenics proponents who want a society “with more suitable races or blood” over “less suitable races.”
