The White House is evaluating ideas on how to persuade Americans to get married and have more children, a sign that the Trump administration intends to adopt a new cultural agenda promoted by many of its right-wing allies to reverse the decline in the birth rate and promote conservative family values.
One of the proposals reserves 30% of the Fulbright program scholarships, the prestigious government-funded international scholarship, for married candidates or those with children.
Another would give a $5,000 “baby bonus” in cash to all American mothers after giving birth.
A third suggests that the federal government fund programs that educate women about their menstrual cycles — in part so they can better understand when they are ovulating and fertile.
These and other ideas are emerging from a movement concerned with the decline in the country’s birth rates.
Public policy experts and advocates for increasing the birth rate have been meeting with White House advisers, sometimes handing over written proposals on ways to help or persuade women to have more children, according to four people who participated in the meetings and spoke on condition of anonymity to The New York Times.
Government officials have not indicated which ideas — if any — they might adopt. But advocates expressed confidence that fertility issues will become a highlight on the agenda, noting that President Trump called for a new “baby boom”.
The behind-the-scenes discussions on family policies suggest that Trump is quietly crafting an ambitious plan to promote the issue. Project 2025, the policy project that predicted much of Trump’s agenda so far, discusses family issues before anything else, with its first chapter promising to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life”.
Much of the movement is based on promoting a very specific idea of what constitutes a family — marriage between a man and a woman — and excludes many families that do not fit traditional gender roles or family structures.
This coalition of people who want to see more babies born warns of a future where the workforce will be smaller and unable to sustain the aging population and the social safety net.
And of course, relying on an orderly immigration system that would bring skilled workers to fill that labor shortage is not part of the conversation.
Source: The New York Times