One perspective on society, babies and the evolving family
- sciart0
- May 6
- 2 min read
Updated: May 7
Excerpt from first link: "American households don’t look like they used to. They’ve been changing for decades, in part because fewer people have been having kids—but also because different people have been having kids. More unmarried couples have been starting families. More single people have been parenting on their own. Some are even raising children with their friends.
According to a report from Pew Research Center, in 1970, 67 percent of Americans aged 25 to 49 lived with a spouse and at least one child; by 2023, that number had plummeted to 37 percent. That’s a profound shift: Most adults in this age group, over the course of roughly 50 years, went from being married with children to not. What some refer to as the “traditional” family is no longer a majority.
Pronatalists across the political spectrum argue that the first trend, dropping birth rates, poses an urgent, existential threat: Fewer children born could eventually mean fewer working people to support the economy, pay taxes, and care for the elderly. Some of these pronatalists have the ear of Donald Trump, who, according to The New York Times, is weighing policies intended to nudge people toward childbirth. Vice President J. D. Vance and DOGE chief Elon Musk are both enthusiastic pronatalists.
But the administration also wants to promote marriage—most likely a certain kind of marriage. Project 2025, a set of policy suggestions that have been called a road map for Trump’s second term, is very clear about who should be encouraged to have children. “Married men and women,” it decrees, “are the ideal, natural family structure.”
A pronatalist policy that defines family so narrowly—acknowledging only a type of household that most Americans don’t fit into—wouldn’t just be a moral mistake; it would also be a strategic one. The United States is full of people yearning for children, but who are struggling to find a partner, or to pay for IVF, or to afford caring for kids beyond those they already have."