From government-mandated menstruation classes to canceling student loan forgiveness, the campaign for more babies goes beyond banning abortion.
Last year, at a Women’s History Month event, Donald Trump called himself the “fertilization president.” The moniker is an obviously pronatalist one, and it comes alongside a rise of cultural and political concern over the birth rate, particularly on the right. That concern is based on the fact that the United States birth rate has fallen considerably since 2007.
Put short, pronatalism describes philosophies, practices, and policies that encourage higher birth rates. Importantly, while pronatalism is in some cases a personal belief ("it would be good if I had several children"), it is also a deeply legislated and institutionalized force. That is, at its fullest extent, pronatalism involves governments incentivising people to have children, often via coercion. That’s how you get a “fertilization president.”
Trump and many of his allies are staunch pronatalists who panic about the so-called birth dearth as an imminent threat to the future of America and Western civilization more broadly. Trump frenemy Elon Musk, for example, has been stressed about this for a while, claiming that “Population collapse is an existential problem for humanity,” “is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” and that “People who have kids do need to have 3 kids to make up for those who have 0 or 1 kid.” (For his part, the richest man in the world has put his money where his mouth is, with 14 children to date.)
The Heritage Foundation, which led Project 2025, has dedicated much energy to rationalizing and promoting pronatalism along with supporting pronatalist legislation. Recent examples include the proposal of a “$5,000 cash ‘baby bonus’ to every American mother after delivery” and a “‘National Medal of Motherhood’ to women with six or more children.” The medal is eerily similar to one Nazi Germany once had—unsurprising given that pronatalism is a common feature of authoritarian regimes committed to sustaining their power.
Significantly, the Trump administration and a coalition of Republican lawmakers have also enacted a full-scale war on abortion rights and access. From overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, which as of this month has allowed abortion to be outlawed completely in 13 states and partially in 28 others; to rolling back emergency abortion protections; to freezing funding of abortion providers; and more, the attack on abortion has been relentless.
It’s imperative to understand the criminalization of abortion in the context of pronatalism because attacking abortion isn’t just about philosophical and moral disagreements; it’s about, as feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan said in 2023, “penalizing any woman who wants to have non-reproductive sex, who wants to have sex for any reason apart from serving the patriarchal reproductive order, producing new bodies.” Abortion, especially in a moment of rising Great Replacement fears, sex positivity, and challenges to cisheteronormativity, is about control.
Despite criminalization, the number of abortions has slightly increased in recent years. People are still getting abortions, increasingly by travelling to non-banned states, using telehealth services, and accessing medication by mail (the legality of which was recently in limbo but remains protected for now).
But beyond attacking abortion and offering women financial bribes, the Trump administration has been pushing forth its pronatalist agenda in less obvious ways. Of focus here is education policy, which has been a stomping ground for indoctrinating young people with pronatalist messaging—often also including pro-family, pro-marriage, and pro-patriarchy messaging, and teaching gender as a fixed binary.
Sex education is failing
Lately, attacking sex education has been at the forefront of pronatalist education policy. For decades, sex education has been a “political football.” That’s because politicians, educators, activists, parents, and students from both sides of the aisle have long recognized sex education for what it is: an inherently political tool that can be used to influence attitudes and behavior among young people. But with the rise of pronatalism since Trump’s first term, attacks on sex education have been sweeping and increasingly bizarre.
According to the latest annual report from the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), only 27 states require sex education, and only three states require comprehensive sex education to be taught in all schools. Further, only two states—Oregon and Washington—scored an A according to SIECUS’ quality criteria, which thoroughly assesses both state requirements for sex education and the content they teach. Contrastingly, 13 states scored an F.
A whole host of issues make for bad sex education. Sometimes it’s abstinence-only, other times it ignores topics like menstruation, consent, and intimate partner violence, and still other times it unnecessarily separates boys and girls or otherwise stigmatizes LGBTQ+ students. To be sure, lots of this ‘bad’ started long before Trump. But the type of ‘bad’ that we’re seeing with Trump is different, and in it we see the insidious rise of pronatalism.
Particularly since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, don’t-say-abortion rules have entered sex education classrooms across the country. As of this March, “17 states have laws that either prohibit instruction on abortion or require it to be taught in a stigmatizing manner.” Take Arkansas, for example, where teachers are required to use an adoption awareness curriculum that emphasizes “the reasons adoption is preferable to abortion,” as the state legislature puts it. Or South Carolina, where “Abortion may only be discussed in the context of the complications that it may cause,” never mind the complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Similar legislation is being introduced in other states, actively stigmatizing abortion and convincing adolescents that carrying a pregnancy to term is a more moral option. What they don’t teach is that abortion bans make pregnancy itself more dangerous and undermine people’s bodily autonomy, safety, wants, and needs.
Further, four states have legally restricted “abortion providers, or those employed or affiliated with them, from teaching sex education” since 2021, which is dangerous because many sexual health experts fall into that broad, McCarthy-esque category. (But what does it matter, anyway? Only 26 states require sex education to be medically accurate.)
