Policy experts and advocates of boosting the birthrate have been meeting with White House aides, sometimes handing over written proposals on ways to help or convince women to have more babies,” reported The New York Times. Among the ideas circulating are a quota for the share of Fulbright scholarships awarded to parents and federal funding for programs that “educate women on their menstrual cycles” to “teach them when they’re able to conceive.”

Exactly which of these “pronatalist” policies President Donald Trump will embrace is not known, but he is a receptive audience, having pledged as a candidate to “support baby booms.” Similarly, in his first speech as Vice President, J.D. Vance told an anti-abortion rally, “I want more babies in the United States of America” (as if we didn’t already know that after Vance’s open disdain for “childless cat ladies” was uncovered in the 2024 campaign.)

The baby-making push is overtly sold not as a dystopian Handmaid’s Tale-esque plan to shunt women out of the workplace and back into the kitchen, even though, as a separate Times dispatch from a recent pronatalist conference noted, their movement has embraced “misogynists calling for a return to traditional gender roles.”

As the Congressional Budget Office detailed last year, in its 30-year population projections, “Over the next decade, immigration accounts for about 70 percent of the overall increase in the population, and the greater number of births than deaths accounts for the remaining 30 percent. After 2034, net immigration increasingly drives population growth, accounting for all population growth beginning in 2040.” Those projections would not hold if Trump’s mass deportation regime remained in place.

So, put me down as skeptical that Trump and his pro-natalist allies are serious about effective policymaking to increase America’s population. They are far more serious about dehumanizing and deporting immigrants and promoting sexist stereotypes about the role of women in society.