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Republicans Want To Increase Birth Rates. Katherine Clark has a Suggestion. [1]
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Date: 2025-04-21
Right wingers are obsessed with Birth Rates.
Sorry, let me rephrase that. Right wingers are obsessed with the Birth Rates of White people.
Promoters of pronatalism, a philosophy premised on a coming population catastrophe, comes from a mixture of eugenics, creepy rich tech bros and creepy White Christian Nationalist Federalist Society Employees.
The Federalist Society, authors of Project 2025, have a series of suggestions to increase birth rates that seem to have been taken right from the middle ages. According to an article in The Independent, (www.independent.co.uk/...), they recommended changing the name of the Department of Health and Social Services to the Department of Life. They want to remove abortion and reproductive services from definitions of healthcare. Really, they want to end the use of contraceptives altogether, with a Heritage Society spokesperson posting on Twitter May 27, 2023, "It seems to me that a good place to start would be a feminist movement against the pill, & for... returning the consequentiality to sex” (that is, the consequentiality of sex for women).
Creepy rich tech bros support a pronatalist agenda, too, rooted in misogyny, as best verbalized by JD Vance and his assertions that the world is run by “childless cat ladies”. JD Vance and Elon Musk promote an anti-immigration, pro-birth rate agenda described by the authoritarian president of Hungary as, “procreation not immigration”.
Elon Musk is attempting to start his own population boom, having now 14 children with a number of women. He called declining birthrates a “mass extinction” in a 2024 Twitter post. His concerns about mass extinction seem to be focused primarily on White births. Jack Prosobiac summarized this view quite well when he said, as quoted in CNN (www.cnn.com/...), “If we don’t reverse the tide.... Everything that we have worked for and built, the cathedrals would crumble, the Constitution would fade, the West would become a memory, a footnote in someone else’s story.” In contrast to the creepy Heritage Foundation Christian Fundamentalism approach of promoting “traditional” marriage, big families and religion, creepy tech bros focus on the use of surrogates and, essentially, creating harems of women to carry on the DNA of genius tech bros.
Into this environment, the Trump administration is planning to release policy proposals of their own. The New York Times (paywalled, so I couldn’t read it) and the Independent (www.independent.co.uk/...) both had articles recently outlining the administrations plans. And they are exactly as you might expect.
The Transportation Department has stated they will steer funding to communities with higher birth and marriage rates, likely meaning steering funding to communities that are Whiter and Richer. Republicans have proposed providing monetary bonuses to married women who give birth. They’ve proposed reserving space in Fullbright Scholarships for people who are “married and have children”. There is also a proposal for “funding menstrual cycle education”, whatever that could mean (Rhythm Method?).
Katherine Clark, Democratic Whip in the House, quickly cut through the creepy tech bro/fundamentalist Christian bullshit to advocate for policies that would actually help young people who want to have families.
x This isn’t complicated: 1) Affordable child care. 2) Paid family leave. 3) Stop trying to slash health care for women and kids. www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/u... — Katherine Clark (@whipkclark.bsky.social) 2025-04-21T21:45:02.185Z
I might also add stop cutting back on programs that regulate food, reduce pollution, and promote proven health policies like vaccination, and bring back the Child Tax Credit that Republicans blocked when they gained control of the House in 2023.
If increasing birth rates in the United States is an issue, the policies proposed by Katherine Clark are the obvious means of getting there. Trust the Republicans, however, to promote everything but policies that actually help families in need. They still don’t understand there is a difference between being pro-birth and being truly pro-life.
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