The Trump Administration has also gutted funding for teen pregnancy prevention programs, which makes sense because successful teen pregnancy prevention means comprehensive sex education and access to contraception, birth control, and abortion, all of which are incompatible with forcing birth rate increases. Plus, the rhetoric around teenage pregnancy has shifted in recent years. Now, pronatalists are normalizing the notion that teen pregnancy is a potentially viable way to restore a declining birth rate. Indeed, Heritage has shifted away from using stigmatizing "teen pregnancy" terminology in favor of a sanitized new term: the “non-marital teen birth rate.” (To be clear, non-marital teen pregnancy is still a problem to them, but likely only because the girls aren’t married.)
The right’s shifting ideas around teen pregnancy were exemplified earlier this year, when a senior medical analyst at Fox News made an appalling statement on air. Dr. Marc Siegel was describing a birth rate chart aggregated by age when he remarked:
We still have 3.6 million births a year, but the problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19 the fertility rate is down 7% and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation, till they’re more financially secure, maybe they haven’t found the right partner.
You read that right. It’s a problem now that teenagers aren’t having enough babies. Last year, that "problem" was taken up by the Institute of Family Studies, which spotlighted writer Johann Kurtz’s assertion that by eliminating “teenage pregnancy from your society, you basically turn off the fertility of women between the ages of 20 and 35.” Their suggestion? Make sex education more pronatal.
This is why the Trump Administration’s attack on sex education makes sense. They need to coerce vulnerable young people to accomplish their pronatalist goals, and coming after education is a fitting strategy.
Classroom propaganda
The problem isn’t only what is being eliminated from sex education; it’s also what is being taught instead. Take, for example, the 20 states that have introduced bills aiming to mandate ultrasound videos in sex education classrooms “as part of a so-called ‘human development’ curriculum,” a last-ditch effort to push students toward expressly anti-abortion views.
To be clear, these aren’t even real ultrasound videos. Dozens of bills in motion effectively mandate the use of a specific video called Baby Olivia, a computer-generated gestation simulation of a fake baby in a fake womb. The video, along with its successor Baby Oliver, was made by Live Action, an organization founded by prominent anti-abortion activist Lila Rose. As pro-choice writer Jessica Valenti puts it, Live Action is “one of the most extreme anti-abortion organizations in the country… that says abortion and IVF are murder, that doesn’t believe in birth control, and that regularly peddles in disinformation.” Absurdly, it’s to these hands that sex education is now being handed over.
Showing Baby Olivia is guilt tripping at its finest: use emotional and personifying language, stretch facts about fetal heartbeats and viability, and misrepresent the appearance of an embryo, hoping students just won’t know any better.
Don’t be fooled. By mandating the use of Baby Olivia, anti-abortion lawmakers aren’t mandating accurate teaching about pregnancy. Instead, they’re seeking to remove pregnancy (and, by extension, abortion) from the contexts in which it actually exists: real life and real pregnant people. These myopic and romantic videos only serve to draw attention toward the debatable notion of fetal personhood and away from the experiences of actual people who become pregnant. Learning in this way erodes young people’s grasp of lived and scientific realities and makes them vulnerable to further ideological manipulation—which is precisely what pronatalists are depending on to make their fever dream of a second baby boom come true.
Pregnancy isn’t the end of it; pronatalists are now hoping to leverage menstrual education in their efforts, too. One staunch proponent of this idea is Emma Waters, a policy analyst at Heritage who is set on what she calls “Repopulating the Playground.” Just last year, Waters suggested government-funded menstrual education classes to inform young women of when they’re most fertile. Admittedly, her idea doesn’t sound half bad at surface level. “Actual, factual education about menstruation,” as menstrual health advocate Colby Siegel says, “would be a meaningful reform in a country where shame and misinformation still reign supreme.”
The problem, however, is that this form of menstrual education is just poorly disguised pronatalism. Real education wouldn’t rely on convincing women to use cycle tracking methods that have long been leveraged by anti-abortion activists as replacements for hormonal birth control. The superpowerful Turning Point USA has pushed this agenda for years, with the group's commentator Alex Clark claiming that hormonal birth control “is poison,” makes women “feel bisexual,” and changes “basically everything about your personality.” Clark, for her part, claims that her anti-birth control position is “totally unrelated” to the pronatalist ideas espoused by her former boss, Charlie Kirk. But the alignment of their messages is impossible to ignore.
It’s not hard to see what this supposed education is really about: exercising control over young women’s bodies, weaponizing contraception, and narrowing reproductive health options.
Out of school, into the home
The scope of pronatalist education isn’t just teaching young people misinformation about pregnancy and menstruation upfront. Perhaps the most insidious part of this campaign is the limitation of women’s educational opportunities altogether. Pronatalists are trying—and succeeding—to repopularize the traditional ("trad’) lifestyle in both culture and classrooms as a strategy to increase the birth rate.
