‘Make Motherhood Great Again’: Pronatalism Finds a Comfortable Home in the Trump Administration
By Shoshanna Ehrlich,
Ms. Magazine
| 04. 15. 2025
Promotional image from Natalism.org
A month into President Donald Trump’s second term, Sean Duffy, the newly appointed secretary of the Department of Transportation (DOT), issued a memo declaring that “DOT-supported or assisted state contracts shall prioritize projects and goals … that give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” This move by Duffy—who happens to be a father of seven—tying federal transportation spending to birth and marriage rates was characterized as “disturbingly dystopian” by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and “deeply frightening” by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).
Duffy’s directive embraces pronatalism—a once-fringe right-wing ideology that has found a comfortable home in the current administration. (Vice President JD Vance, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have around 22 kids between them.) Pronatalists believe that having lots of children is an urgent social project—at least for those living in the United States and Europe—in order to “maintain population levels, support economic growth, and preserve cultural and national identities.” And although not usually mentioned in the same breath, pronatalism fits cozily aside the Trump...
Related Articles
By Blake Brittain, Reuters | 05.12.2025
The University of California and the University of Vienna on Monday convinced a U.S. appeals court to revive their bid for patent rights to groundbreaking CRISPR gene-editing technology created by their Nobel Prize-winning scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier.
The ...
By Aitor Hernandez-Morales, Politico | 04.30.2025
Flag of Spain, public domain via wikimedia commons
The Spanish government is banning its embassies and consulates from registering children born through surrogates in foreign countries.
Regulations set to go into effect on Thursday cancel all pending registration processes and...
By Lisa Hagen, NPR | 04.25.2025
The Collins Family, by TeggorMindFish, CC 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
“Humanity is dying,” billionaire Elon Musk told Fox News anchor Bret Baier recently when asked what keeps him up at night. “The birth rate is very low in almost every...
By Charlotte Graham-Mclay, Associated Press | 04.11.2025
A woman in Australia unknowingly gave birth to a stranger’s baby after she received another patient’s embryo from her in vitro fertilization clinic due to “human error,” the clinic said.
The mix-up was discovered in February when the clinic in...