JD Vance and the New Pronatalism: Why Boosting Birth Rates Is Complicated

Vice President J.D. Vance’s public advocacy for higher birth rates has brought renewed attention to pronatalism, a political movement focused on increasing fertility. With Vance and his wife expecting their fourth child in July 2026, the vice president has positioned himself as a prominent voice in debates about America’s declining birth rates. However, social scientists and public health researchers caution that the solutions proposed by pronatalist advocates often lack scientific grounding.

Pronatalism has gained traction as global fertility rates fall. The average number of births per woman worldwide dropped from 5.3 in 1963 to 2.2 in 2023, according to World Bank data. Many countries, including the United States, now fall below the replacement level of approximately two births per woman. This demographic shift has sparked policy discussions across the political spectrum.

Approaches to addressing fertility decline vary significantly. Some nations have implemented left-leaning policies, including tax credits for new parents and paid parental leave, to encourage childbearing. In contrast, right-leaning pronatalist circles tend to reject state-funded support for children, and families. Instead, they advocate for a return to traditional nuclear family structures where women raise children and men serve as primary earners.

What Science Says About Supporting Families

Research suggests that policies focused solely on boosting fertility rates have largely failed to achieve their goals. Social scientists argue that people’s reasons for foregoing children in the modern era run deep, and that asking how to increase fertility may be the wrong question altogether. A more productive approach, experts say, is examining how to support communities and families.

Philip Cohen, a sociologist and demographer at the University of Maryland in College Park, notes that the nuclear family model is a relatively recent development. “In ancient times, the nuclear family was not the system for taking care of children,” Cohen says. Instead, humans practiced cooperative child-rearing in which caregivers beyond parents, including extended kin, older siblings and community members, played central roles in raising children.

“It takes a village to raise a child … It’s really trite, but it’s a really profound insight into human evolutionary history.”

Heidi Colleran, evolutionary anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

The nuclear family emerged just a few hundred years ago and slowly proliferated across the world. This shift, coupled with other demographic changes, has weakened community ties. Family members often live far apart, precarious housing makes it difficult to build societies that support communal childrearing, and smaller families mean fewer older siblings to watch younger ones.

Historical Context and Concerns

Contemporary pronatalism traces its roots to the eugenics movement of a century ago, according to Cohen. Following World War I, when many men perished and birth rates plummeted, leaders including Benito Mussolini of Italy and Adolf Hitler of Germany established pronatalist policies. In Nazi Germany, the government provided couples with loans to purchase homes, forgiving portions of those loans for each child born. However, such offers were not available to people with “impure” lineages, including those with nonwhite or disabled ancestors.

In some ways, Cohen says, the push today feels similar. Pronatalist leaders often encourage more people to have children while simultaneously opposing immigration. What’s largely missing from the dialog is how immigrants, who account for nearly a quarter of all births in the United States, also make up roughly a fifth of the childcare workforce, compensating in some ways for diminished community support systems.

Workplace Compatibility and Family Support

Rebecca Sear, a demographer and evolutionary behavioral scientist at Brunel University of London, identifies workplace changes as a significant factor in declining fertility. “It’s not women who have changed. It’s the workplace that has changed,” Sear says. “The workplace is now not compatible with childrearing.”

In hunting and gathering societies, women remained incredibly productive while caring for children. Research shows women in such communities procure almost half of the calories consumed. Work and family life began to diverge as people shifted from farming to industry, a trend that accelerated with the Industrial Revolution. Without networks of caregivers, women tended to stay home while men went to work.

Rethinking Policy Success

Research into family policies such as paid parental leave and childcare support suggests these measures may increase fertility by roughly one child for every 10 to 20 women, according to estimates published in March 2025 in Population and Development Review. However, the paper’s authors argue this does not mean such policies are failures. Instead of measuring success in terms of fertility, policymakers should focus on how well such policies support individuals and families.

Nordic countries exemplify this mindset, often topping world happiness rankings. Their policies, including making caregiving, education, housing and health care affordable for all, are not centered on convincing people to have more children, but on improving the population’s overall well-being.

Rising levels of loneliness and social isolation indicate that people crave a return to stronger community connections, say Cohen and others. In the United States, people want more children than they are having, researchers reported in January 2023 in Population and Development Review. Helping aspiring parents have children while improving quality of life across the board may be more effective than pronatalist messaging alone.

Pronatalists often treat population decline as a harbinger of societal collapse. But for the foreseeable future, at least, societies can adapt to fewer births through various measures, such as easing paths for immigration. “The low birth rate gives us the opportunity to fix our other problems,” Cohen says.