When Usha Vance, the second lady of the United States, announced she was pregnant with her fourth child this week, Conservatives heralded the start of a “Maga baby boom”.
It is the first known time in modern US history that a sitting second lady is expecting a baby while her husband is in office. The White House, in response, labelled itself on social media as “the most pro-family administration in history”.
Also pregnant currently are Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokesman, and Katie Miller, the wife of the White House deputy chief of staff.
The “America needs more babies” rallying cry has been central to Trump 2.0.
The messaging is that Maga women can take on anything while pregnant – even a wall of reporters in a packed press room, à la Mrs Leavitt.
The US fertility rate reached a record low of 1.6 children per woman in 2024. Without immigration, the US population is projected to start shrinking by 2030 – an issue at the heart of the “pronatalist” movement.
Pronatalists believe government policy should be geared towards more childbearing and they increasingly draw supporters at the centre of power.
Mr Trump pledged on the campaign trail to create a “baby boom” to tackle America’s ailing birth rate. He has made children a visible part of day-to-day operations, including babysitting Elon Musk’s son in the Oval Office.
After declaring himself to be the “fertilisation president”, Mr Trump announced a slew of policies aimed at encouraging women to have more babies, including plans to reduce the cost of IVF and establish newborn savings accounts.
Mr Vance, in turn, has made the need for “more babies” an explicitly Maga cause.
He used his first public address as vice-president to proclaim: “I want more babies in the United States of America”, criticised prominent Democrats who do not have biological children of being “childless cat ladies” and framed America’s falling birth rate as a “civilisational crisis”.
Mr Vance’s views are also shared by a growing number of Silicon Valley titans with links to the Trump administration, including Mr Musk, a father of 14, who believes declining birth rates are the “biggest danger civilisation faces”.
Sean Duffy, the transport secretary and a father of nine, is pushing for grants to be funnelled into communities with higher marriage and birth rates.
But the administration’s policies, rooted in the importance of “family values”, fall well short of what is being proposed by pronatalists.
The movement’s supporters frame the falling birth rates in the US as an existential crisis that could lead to societal collapse. Its critics, however, say that pro-family policies will encroach on reproductive freedom and reinforce outdated gender roles, while ignoring the economic and societal issues behind decisions about having children.
The Heritage Foundation, a Right-wing think tank tied to the architects behind Project 2025, in a January report called for a “culture wide Manhattan Project” to restore the nuclear family.
It is considered the central institutional force in the US pronatalist movement, casting the issue of falling birth rates as a national crisis that could devastate the US economy – and derail the Maga agenda.
Elon Musk with his son, X, in the Oval Office last February – JIM WATSON/AFP
Their report this month, entitled “Saving America by Saving the Family”, encourages Mr Trump to boost marriage and birth rates by creating tax breaks for bigger families, discourage online dating, restrict access to pornography and “reform divorce culture”.
Delano Squires, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Centre for Human Flourishing, told The Telegraph that at the centre of the problem is a “decline in marriage”.
“The American marriage model has gone from early and often to less and later,” he said, echoing a key concern of the pronatalist movement.
To fix the issue, the federal government should play a “limited role in healthy family formation”.
“Every signal I’ve seen from the current administration is in support of American families. I have no doubt it is open to our ideas,” Mr Squires said, while acknowledging it is “not likely to accept every policy proposal”.
However, critics say such plans represent an overreach and pushes for the type of government intervention that undermines privacy rights and female autonomy.
Katie Miller and Stephen Miller with their children in the Oval Office
Family policy appears to have been sidelined while Mr Trump focuses on fulfilling key campaign pledges of enforcing steep tariffs, “solving wars” and carrying out mass deportations.
The immigration crackdown, experts also warn, is accelerating the decline in US population growth, compounding the already low fertility rates and projecting to cause constraints on the economy.
There is also little evidence to suggest government-led policies can reverse declines in birth rates. For example, South Korea and Hungary’s aggressive pro-family policies have achieved little impact.
“All these pro-family policies are doomed to fail,” said Brian Dixon, senior vice-president at Population Connection, a US-based non-profit that promotes population stabilisation through increased access to contraception and gender equality.
He pushed against what he called the White House’s “parading of babies”, arguing it is “driven by a Right-wing idea about gender roles”. “We need to give people the power to live the lives they chose, not what JD Vance chooses for you,” he added.
“People are making choices, they want smaller families, and this is happening across the world,” he said. And meanwhile, the US government “is not doing anything to make it easier to raise children”.
