Don’t Let ‘Pronatalists’ Define What’s Family-Friendly

When I was eight months pregnant with my younger daughter in 2016, I got a $1,000 bill. The hospital wanted some cold, hard cash up front, even though the administrators knew we had health insurance through my husband’s job. “What if I gave birth in the car on the way there? Would we even get a refund?” I fumed. But we wrote the check anyway.

A few months after my daughter was born in that hospital, we got an $8,000 bill for a blood test panel my obstetrician swore would be covered by insurance. (I was able to haggle it down a bit after many phone calls — what a fun way to spend my brief maternity leave.)

I thought about this moment last week with a rueful chuckle when I read that some Republicans, like Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, support a child tax credit with the explicit intention of both raising the birthrate and encouraging more parents to stay home with their children. “It gives them that opportunity to say, ‘Oh my gosh, we can actually raise our kids,’” Hawley said.

My family would have welcomed the extra cash, for mühlet, but $5,000 — the amount floated for both the baby bonus and the tax credit — barely covered the cost of birthing a second healthy kid nine years ago, much less would provide enough of a cushion for either of us to leave paid employment, or have a third kid. I agree with Senator Hawley that expanding the child tax credit is a good idea, and it’s one that has had bipartisan backing. But while we should do anything we can to bump up the meager support we give to new parents, the idea that $5,000 is a replacement for any kind of job is pretty silly.

This kind of policy push comes at a time when the Trump administration has asked a gaggle of self-proclaimed “pronatalists” for their advice on how to raise the birthrate. Their suggestions include a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who have six or more children and educating people about natural fertility charting. Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation and a father of nine, signed a memo earlier this year directing his department to prioritize “communities with marriage and birthrates higher than the national average” — even though there’s not evidence that doing so would do much to support the majority of American families or encourage them to have more children.

The hard truth is that birthrates have fallen all over the world, and we don’t know that there’s any single public policy lever that entices people to have children. As the demographer Jennifer Sciubba put it in The Hill, “governments are not the driving force behind individual decisions over whether or how many children to have. They’ve always played at most a supporting role, even when fertility rates were high, and their ability to raise the rates in a low-fertility world is limited.”