President Donald Trump’s administration has been exploring ways to increase the country’s birth rate, with the president himself saying he wouldn’t mind being known as the “fertilization president.”
But congressional Democrats and activists say Republicans have long overlooked the growing cost of having and raising children and ignore policy solutions that are readily available.
“If you want to encourage families to have children and be serious about it, then you would work to lower costs, build economic security for families,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, an 18-term Democrat from Connecticut and a leading proponent of a federal paid family leave program, told NBC News.
The fertility rate in the United States has declined overall since 2007, hitting a historic low in 2023 before plateauing the following year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But birth rates are declining globally, not just in the U.S.
The New York Times reported in April that some of the policy pitches being made to the Trump administration to encourage women to have more babies include giving mothers $5,000 in cash after they give birth and government-funded classes on menstrual cycles. And Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent a memo this year ordering the department to prioritize funding for communities that have higher birth and marriage rates.
A senior White House official confirmed to NBC News that the administration is encouraging people to have babies, saying, “That’s what we talked about during the campaign.”
Asked at a White House event about the proposed “baby bonus,“ Trump told reporters that it “sounds like a good idea to me.”
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a co-chair of the bipartisan House Paid Family Leave Working Group, said the effort “would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad.”
Instead of a one-time payment, expanding the Child Tax Credit — which provides long-term tax breaks for some parents — would be a more reliable way to help families, said Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., leader of the congressional Dads Caucus.
“Most costs are not one-time costs. When it comes to a kid, they’re ongoing every single month,” Gomez said. “The Child Tax Credit, if it was advanceable — that means, if it was paid monthly — it would have a huge impact on families.”
Gomez pointed to Census data and a Care.com report that showed that the median housing cost as a percentage of income was 31% for renters and 21% for homeowners in 2024. Meanwhile, parents on average spent 29% of their savings on child care costs the same year.
But the $2,000 annual Child Tax Credit approved under Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is set to expire at the end of the year, with the credit dropping to $1,000 for each qualifying child.
A group of Senate Democrats introduced a proposal last month to expand the credit to $6,360 annually for newborns, with the credit gradually lowering to $3,600 for children ages 6 through 17.
With Republicans controlling Congress, the bill faces strong headwinds. Some Senate Republicans, though, have signaled a willingness to raise the child tax credit in other ways as they consolidate plans to pass a major tax bill this session.
“I don’t know if they have a real appetite to do it,” Gomez said of the Trump administration. “Because the solutions are there. Like, people have been discussing them for a long time. They’re not new. And if they were serious about it, they would look at those solutions.”
Erin Erenberg, the CEO and co-founder of Chamber of Mothers, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that advocates for maternal and parental rights in the U.S., said her organization is hearing that women cannot afford to have children today.
“That’s not a cultural crisis. That’s a policy failure,” she said. “Parenthood doesn’t need to be incentivized — it needs to be supported every step of the way.”
Erenberg went on to list the three policy proposals her group believes would “invite motherhood:” a federal paid leave program, investments in maternal health and access to affordable child care.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., who leads the Dads Caucus, brought his son, Hodge, to work in 2023. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is at left.
In a statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “President Trump is proudly implementing policies to uplift American families, from securing order border to keep violent criminals out of our communities, to lowering taxes and the cost of living.”
DeLauro questioned whether the Trump administration is serious about its plans to encourage women to have more children, citing the other parts of his agenda that she said would hurt families.
“One has to take a look at what some of the proposals are that really are barriers to encouraging women to have more children, families to have more children,” DeLauro said, pointing to House Republicans’ efforts to pass a reconciliation bill that could cut $880 billion from Medicaid, a federal program that provides insurance for low-income families and children.
“There’s a little incongruity here between talking about encouraging women to have more children and families to have more children and at the same time, really putting up enormous obstacles,” she added.
Gomez made a similar point about Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on the nation’s largest trading partners.
“My son goes through shoes like nobody else’s business. And … that’s every toddler,” Gomez said. “They just grow, grow and grow. … From 1 years old to 5 years old, a toddler, on average, goes through 16 pairs of shoes, anywhere from $15 to $60 on average. And 99% of shoes bought, purchased in America are made outside of this country.”
“And then, when you start looking at cribs, car seats, strollers: Almost all of it is made outside this country,” Gomez added. “And you’re going to impose a tariff that’s going to increase the prices?”
Asked about potential price hikes on goods for children as a result of the tariffs, Trump, in an interview that aired Sunday, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker: “They don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.”
When pressed about the rising cost of a common item for parents —strollers — Trump dismissed it as less important.
He replied, “When you say strollers are going up, what kind of a thing? I’m saying that gasoline is going down. Gasoline is thousands of times more important than a stroller.”
Trump has also touted an executive order he signed in February that aimed to expand access to in vitro fertilization. At a Women’s History Month event in March, he credited Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., with bringing the issue to his attention and said, “I’ll be known as the fertilization president, and that’s OK.”
But the order he signed didn’t make any changes to current policies, and also fell short of his promise on the campaign trail to either have the government pay for IVF treatments or mandate that insurance companies cover them.
The administration has also made cuts to federal programs to improve access to fertility treatments. A CDC team that tracked IVF success rates working across the country was gutted last month as part of wider government spending cuts.
Pregnancy can also be dangerous; the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is 18.6 per 100,000 live births, among the highest of wealthy Western nations, and infant mortality is on the rise, according to the CDC. But the White House also cut funding to the largest women’s health study in the nation.
“What really matters is the things that are also happening simultaneously to undermine people having children,” Houlahan said, citing the Trump administration “cutting maternal child health programs, the proposed cut of Medicaid that covers 40% of all the births that happen in the United States, the kinds of things that are happening with CDC, the threats to things like Head Start.”
“All of those things at the same time as making a proposal as meaningless as a $5,000 credit and then at the same time destroying all of the support structures that would allow you to be able to have that child,” Houlahan said. “It’s just completely bananas.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
