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Opinion
The total fertility rate (TFR) is the average number of children that would be born to a woman throughout her life. Source: World Population Prospects 2022 report from the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs
– As birth rates continue to decline in many industrialized countries, anxious governments are running out of plans to keep women procreating.
In the United States, millionaires and billionaires are lining up to donate to Trump’s “baby bond” savings accounts. Trump’s accounts give parents $1,000 for all babies born between now and 2028, plus whatever private donors contribute.
Late last year, tech billionaires Michael and Susan Dell donated $6.25 billion to them. The bills are part of Trump’s far-right pronatalist agenda, and also part of the broader trend of governments using heavy-handed pronatalist policies, ranging from bribes to outright coercion, to convince women to have more babies and shore up the supply of future workers, taxpayers and soldiers.
These interventions are notoriously ineffective. A recent Heritage Foundation report recommended using financial incentives to convince American women to have more children, “with preferences for larger than average (families),” while shaming those who choose to have fewer or no children.
A family from South Korea, which has the lowest total fertility rate in the world (0.8).
But he also admitted: “Other nations have attempted to reverse declining birth rates through financially generous family policies, but none have succeeded. Public spending alone does not guarantee demographic success.”
These policies also cannot achieve what Heritage calls “success.” Trying to increase birth rates by encouraging women to have babies not only undermines hard-won reproductive rights, it is a waste of money.
That spending is not a priority for American taxpayers, since most Americans do not see falling birth rates as a crisis. Instead, they overwhelmingly want the government to address the unsustainably high costs of child care. But a one-time injection from Trump’s account doesn’t affect the high costs of raising children and other barriers to motherhood.
Just as recent cuts to SNAP and Medicaid disproportionately affect marginalized women and children, Trump’s bills benefit least those who need help the most. By the Administration’s own calculations, the bills will disproportionately benefit wealthy parents.
This should not surprise us. Trump’s accounts and other pronatalist policies are not really about empowerment, or saving families, or supporting children. They are an attempt to make more white Americans, part of a broader nativist program that includes cracking down on immigration from African and Muslim countries, detaining and deporting nonwhite people in large numbers, and even abandoning previous U.S. efforts to fight child exploitation and trafficking.
These policies openly stoke panic over falling birth rates and tacitly advocate the white supremacist conspiracy theory of the “great replacement.”
That makes support for pronatalism by some progressives especially troubling. Even if your intention is not nativist, advocating policies that encourage women to have more children is anti-feminist and fundamentally at odds with reproductive agency.
And even when such policies aim to serve feminist goals – for example, Finland’s generous parental leave and health and child care – they fail to increase birth rates. This is because the most important factor in decisions about having children is not affordability; It is empowerment.
Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Claudia Goldin has shown that high birth rates are no longer linked to economic prosperity, as women increasingly choose education and careers over traditional family roles. In fact, he found an inverse relationship between per capita income and fertility. “Wherever you increase agency,” he said, “you get a reduction in the birth rate.”
Another study conducted in 136 countries confirms this: every time women achieve reproductive capacity, birth rates decrease, whether the economy is growing or contracting.
But hundreds of millions of women and girls are denied this power. More than 640 million people alive today were child brides (including in the United States). More than 220 million have an unmet need for contraceptives. More than half of pregnancies are unwanted: 121 million a year. Cuts to USAID and other aid programs exacerbate the situation.
Although birth rates are declining in many countries, the world’s population is increasing and is projected to increase between 2 billion and 10.4 billion by the 2080s, with enormous ecological and social consequences. Extreme climate events are expected to kill more than one billion people and displace up to 3 billion this century, most in countries where women and girls are disempowered and fertility rates remain high. Pronatalism will only worsen ecological and social crises.
We need new political thinking that recognizes this and embraces the many advantages of declining fertility and slower growth. As fertility rates fall, female labor participation will increase and gender pay gaps will narrow.
As median age increases, demographic shifts could enable policy changes that improve wages and conditions for workers and expand job opportunities to billions of marginalized people who want jobs but don’t have them.
There is no shortage of good ideas, from economic models that center well-being and rethink growth to radical ecological democracy. Exploring them requires breaking out of the endless growth rut that enriches the elites at the expense of the rest of us. We must stop treating women as reproductive vessels so that more people serve the economy and start reshaping our economies so that they serve more people and the planet.
Nandita Bajaj He is executive director of the NGO Population Balance, a senior professor at Antioch University and producer and host of the podcasts OVERSHOOT and Beyond Pronatalism. Her research and advocacy work focuses on addressing the combined impacts of pronatalism and human expansionism on reproductive and ecological justice.
IPS UN Office
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