This week, news broke that the Trump administration is weighing a bunch of policy proposals from advocates of an emerging “pronatalist” movement, one designed to convince more women to have more children. You could say I fall squarely in its target demo: I’m a 30-year-old woman and engaged to be married to a man with whom I have a secure and loving partnership. I’m also college-educated, financially stable, and have a support network of friends and family—which is to say, I’m immensely privileged. And I’m a fence-sitter on the topic of whether to have kids. But if anything, the baby-boosting policies proposed have swayed me in the opposite direction.
As reported by The New York Times, these policy ideas include reserving a portion of Fulbright scholarships (which are paid by the government) for people who have kids, funding education on the menstrual cycle (presumably so folks better understand when they can get pregnant), and handing out $5,000 in cash as a “baby bonus” to every new mom once they pop out a kid—as if that would make a dent in prenatal care and childbirth expenses, or the roughly $20,000 cost of a child’s first year of life, much less beyond that (more on this later). There’s also, laughably, a proposal on the table that would award a “National Medal of Motherhood” to moms with six or more children. Because a fancy thank-you-for-your-service is what will really get people to commit to raising a full volleyball team.
That first one is just a bit of a head-scratcher. It seems far-fetched that a measure of additional access to a particular scholarship would sway many folks to have kids—and more likely that a quota for parents would penalize the single recent grads to whom these scholarships are often awarded. As for the second? I’m all for ramping up menstrual education, given that sex ed in this country is notoriously abysmal. But to suggest that the declining birth rate is largely a function of people not knowing how their bodies work is both insulting and ignorant of the real issue. “Most women we hear from aren’t opting out of motherhood [because they don’t want children],” Erin Erenberg, CEO and co-founder of Chamber of Mothers, a nonpartisan nonprofit advocating for maternal and parental rights, tells SELF. It’s not that they can’t bother figuring out when they’re ovulating. “Rather, they simply can’t afford having kids,” she says.
Which brings us to the $5,000 baby bonus. At first blush, the idea might seem at least like a good start, some money for new moms being better than no money. But when you do the math, that figure starts to feel a bit ridiculous, if not downright offensive.
To start, there are the costs of childbirth, which, if you don’t have insurance, can total roughly $15,000 for prenatal appointments, vaginal delivery, and postpartum care (or about $2,600, on average, with coverage), according to research from The Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF. Deliver with a C-section? You’re up to about $26,000 without insurance or $3,200 with coverage. (Some plans may have you on the hook for a lot more.) And that number spikes by the thousands if you have pregnancy complications, or if your baby has to stay in the newborn intensive care unit (NICU) post-birth. Finally, there’s the mountain of costs associated with raising a kid, estimated to total about $300,000 from birth to age 18 in a recent analysis by LendingTree. It’s a number that makes any possible handout, even a larger one than proposed, feel like small potatoes.
