Childcare is now higher than mortgages, and there is no paid maternity leave. Only panic, alarms, and fading voices are there, sitting with women after giving birth. For a lot of women, the current national conversation about the declining birthrate feels so incredibly disconnected from reality.
All across the world, fertility rates are falling, and populations are projected to shrink.
Republicans have made the claim for decades now that feminism has led women to abandon marriage and family, lowering the birth rate, making it harder for men to find wives and damaging our overall social fabric. However, countries like Iran and Afghanistan have a very high declining birth rate. In these countries, there is no feminist movement at all. Therefore, feminism and the birth rate don’t foster a connection the way that Republicans like to project.
Within the conversation of the declining birth rate, there is always one question: What can we do about this? The Trump Administration, influenced by Project 2025, has considered financial incentives to encourage people to have children. Things such as education about menstrual cycles, or a “National Medal of Motherhood” for mothers with six or more children.
In countries with rising birth rates, such as South Korea, they recorded 254,500 births in 2025, the largest annual increase in 15 years. In the past two decades, South Korea has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on pro-natal measures, such as generous cash handouts, housing, parental leave and childcare support. Some corporations now offer up to $51,500 per birth. However, is throwing money at people enough to make them take on a lifelong responsibility?
If we want people to want to have more children, it is a must that we create a society that actually supports women.
Women lack basic care that is needed to support their well-being. Infertility treatments in particular are prohibitively expensive. The U.S. estimated that births increased by 32% when fertility treatments were covered by insurance. The connection is clear: covering care works. While the government is begging women to have more children, they are dismantling the infrastructure that supports their health. Just last year, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, got rid of the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health. It is simply impossible to be pro-women and wanting healthy families in America. while simultaneously taking away essential health systems.
The conservative movement wants women to believe that having babies is being done for their benefit. The other things they want to achieve are ultimately soulless and unfulfilling. In addition, feminism has made women overall miserable, and the real way to be happy is to be a mother. However, the reality of having kids isn’t the happy picture they attempt to paint. It is not about family values. It is about control. Control over who gets to make the future, control over women’s lives, bodies, and choices.
In 2020, a whistleblower at the Irwin County ICE Detention Center in Georgia reported a high rate of unnecessary hysterectomies performed on mostly Black and Latina immigrant women without full consent. Even though sterilization was performed on people of color (POC) in the 1920s to the 1970s, it is still alive today. Through this, the pattern is clear. Reproduction in America has always been political. It is encouraged for one population but discouraged for others. Whenever birth rates start to decline among White people, it is a “national emergency”. However, when birth rates were high among POC, it was looked at as a social pathology, such as poverty, and the answer was eugenics.
The right wants to suggest that they care about choice and life. However, they are willing to trap girls like her, trapping them in marriages and reducing their education and opportunities. The Heritage Foundation is a prominent Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank founded in 1973. The Heritage Foundation published an article just last month, Jan. 2026, titled “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” detailing their plans for society, specifically women which, include:
- Promoting Traditional families
- Federal funding for ‘marriage education’
- Encouraging motherhood
- Opposition to Universal Childcare/support women staying at home or utilizing “home child care”.
- Restricting Reproductive Health
- Reducing the focus on college degrees for women and promoting alternatives like apprenticeships to encourage faster transitions into family life.
The goal is clear: they want to shift women’s focus away from their careers and goals, instead encouraging them to marry and have children earlier. CONTROL your family, your education, your healthcare, your thoughts, your BODY, and your CHOICES. It is most distressing to think about this possibility. Conservatives aren’t just systematically stripping away support systems for women; they’re eradicating basic rights and information. Layered beneath the incentives of having kids is something more coercive: a tightening grip on abortion access, hostility toward contraception, and a rhetorical war on not having children.
This conversation is not meant to persuade people not to have kids or take away the happiness of giving another human being life. It is the reality of this damaging uprising movement. One we must fight back against. First, it was abortion. Then it was tubal ligations. Now they want to come for birth control pills. This is how they get the birth rate up. They want to take away our ability to control our wombs.