Emblematic of this effort is the so-called Success Sequence, a framework endorsed by Heritage that teaches “graduating from high school, getting married, and having children—in that order—[as] a near-guarantee of life success.” Bills have been passed in Utah, Tennessee, and Alabama to require instruction of the Success Sequence by name, and several other states have similar bills in motion. With these bills, lawmakers are—by proxy of educators—encouraging kids to have families they may or may not want and diminishing the value of personal development in favor of family development.
It’s this same ethos that motivates Heritage to make proposals such as ending student loan cancellation, which they contend “signals what Americans should do upon high school graduation.” According to the Foundation, “Spending more years in higher education often means delaying many traditional markers of adulthood, such as getting a job, getting married, and, ultimately, having children.” It’s the last marker they’re most concerned about. They don’t want kids going off to school, having careers, and living lives for themselves. They want to repopularize domesticity, baby-making, and the restoration of old American life. And pronatalists haven’t been shy about wanting to turn back the clock. The latest special report by Heritage titled Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years, for example, posits that the solution to modern problems is a return to the values that our country was supposedly founded on. Or as the report puts it, “The key to American greatness in the first 250 years remains the key to American greatness in the next 250 years: the family.”
As usual, women are bearing the brunt of this ideology. Not just because their reproductive health and sex education are under attack, but because trad life threatens their status as independent people, too. We’re now seeing proposals that would make higher education attainment and raising a family effectively incompatible: eliminating on-campus childcare programs and cutting financial aid for students who are parents. Such policies would overwhelmingly impact women, who, in 2020, made up 74 percent of the undergraduate student parent population; most student mothers were also single.
Limiting women’s educational access in pursuit of pronatalism is a tactic backed by real evidence. Women with a high school diploma or less have a significantly higher birth rate than women with bachelor’s degrees. Further, people who haven’t received a college education are more likely to oppose abortion. The data thus support that keeping people, especially women, undereducated is central to both achieving pronatalist goals and popularizing the adjacent anti-abortion ideology. (Notably, pronatalists still have a long way to go because women today dominate higher education.)
The implications of this also extend to teaching as a profession itself. Heritage has advocated for eliminating certification requirements for public school teachers, over 75 percent of whom are women. They reason not only that “certification fails to predict effectiveness,” but also that certification requirements “delay family formation.” What they suggest instead is that principals and other school leaders should be trusted to hire “whom they deem to have sufficient subject-matter expertise to teach in K–12 classrooms.” In that solution, subjectivity trumps standards.
It certainly can’t be ignored that there are issues with teacher certification today. But the best solution would be better certification, not none of it—and especially not for the secondary purpose of driving up the birth rate. Carelessly chipping away at certification requirements will result in less educated teachers, conveniently less likely to question rapidly worsening and increasingly pronatalist sex education curricula. That would be dangerous on an intergenerational scale.
Similar red flags about loosened educational oversight are raised with regard to homeschooling. Of particular concern is the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), a conservative organization that lobbies for homeschool rights. HSLDA’s co-founder, Michael Ferris, also served as the CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a group that firmly opposes abortion. This makes sense because HSLDA attracts people who are invested in shielding children from what they view as “malign secular influence[s]” in public schools, like comprehensive sex education and support for abortion or non-reproductive sex.
Of course, not all homeschool advocates are like this. Even so, the independent nature of these settings creates vulnerabilities for young people that need to be addressed: indoctrination goes unchecked, and sexual abuse in the absence of “frequent contact with mandatory reporters” becomes possible. Ironically, according to watchdog reporters, HSLDA has previously advocated against the expansion of mandatory reporting and the development of a national child abuse registry.
Coalition building
What I’ve described here isn’t an attack on women’s bodies, reproductive justice, or education, but a coordinated expression of all three. So it’s frustrating that many education policy reformists consider reproductive justice as a battle fought on another front, and vice versa. This comfortable intellectual, political, and on-the-ground siloing is precisely what the right has so effectively taken advantage of in recent years. And they’ll keep going.
I hope that activists working in women’s rights, reproductive justice, and education reform build a stronger coalition (not just with regard to sex education, the most obvious overlap, but also with regard to the structural abuses of education as vehicles for misogynistic and pronatalist agendas).
Reproductive justice advocates should pay attention to the school policies I’ve described here and help young people resist the narrow messaging they’re receiving in classrooms. Show up to parents’ meetings, run for your school board, or send your school board a guide to sex education in just one click. Figure out what your kids are and aren’t learning at school, and fill in the gaps when you can with holistic reproductive information. At the same time, education reformists should consider how education policies can alter the reproductive lives of students and contend with how indoctrination bleeds into embodied control. Advocate for robust support for student parents and for people who don’t want children to pursue education without shame. If we want to respond purposefully to this multifaceted attack, this is the path we must take.
