Hey y'all,
Recently, reports surfaced that Trump allies are tossing out ideas like a $5,000 baby bonus for new mothers, quotas for married applicants in prestigious programs like Fulbright, and even menstrual cycle tracking initiatives to "help" women conceive. (Because nothing says freedom like the government monitoring your uterus.)
Let me be clear: there is no amount of one-time cash, no quota system, no empty appeals to "family values" that can paper over the deeper problems steering American women away from motherhood. And that's not just about vibes or personal preferences.
It's about reality. It's about the soul-crushing math of an economy that's rigged, the brutal realities of parenting in an underfunded, overworked society, and a profound collapse in optimism about the future.
The Trump team's nostalgia for the 1950s isn't subtle. They're selling a fantasy: that if you can just get white American men back into stable, high-paying manufacturing jobs, they'll reclaim their castles and the women will stay home barefoot and pregnant.
But even the first baby boom wasn’t magic. It wasn’t just a cultural retreat from women in the workforce. It was government investment. It was the GI Bill offering free college and home loans. It was economic policies actively building the American middle class. It was rewarding veterans — especially white ones — with opportunity, not gaslighting them about personal responsibility while slashing social supports.
Today, the idea seems to be to wave $5,000 at women and hope they forget that childcare costs are astronomical, healthcare is a joke, and maternity mortality rates are climbing every year. Meanwhile, the same politicians pushing the baby bonus are hacking away at the very institutions that might actually make family life sustainable: healthcare, education, labor protections, and scientific research.
And underneath it all, there's a broader, heavier truth weighing on people's choices. Everywhere you look, people are saying the quiet part out loud: this economy is a rigged, winner-take-all game. And guess what? They're not wrong. We’re living through a period where the return on capital is higher than the growth of the economy itself. Thomas Piketty taught us that. The rich aren't getting richer because they work harder. They're getting richer because they’re sitting atop asset bubbles, inheritance flows, and financial structures designed to protect and multiply their wealth.
Social media only magnifies the hopelessness. You’re reminded not just that you’re locked out, but that your future children would be too. That’s why even ambitious, well-paid women increasingly say, “No thanks.” Why bring children into a system you already know is broken beyond repair?
And that's assuming you have the money to begin with. Raising kids today isn’t just expensive. It’s isolating. It’s precarious. It’s terrifying. It’s not enough to have a good job anymore. You need astronomical savings for daycare, safe and affordable healthcare, job flexibility your employer probably doesn't offer, and the resilience to swallow the fact that having a child can tank your lifetime earnings by 20–30%.
That’s the real deterrent. Not "selfishness." Not feminism. Not TikTok trends. Reality.
Which is why throwing out a $5,000 baby bonus and calling it a day is both unserious and insulting. If politicians truly cared about birth rates, they would be talking about massive investments in healthcare, childcare, housing, and labor protections. They’d be attacking wealth inequality at the root, not offering trickle-down scraps. They’d be trying to restore some faith that the next generation could actually have it better than the one before.
But they won't. They don't want to. Investing in regular people doesn't fit into the Republican playbook of deregulation, tax cuts for billionaires, and cratering public services.
So here we are: stuck between despair and disgust, wondering why anybody still thinks women can be guilted or bribed into motherhood in a collapsing society.
$5,000? Girl, be serious.
💜Kim
✨ Links & Resources:
The Puzzle of Falling U.S. Birth Rates Since the Great Recession by Kearney, Levine, and Pardue (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022)
The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind by Melissa Kearney (2023)
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