Trump wants women to have more babies. Only 1 problem.

This year there has been a lot of talk about birth rates.

President Donald Trump called himself the “fertilization president” shortly after returning to the White House and declared, “We want more babies.” He reportedly considered policy proposals to incentivize American women to have more children, including a $5,000 “baby bonus” and a “National Motherhood Medal” for any woman who has six or more children.

Most recently, at a White House press event alongside Trump, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proclaimed Declining birth rates are “a threat to national security.”

In short, the administration has adopted blatantly pronatalist rhetoric: an ideology created to increase declining population rates that have historically been co-opted by fascist and authoritarian regimes.

As the Trump administration ramps up fear around falling birth rates, it’s important to ask why this is suddenly such a hot-button political issue. What does it really mean to have 1.6 children per woman? Should we really be worried about declining fertility rates? And what other factors are affecting people’s decisions about having children?

News themezone spoke with Karen Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Centerabout the U.S. birth rate and whether concerns about its decline are justified. Guzzo, who is also a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, connected the dots between the pronatalist rhetoric coming from the top of our government and how it is shaping our opinions on this issue.

I keep hearing that we should be concerned that the fertility rate in the United States has decreased. Can you break down how the United States tracks birth rates and explain what these numbers really mean?

The total fertility rate is basically an aggregate of birth rates at different ages. We generally take birth rates in five-year intervals (i.e. 15-19, 20-24), combine them, do some math, and come up with this hypothetical estimate.

Birth rates are not supposed to change over time at different ages. So today’s 15-year-olds are supposed to have the birth rates of today’s 40-year-olds when those 15-year-olds turn 40. And we know that’s not the case because people are increasingly waiting longer to have children at older ages and having fewer births at younger ages. So it’s not really a good estimate. It’s the best number we have because it’s easy to calculate and easy to compare over time.

But it introduces a problem. When people have their first child later in life (as happens in the United States), that total fertility rate tends to be artificially biased downward. Therefore, it does not actually predict how many children a woman will have over her lifetime.

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Can you explain what it means that we need 2.1 children per woman to maintain a stable population?

This is replacement-level fertility, which is basically how many children a woman would need to have in her lifetime to replace herself and her partner. It is generally estimated to be around 2.1 because there will always be some loss of life at some point. The problem with the replacement level is that it also assumes that there will be no change in birth rates, there will be no change in death rates or life expectancy, and that there will be no immigration.

So when you juxtapose replacement-level fertility with a total fertility rate, you think, “My God, we’re way below that and that means we’re facing an imminent population decline.” That’s not really accurate. The United States could maintain the same population size even with low birth rates or a low total fertility rate because people are living longer than they were 50 years ago, because we have a lot of immigration. In reality, there are many things that influence whether our population remains stable; It’s not just about births. So I sometimes worry that when we talk about replacement level and there’s below-replacement fertility, we’re setting ourselves up for this bigger panic about what’s going to happen when birth rates get too low.

What I hear is that there are a lot of rumors about a birth rate that is actually not a great representation of where we are as a country.

The interesting thing about the United States is that our birth rates were actually driven largely by teen births and births that were considered unwanted. And those are the births that have decreased the most since the Great Recession [in 2008-2009]. Our birth rates were propped up by something we didn’t necessarily brag about. In fact, the United States spent a lot of money and time trying to reduce our teen birth rates and our unwanted birth rates. We had the national campaign to prevent teenage pregnancy, which has morphed over time, but in some ways it has remained with the mission that people should not give birth too early when they do not have enough money or are not in a stable relationship. The United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars and a lot of programming to reduce teen birth rates. And we were successful.

So the birth rate doesn’t really tell the whole story. Should we be worried about the current fertility rate?

At the population level, I would say no. There are real implications for low birth rates. It means our population is aging. There are fewer young people and life expectancy is increasing. It has implications for the growth of communities. It has implications for the workforce, for tax policy and things like Social Security. But this is like the slowest moving train in the world. We can adapt. We see this coming. Other countries have taken care of this.

No country has been able to raise birth rates to or near replacement level and sustain it. Places like Japan, Italy, Hungary have been trying to do this for a long time and no one has been able to sustain it. We have a lot of time to think: What kind of world do we need to build? What kind of policies, laws, employment, labor market structures? What do we need to build to adapt to a world where there will be no constant growth and no constant large groups of young children?

