The Trump Birth Rate Proposals Are a Joke

It’s stressful to be a mom in the US—from inflation, to the erosion of our reproductive rights, and parental burnout. So it’s not shocking the Donald Trump birth rate proposals have a lot of women up in arms.

In case you missed it, The New York Times released an article on Monday detailing the administration’s apparent ideas to encourage American women to have more babies. According to the newspaper, the proposals being batted around include three main ideas.

The one that’s getting the most attention online is the idea of a “baby bonus” of $5,000, which would be given to every mother after she delivers. That amount would cover only a few weeks of daycare, diapers, and formula for most, but let’s move on. Another idea is to give 30% of the government-backed, prestigious Fulbright scholarships to applicants who are married or have kids. And the last, and probably the oddest, proposal is to offer government-funded “programs that educate women on their menstrual cycles” so they can better understand when they could potentially conceive.

It’s important to provide context for the state of American motherhood as it stands, which compared with the rest of the developed world, is pretty bleak. The US is one of only six countries in the world with no federally mandated paid leave, and one in four women return to work just two weeks after giving birth. The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations, and it is increasing: It jumped by 27% from 2018 to 2022. In 2022, women lost the national right to abortion, and now women in half the states in our country are living under laws deemed “restrictive.” The US Department of Labor has—in the past—called childcare costs in our country “almost prohibitive,” with many spending more on it than rent. And we are facing unprecedented burnout and stress to the point that the surgeon general called it a “public health crisis” last year.

With these facts, it’s not exactly surprising that our country’s birth rate has been dropping since 2007. Simply put, many families cannot afford to have kids, cannot afford multiple kids, or have delayed having kids because of economic hardship.

“Motherhood in America is in crisis,” Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director and CEO of the advocacy group MomsRising, tells Glamour.