How “Pronatalism” Could Divide the Right

The Right’s “pronatalist” movement brings attention to a serious problem confronting modern civilization. Birthrates in America and throughout the developed world have dropped well below the approximately 2.1 births per woman required to sustain a population through natural growth.

At the same time, efforts to address this issue have revealed deep divisions within America’s evolving conservative coalition. Most notably, pro-life conservatives and the tech Right each propose their own, sometimes conflicting, solutions. Still, a handful of ideas—if framed as broad investments in children’s well-being and long-term economic vitality—could transcend these divides and even gain support beyond the fractured Right.

Frustratingly, many of the factors behind America’s declining fertility are signs of progress. Teen births and births to unmarried women have declined. Economic growth has brought more fulfilling careers and leisure options, making parenthood a tougher sell. People are also waiting longer to marry, often becoming more mature in the process.

What government policies could help address the problem? That’s where things get interesting, controversial—and occasionally a bit strange. The most straightforward approach would be a modest increase to the Child Tax Credit, which offers parents a flat tax refund per child. A recent New York Times article reported that the White House has been rounding up its own set of fertility-boosting ideas. Possibilities range from a $5,000 “baby bonus,” paid at birth, to awarding medals to mothers with at least six kids, to government-sponsored menstrual-cycle education.

Even the pro-natalists themselves are not fully aligned on these proposals. In fact, they come from such varied backgrounds that each faction can seem like a separate movement entirely.

The most notable divide is between traditional, pro-life religious conservatives—who emphasize marital stability and often oppose in vitro fertilization—and the more tech-oriented, futurist wing of the movement, exemplified by Elon Musk. Musk has at least 14 children by several women, some conceived through IVF. He reportedly has expressed particular concern about lower fertility among the higher-educated.

Both factions want more American babies, but they have different visions of who would have those babies, and how. A religious conservative might back subsidies for married couples to have children naturally and be more willing to weather the political backlash that could come from excluding single parents. A tech-bro pronatalist, by contrast, might favor subsidies for IVF and daycare, viewing marriage as largely irrelevant. And that’s before accounting for other divisions on the right over whether—and how aggressively—the state should intervene.

Pronatalism gets expensive when it involves subsidizing parents. Studies vary wildly in estimating how much of a subsidy translates to how many extra babies, and different methods of subsidizing parenthood likely yield different results. But for back-of-the-envelope purposes, it seems fair to say that it takes at least $100,000 in spending, and possibly much more, to produce one additional birth.

Why so much? Babies are expensive and time-consuming, and it takes real money to change a couple’s decision to take on such a major responsibility. Moreover, these subsidies—whether baby bonuses, tax credits over a child’s life, or childcare support—often go to people who would have had children anyway. Take a $1,000 baby bonus that boosts births by 1 percent. In that case, the government ends up spending $101,000 for every additional birth: $100,000 to the 100 families who were already planning to have a child, plus $1,000 to the one family the policy actually moved.

Bringing the fertility rate up to 2.1 from its 2023 level of about 1.6 would require roughly 1 million more births. That would cost $100 billion annually if each new birth costs a hundred grand—on top of our existing family benefits, including the Child Tax Credit, which already costs about that much. If more money is needed to affect these decisions—especially for families with higher incomes—costs will rise accordingly.

This spending would come into conflict with other conservative priorities. Some conservatives want to reduce the deficit. Others want to cut taxes as much as possible.

Then there are the welfare reformers, who argue that government support should come with an expectation of work. The current Child Tax Credit, for instance, is structured so that it never returns more than a household paid in income and payroll taxes—and sometimes less.

About a quarter of kids don’t qualify for the full credit because their parents don’t make enough money. That number would go up if the credit were made larger. Some on the pro-family Right would like to weaken or eliminate the connection between this benefit and parents’ tax liability, which other conservatives see as unwise, anti-work, and, frankly, kind of socialist.

Meantime, some studies suggest that child-care subsidies boost fertility, which could target women who want to work. But traditional conservatives see such subsidies as unfair to stay-at-home parents and aren’t crazy about day care generally. (As I noted in a Manhattan Institute report last year, however, other aspects of the tax system are extremely favorable to the one-earner model.)

A few of these ideas show some bipartisan potential. The Left may resist using public policy to encourage childbirth, but family subsidies can serve other aims, such as reducing child poverty or supporting working mothers. It was, after all, the Biden administration that enacted both a temporary, work-requirement-free expansion of the Child Tax Credit and significant child-care subsidies.

The fertility crisis won’t be easy to solve. Given America’s fiscal constraints and political divisions, it may not be solved at all.

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