How the far-right Heritage Foundation keeps accidentally proving liberals right

America is experiencing a baby slumpand the MAGA pro-natalist movement claims to have just the solutions for it. But they’re not what you might expect.

According to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Wednesday, the American fertility rate currently sits at around 1.6 per woman — a rate just 1% higher than the record low set in 2023, and significantly lower than the replacement rate of 2.1. The U.S. birth rate, which has been on a steady downward slide since 2007, has the Trumpist right worried about the fall of “Western civilization.”

At one of his first appearances after being sworn in as vice president, JD Vance stated, “Very simply, I want to see more babies in America.” At the same event, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis awkwardly quipped, “Florida is not just the place that woke goes to die, it’s the place that babies go to live.”

Elon Musk has characterized the drop in birth rates as a catastrophe leading to civilizational ‘collapse.’

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a father of nine, issued a memo shortly after being confirmed by the Senate stating that his department would be prioritizing federal transportation-related funding to states and districts with marriage and birth rates above the national average. (How are highways made? Well, when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much…)

Elon Musk has characterized the drop in birth rates as a catastrophe leading to civilizational “collapse,” warned that it “will lead to mass extinction of entire nations” and claimed on Fox News that unless the birth rate increases, “civilization will disappear.” The father of at least 14 children by at least four different women, he’s maybe joked, maybe bragged about “doing his part” to rectify the global fertility rate.

In recent years, natalism has made cultural inroads as well. Simone and Malcolm Collins seem to pop up everywhere in the pro-natalist space, from the baby-fever-afflicted White House to a recent annual conference on natalism known as NatalCon. (They’ve been profiled by major media outlets so many times that Slate felt the need to run an article on them titled, “For the Love of God, Stop Profiling This Couple!”) The Collinses say they have relied on a sort of Gattaca-adjacent technology to screen all of their embryos before choosing the strongest ones to implant in Simone, thus ensuring their children will be “highly intelligent.”

And no social media feed is safe from the deluge of tradwife and big-family content that makes it look like the only thing standing between ennui and a full life is a brood of four to eight children.

Many have described the new MAGA-spiced “pro-natalism” as just old-fashioned American eugenics in a Tesla. But there’s something else going on here. A recent New York Times piece details some of the new ideas MAGA pro-natalist thinkers are batting around as a way to goose the birth rate, and, well, they sound a little familiar.

According to the Times’ reporting, the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation think tank has formed its own natalist task force — the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family.

Heritage’s “newest and boldest” (their words) policy idea is … a tax credit for married couples with children that increases the more children the couple has. That would have been a new and bold idea in 1991, when 16-term Connecticut Democrat and longtime Child Tax Credit advocate Rep. Rosa DeLauro entered Congress. Heritage’s bold new idea is to do a version of a law that’s been on the books since 1997, except it would only benefit married parents, who typically are in a higher income bracket than single parents and thus don’t need as much help.

Columbusing — the act of ‘discovering something that is not new’ — is happening in abundance among the pro-natalist MAGA right.

Another pro-natalist pitch put forth in the Times article is to pay women a $5,000 bonus to have babies. Which, again, sounds like a rehashing of the Child Tax Credit, this time increasing the size of the cash payout and making it single-use. By the way, in recent years, Republicans have had opportunities to permanently expand the child tax credit that already exists — and have blocked it at every turn.

Columbusing — the act of “discovering something that is not new” — is happening in abundance among the pro-natalist MAGA right. They’re taking long-held center-left policy proposals, throwing a Western-centric, nationalistic sheen on them, and acting as if they’re newly discovered innovations in good governance.

One Heritage Foundation thinker suggested that rather than prescribing IVF as a panacea, Trump’s pro-natalists should invest in getting to the bottom of what causes infertility. “The idea, called Restorative Reproductive Medicine, revolves around treating the ‘root causes’ of infertility, and leaving IVF as a last resort,” the Times reported.

Great “new idea,” but it’s also well-trod territory.

In 2010, for example, pre-eminent American scholar Greta Gaard wrote that reproductive technologies like IVF “medicalize and thus depoliticize the contemporary phenomenon of decreased fertility in first-world industrialized societies, personalizing and privatizing both the problem and the solution when the root of this phenomenon may be more usefully addressed as a problem of PCBs, POPs, and other toxic by-products of industrialized culture.”

The Heritage Foundation seems to have somehow stumbled into embracing an idea rooted in ecofeminism.

And scientists have been looking into the root causes of infertility for quite some time. Much of the research has found that, as insinuated by both Gaard and memes shared by Maha moms on Instagram, environmental factors like air and water pollution are at least partially to blame. For example, a handful of studies have linked exposure to polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to both male and female infertilitywhich makes the Trump administration’s recent move to withdraw limits on PFAS allowed in industrial wastewater — and the other myriad rollbacks to clean air and water standards — counterproductive to the natalist cause.

Most young women know how to get pregnant, despite a decadeslong fight from the right to keep sexual and reproductive health information away from them. But another Heritage source featured in the Times piece wonders: Could the issue be that women simply don’t know how to get pregnant? Their solution to this imagined problem is also a rerun: teaching young women about their bodies and menstrual cycles, perhaps in a classroom setting.

Like, say, a school sex education program.

I see no evidence that anybody in pro-natalist MAGA land bothered to ask reproductive-age American women why they don’t want to have as many babies as previous generations did.

There are myriad factors that contribute to a country’s birth rate rising or falling, and researchers still haven’t nailed down how, exactly, to convince women to have more children when they’d rather not. A Pew study released last year found that 64% of American women under 50 who don’t have any children say they simply do not want to have them. That leaves the Trump White House with an ever-shrinking pool of potential willing mothers to make up the difference.

Which might necessitate some kind of incentive for those patriotic birthers willing to get in the birthing stirrups over and over again for the good of their country. Might I suggest, perhaps, a medal for women with six or more children?

Most young women know how to get pregnant, despite a decadeslong fight from the right to keep sexual and reproductive health information away from them.

This idea also has a precedent, although it’s older than the proposals that have been basic Democratic fare for four or five decades. In 1927, a program started in Italy called “Battle for Births,” which aimed to increase the population from 40 million to 60 million by 1950. The state would award women with five or more children a medal for bravery, among other measures designed to reward reproduction and punish childlessness. The most prolific birthers would even have a chance to meet their country’s leader — Benito Mussolini.

Sadly for the medal winners, the Italian Battle for Births was a failure. The population only increased 7.5 million by 1950. The Italian birth rate is currently among the lowest in Europe, at 1.24. But it might work for us.

Goosing the birth rate has flummoxed policymakers for generations. But one factor that’s been shown — over and over again — to make women in industrialized countries actually want to have more children was their male partners doing more around the house.

One potential solution to raising the birth rate in the U.S. is not handing out medals or writing checks. It’s for men to evolve. Let’s see how long it takes the Heritage Foundation to come up with that one.

Erin Gloria Ryan

Erin Ryan is a writer and podcaster. She’s the creator, cohost and executive producer of Crooked Media’s Hysteria podcast and a frequent contributor to other Crooked Media podcasts and video series. She’s written for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Daily Beast, Jezebel, and other TV shows and publications.