Over the past few weeks, the White House has been considering a range of ideas to boost America’s falling birth rate: a $5,000 (£3,756) ‘baby bonus’ to new mothers, programmes to educate women on their menstrual cycles, a ‘National Medal of Motherhood’ for women with six children or more. Trump has pledged to be the ‘fertilisation president’, whilst J.D. Vance has said, ‘to put it simply, I want more babies in America’.
Across the world, countries are trialling increasingly creative and dramatic policies to try to reverse the fertility decline. In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s self-proclaimed mission is ‘procreation, not immigration’, mothers with two or more children are now exempt from income tax for life.
If Trump wants to boost the birth rate, then he needs to make parenting joyful again
Yet none of them have shown any signs of real success. South Korea has spent more than $200 billion (£150 billion) over the past 16 years on family-friendly policies, and yet its total fertility rate fell by 25 per cent in that time.
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