More than one year into the second term of President Trump, who declared he would be the “fertilization president,” experts say becoming a parent hasn’t become easier, and the number of people who want children has only continued to go down.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump latched on to the issue of in vitro fertilization (IVF), particularly after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee at the time, claimed to have used the procedure to conceive, though he had in fact used intrauterine insemination.
Trump declared himself the “father of IVF” during a Fox News town hall event, and after being elected, he quipped in a Women’s History Month speech, “I’ll be known as the fertilization president.”
And many of his actions since returning to office have gone toward supporting those aims.
In October, he signed an executive order to lower the cost of fertility drugs such as Gonal-F, one of the first prescription medications offered on his TrumpRx platform, while expanding coverage of fertility services for employees in the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Treasury.
On Mother’s Day this month, Trump announced the launch of moms.gov, a site with resources and information on pregnancy support services, including links to “Trump Accounts” for children.
“They say it takes a village to raise a child, and it takes systemic change to turn America’s birth rates around,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai told The Hill. “The Trump administration is leaving no stone unturned to address this challenge, from researching long-ignored chronic health issues that affect fertility to pushing policies that will improve childcare, healthcare, and housing affordability.”
All of these actions are being carried out in the name of the administration’s “pro-family” agenda. In the fact sheet for his IVF executive order, Trump explained his motivation: “We want more babies, to put it very nicely.”
Vice President Vance, who is expecting his fourth child with second lady Usha Vance, said last year, “I want more happy children in our country, and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.”
But experts don’t think it’s gotten any easier to have children since the launch of these pronatalist policies.
“It’s clear that, like a lot of industrialized Western countries, the birth rate in the United States has been declining, right? I think a solution to that is going to require a lot more than we have seen so far,” said Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
“I think that it’s a big sociological problem, cultural problem, as well as a biological problem.”
Couples with these overarching challenges have seen their issues compound since the start of the second Trump administration, healthcare analysts say.
“The rhetoric of honoring mothers and giving birth is hard to square with the reality of the massive cuts to Medicaid and healthcare and caregiving in general,” Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA, told The Hill.
“The biggest thing this administration has done is the Big Beautiful Bill, with over $900 billion of cuts to Medicaid,” Wright noted. “Medicaid is literally the primary payer for pregnancy and birth in this country. It covers over 40 percent of births and pregnancy care in this country, and so cutting that program by nearly a trillion dollars has a dramatic effect.”
Desai responded to Wright in a separate statement: “Given that the Medicaid provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill in no way affect pregnant mothers or children, this ‘healthcare access advocate’ is an idiot.”
The administration’s goals align with anxieties among the rich and powerful about future population collapse.
Elon Musk, a major ally to Trump and former head of the Department of Government Efficiency, has long espoused these concerns, writing on social media in 2022, “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Musk has more than a dozen children and has encouraged others to have more children to prevent future labor shortages.
Tipton opined that something like universally accessible fertility treatments could make a “dent” in the nation’s falling fertility rate, but it wouldn’t be a solution.
Wright said he thinks the administration is more interested in rhetoric than the “reality of even providing care during, before and after the pregnancy.”
The national fertility rate fell to a record low in 2025, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), coming out at 53.1 births per 1,000 women. For a population to remain stable, the total fertility rate should be around 2.1 children per woman. In 2024, this rate fell below 1.6 children per woman.
Though infertility rates are higher than in the past — 13.4 percent of women between the ages of 15 to 49 reported having an impaired ability to reproduce in 2022 — there is not a widespread infertility epidemic that can be blamed for the U.S.’s slowing population growth.
Economic realities are undoubtedly deterring people from having children. A survey from Brigham Young University last year found 7 in 10 people thought raising children was unaffordable — but the ongoing trend reflects a broader shift in the national attitude toward parenthood.
“We’ve seen a growing share of Americans say fewer people choosing to have kids would negatively impact the U.S. Fifty-three percent said that in 2025 compared with 47 percent just a year earlier,” said Rachel Minkin, senior researcher for the Pew Research Center’s social and demographics team.
According to Minkin, the foremost reason behind people saying they didn’t want to have children was that they simply didn’t want them. Other reasons were that they wanted to focus on other things, and nearly 40 percent said they had concerns about the state of the world and the environment.
“If the administration really wants to live up to the president’s promise of accessible IVF care, they’ve got a long way to go,” Tipton said.
