The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently shared information on the birth rate for 2024, and while there was a less than one percent increase, things still aren’t looking good.
Other data from the CDC shows an underlying issue in the birth rate, reporting the birth rate for women between 20 and 24 years old has decreased to 56.7 births per 1,000 women, another all-time low.
The White House is currently brainstorming ways to encourage women to have more children, according to an article in The New York Times.
Reading the headline made me laugh as I thought about how many people would probably be less motivated to have children if Trump wants them to.
It also seems clear to me that a simple way to make women feel more comfortable with pregnancy, birth and raising a family is restoring Roe v. Wade. I can see why someone wouldn’t want to get pregnant when the fetus’s life is prioritized over theirs.
The article shared some of the proposals that have been made, a $5,000 cash bonus to every woman after delivering a baby, government-funded menstrual cycle education for women and reserving 30% of scholarships for the Fulbright program, an international fellowship, to applicants who are married or have children.
These pitches sound so dystopian to me. Getting paid to have a child sounds great until you think about the cost of raising a child; $5,000 wouldn’t go far.
I remember seeing TikToks about the 4B movement the morning after the 2024 presidential election. 4B, a South Korean feminist movement, stands on the principles of no sex, no dating, no marrying men and no children.
Searches for “4B Movement” surged in the US hours after the election, according to an article by 19th News. They explain that the idea behind the movement is individual resistance against the “conservative political environment and corrosion of reproductive rights.”
This makes me curious if the movement really did have any impact on women in the U.S., impacting the birth rate, or if it is from another variable.
The way Trump is approaching this issue scares me, because he doesn’t care about the children that will be born, but rather, that “his country” looks better to others.
Kate Beske is a 22-year-old journalism senior from Destrehan, La.
