Americans are having fewer babies than ever before. The fertility rate in the United States has dropped to an all-time low of 1.6 births per woman. In response, the Trump Administration has urged Americans to have more children and proposed a range of pronatalist policies including baby bonuses, an expanded Child Tax Credit and making IVF treatment more affordable. Critics of the Trump Administration worry the underlying intent is to restrict access to contraception and return women to primarily domestic roles.

In this episode of Top of Mind, host Julie Rose explores the complex choices American women face when deciding how many children to have. We’ll dive into the history of fertility trends in the U.S. and take a look at how France managed to sustain a higher fertility rate than most European countries. We’ll also unpack the cultural and political tensions driving the pronatalism debate to discover a bit of common ground in the concept of “reproductive justice.”

GUESTS

Mother and daughter Melody (12 kids), Jaynee (3 kids)

Karen Benjamin Guzzo, professor of sociology, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill(https://www.cpc.unc.edu/)

Laurent Toulemon, population researcher at the French Institute for Demographic Studies in Paris (https://www.ined.fr/en/)

Mara Gordon, mother of 1, family physician in Camden, NJ, author of “Your Doctor Friend” on Substack (https://maragordonmd.substack.com/)

Lyman Stone, director of The Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies (https://ifstudies.org/pronatalism-initiative)