It seems that encouraging people to have more children is not really the right approach to increasing birth rates.

It’s actually silly to try to figure out how to get people to have more births at a population level. But there is a lot of evidence to suggest that individual people are not capable of achieving their own goals. We know that most people would like to get married and have children. Most people would like to have two or three children and that is not happening. … I think it’s worth addressing why people can’t have the children they say they would like to have. But trying to address this broader structural problem of too few babies being born to sustain the economy in 30 years is the wrong approach.

As a demographer, 50 or 60 years ago we worried that there were too many people in the world. People said, “We have to get women to stop having babies.” And now we think, “My God, there are too few people and the birth rate is too low. Now we have to get women to have more babies.” The problem I have there is that women’s bodies are somehow the solution to a larger macro problem. And that just doesn’t sit right with me.

“The problem I have there is that women’s bodies are somehow the solution to a larger macro problem. And that just doesn’t sit well with me.”

It seems that women’s bodies are too often used as political pawns, with the recent rollback of reproductive rights under the Trump administration.

Using births as the only lever to solve a problem: there is a problem with reproductive rights, yes, but it is also simply inefficient. Immigration would solve our problems much more immediately than having babies right now. Let’s imagine that suddenly everyone has a baby today and birth rates go up, that doesn’t solve our labor market problems, it doesn’t solve our tax problems. For two reasons: One, babies are not economically productive for 25 years. That doesn’t help anything in the short term. The second thing is that if people started having tons and tons of babies, that would actually take a lot of women out of the workforce. …Babies need schools, they need health care systems, they need caregivers. It is a mistake to focus on birth as a solution to this problem.

I’ve written a lot about pronatalism in the past year, and there’s definitely a dividing line between the Trump administration’s talking points about rising birth rates and cultural rhetoric encouraging a return to traditional gender roles. What’s interesting and stands out in particular to me is who these conversation topics are aimed at.

Absolutely. Just look at the new white paper from the Heritage Foundation that details how they want to restore the nuclear family. One of the big drivers they want to focus on is getting more people married, but they only want marriage between people of different sexes and they want it to happen sooner. They highlight free love, pornography, careerism, [birth control] the pill, abortion, same-sex relationships, and no-fault divorce as factors driving delayed marriage and non-marriage. To me, that’s a list of things they’re going to pursue. And they already are.

It’s about certain types of families. Transgender attacks are actually about much more than transgender issues: they are about gender roles in general. Who is a real woman? Real women stay at home and take care of their children. The ideal femininity is the “tra-wives” of the Internet: young, thin, married and Christian. White women who have three, four, five, six children and seem to be very happy about it. We also somehow ignore the fact that they are actually making money creating this image online and are in fact working mothers.

If we were really worried about low birth rates and a shortage of Americans, we wouldn’t want to get rid of birthright citizenship, and yet we are doing it. If we were worried about the labor market, we wouldn’t be trying to get rid of immigrants. It is a very specific type of family that concerns us.

Even there are parallels in the MAHA. [Make America Healthy Again] motion. We’re talking about vaccines for children: fewer vaccines or you need to do more research on your vaccines or you need to individualize what is necessary for your family. That falls on women. To me, they are trying to redefine motherhood: your children will only be healthy and safe if you personally dedicate your life to protecting them.

The United States is well known for not having much support for mothers and families. The conflicting information we’re getting, that they should homeschool their children, that they should space out vaccines, that they should grow organic food, all of that falls on mothers, and I don’t think it’s an accident.

What would you say to someone who is concerned about the apparent decline in birth rates?

I would say that it is very difficult, almost impossible, to increase birth rates. However, the policies that tend to work best or that have at least prevented other countries from experiencing really big declines have been to create a more gender equal society where parents are fully involved in raising their children and where workplaces are safer. Recognize the importance of having children. But we also need paid leave and strong, affordable child care infrastructure because those things help families. More importantly, we know there is a well-established return on investment for things like paid leave and child care. Children are healthier, mothers are healthier, mothers return to the workforce and stay in it. Children do well with high-quality child care: it prepares them for preschool and school.

If we invested in children, in families (not through a $1,000 Trump account that a child gets when they are 18), if we invested in an infrastructure that allows people to not only combine work and family, but also take care of families, that would mean that the people we have are healthy, productive, and ready to contribute to society. If we are going to have fewer people, we should invest and support those families.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.