U.S. President Donald Trump had a notable impact on birth rates during his first term in the Oval Office and the same is expected in his second term, according to researchers.
‘We Want More Babies’
The United States is among several major economic powerhouse countries facing a population decline, driven by low fertility rates.
America’s fertility rate is now projected to average 1.6 births per woman over the next three decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest forecast released this year. This is well below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman required to maintain a stable population without immigration.
Trump has spoken out on this issue several times, including during a campaign speech in December, when he said: “We want more babies, to put it nicely.”
Last month, Trump signed an executive order expanding access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) for Americans while Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy directed the Department of Transportation to give precedence to “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”
Trump’s Previous Impact on Births
After Trump’s first term, from early 2017 to early 2021, economics researchers at the University of California San Diego looked at how his presidency had changed birth trends across different states.
Authors Gordon B. Dahl, Runjing Lu and William Mullins found in the paper “Partisan Fertility and Presidential Elections,” published in the American Economic Review in 2022, a “sharp and persistent increase” in Republican-leaning counties compared to Democratic ones.
This bump in Republican areas amounted to between roughly 1.2 percent and 2.2 percent of the national fertility rate.
Mullins told Newsweek: “It’s important to realize that, before the election, birth trends in Republican- and Democratic-leaning counties looked similar. But starting about nine months after the 2016 election, those trends began to diverge, with Republican counties showing persistently higher birth rates and Democratic counties showing comparatively lower ones.”
But Hispanic birth rates declined relative to non-Hispanics “for several months after Trump election campaign visits to that county,” the research found.
Will Trump Have the Same Impact on Births Again?
Mullins said he “expects” Trump to have a similar effect on births during this term “especially because political partisanship – the fundamental driver of these fertility shifts – has only become more intense since 2020.”
Dahl agreed in a recent interview with The Times, when he said that while “Trump’s 2024 victory was less of a shock than in 2016, that could mean that the partisan fertility gap will be smaller this time,” adding that “America has become more polarised with the recent election” and “this is likely to amplify the effect this time around.”
Is It Trump or Abortion Policy or Both?
Beth Jarosz, senior program director in U.S. programs at the Population Reference Bureau, told Newsweek: “One thing that’s lacking in all of the analyses I’ve seen between Republican vote share and fertility can be summed up in one word: policy. Republican states have enacted increasingly stringent restrictions on abortion and contraception over the past decade.”
She cited some research that came out last month assessing the link between abortion policies and birth rates.
It was carried out by several academics who specialize in population, statistics and public policy, from institutions including the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the University of California and Carnegie Mellon University.
The paper, called “US Abortion Bans and Fertility,” concluded: “These findings provide evidence that fertility rates in states with abortion bans were higher than would have been expected in the absence of these policies, with the largest estimated differences among subpopulations experiencing the greatest structural disadvantages and in states with among the worst maternal and child health and well-being outcomes.”
Optimism About the Economy
Mullins said: “Fertility could be responding to changes in economic optimism. It is well established that partisans of the winning side in a presidential election become more optimistic about the direction of the economy, and those of the losing side more pessimistic.
“Moreover, the timing of these changes in optimism lines up with the changes in fertility. As the decision to have a child has important economic consequences, it seems likely that this was the most important factor, in our view.”
Similarly, Jennifer Sciubba, president and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau, told Newsweek that “one likely explanation (though not the sole factor)” for there was an increase in birth rates in Republican counties after Trump’s election is “an increase in optimism about the future among Republicans after the electoral victory.”
“Republicans are more optimistic about the economy right now (post-second electoral victory for Trump) than are Democrats,” she said. “Worry about the economy depresses fertility, but not everyone is worried.”
But Sciubba warned: “It’s hard to predict political future … So, we have to be careful not to read too much into the connection between demography and party politics.”
Mullins agreed, saying that while these birth rate trends “certainly could contribute” to long-term demographic shifts, “long-term shifts involve many other factors, and political coalitions and even partisanship can also change over longer horizons.”
Read the full article here
