With a shared goal of limiting bodily autonomy, the anti-abortion and pronatalist movements go hand in hand.

When President Donald Trump dubbed himself the “fertilization president” earlier this year, he reinforced his administration’s commitment to supporting the traditional nuclear family and encouraging a modern “baby boom”—all in support of constructing a family-friendly façade. However, the current administration’s pronatalist policy priorities are anything but, often putting the health and safety of vulnerable populations like children and pregnant people at risk.

Pronatalists see a fundamental need to increase the population by encouraging family growth—largely informed by a premonition that declining birth rates will lead to America’s decline. This belief system also suggests the strength of the nuclear family unit reflects a nation’s societal health and presumes that men serve as breadwinners while women stay home as caretakers.

Trump is even using unconventional levers of the federal government to promote his narrowly defined pro-family agenda with the Department of Transportation announcing what is likely the administration’s most explicitly pronatalist policy: “giving preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average when awarding grants.”

Most visibly, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Department of Health and Human Services and its adjacent “Make America Healthy Again” movement are backing the administration’s largest pronatalist propaganda project with their ringing endorsement of the unfounded, unscientific fertility treatment “restorative reproductive medicine.” To do so, HHS announced a new grant that would provide $1.5 million to an organization to build a “infertility training center” to promote the practice.

Touted as a more ethical alternative to in vitro fertilization, restorative reproductive medicine is practice of holistic medicine that claims to treat the underlying conditions that lead to infertility. Restorative reproductive medicine may sound uncontroversial at first glance, but its rapid rise in prominence is inherently tied to conservative efforts to eliminate IVF access due to the belief that the destruction of embryos common in IVF is a moral wrong, much like abortion.

This turn to promoting restorative reproductive medicine implies that conventional fertility treatments like IVF are misguided and ineffective. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine explains: “Its proponents create a false narrative that standard fertility care skips proper diagnosis or healing, when in fact, it is based on precisely those principles.” Moreover, experts at RESOLVE, a national infertility association, have further pointed out that restorative reproductive medicine “is not a formally recognized specialty.”

If the idea of limiting access to well-established treatments such as IVF comes across as contradictory to the pronatalist cause of growing the U.S. population, it’s because it is. And if state legislation inspired by conservatives’ moral panic about embryo disposal takes effect, IVF will become even less accessible than it is now, and the people struggling with infertility will have fewer options to aid them in conceiving the families that Trump and his allies have so vocally encouraged. Trump’s inconsistencies on pronatalist policies have also drawn pushback from the anti-abortion movement, who previously heralded Trump for enabling Roe’s reversal but are now concerned the president is straying from pro-family values.

After Trump made a campaign promise to ensure that health insurers cover IVF treatment, an anti-abortion pressure campaign ensued, with activists claiming IVF conflicts with the anti-abortion’s goal of establishing “fetal personhood,” a legal concept granting embryos legal rights at the point of conception. And just months into his second term, White House insiders suggested Trump overpromised in his pledge to require IVF coverage and would instead redirect resources to promote restorative reproductive medicine.

Trump’s seesawing on IVF took yet another turn following an October announcement that his administration worked out a deal with a major pharmaceutical company aiming to lower costs of drugs used for IVF. The White House is also calling on employers to provide fertility treatments as a work benefit but stopped short of mandating coverage or providing subsidies for businesses adopting the policy. And just as they did before, anti-abortion leaders came out in stark opposition to expanding IVF access, claiming “IVF kills more babies than abortion.”

In addition to casting the procedure as a moral wrong, anti-abortion activists often frame abortions as a major existential risk to the U.S. in light of the national birth rate trending downward. Anti-abortion policies themselves are inherently pronatalist.

This natural overlap between these two movements is clearly expressed by Live Action founder and anti-abortion leader Lila Rose, who in 2018 tweeted: “The U.S. birth rate is the lowest it’s been in 30 years, below the rate needed to sustain the population. Meanwhile, nearly 1 million preborn children are killed every year in the U.S. Abortion not only destroys our children, it destroys families and the future of a society.”

The stark contrast of using pro-family rhetoric while supporting restrictive policies is made all the more clear in light of the inverse relationship of decreased abortion access leading not only to increased live births but also increased infant deaths—a trend observed by researchers following the 2022 Dobbs decision. Additionally, post-Roe abortion restrictions have already worsened the country’s already dire maternal mortality crisis, with pregnant people “living in states that banned abortion nearly 2x as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or soon after giving birth” compared to states with abortion access. Such restrictions are creating even larger racial health care inequalities, as “the Black-White gap in maternal mortality also widened significantly.”

And earlier this year, the Trump administration created more barriers for pregnant people seeking care by rescinding a policy that allowed pregnant patients to receive an abortion as a necessary emergency health intervention even in states with bans. Without clear guidance on whether abortion care is protected or not in emergency situations, doctors practice under the fear that treating patients for pregnancy complications may be misinterpreted as providing illegal abortion care, leading to legal persecution.

Ultimately, the anti-abortion and pronatalist movements have always been about control, which is why they’ve eschewed the kinds of pro-family policies that would usher in real change, such as making assisted reproductive technology like IVF more affordable for all, ensuring that Medicaid remains funded, or supporting child tax credits. Instead, both groups have strategically concealed these views behind the illusion of returning to an idyllic, white-picket-fenced society reminiscent of the 1950s baby boom.

But whatever society the pronatalist movement envisions recreating is largely imaginary and purposefully exclusionary. Achieving a pronatalist future is entirely dependent on traditional gender roles returning as societal norms, casting women who invest in their career over raising a family as selfish and blaming falling birth rates in part to feminism. And though immigration provides a strong opportunity to offset population decline in the U.S., this partial solution has largely been omitted by pronatalists over anxieties around the country’s increasing racial diversity—a core aspect of the white supremacist “great replacement theory” that suggests the U.S. is being overtaken by immigrants, threatening white Americans’ political power.

The reality behind the pronatalist push for a larger population has always come with the caveat that only certain demographics—read: white, straight people—should be encouraged to procreate in a cycle reinforcing the same white supremacist, eugenic worldview that has always been innate to pronatalism.

Simply put, pronatalism is societal regression repackaged as a form of social improvement by asserting that we will all be better off with greater population growth while simultaneously undoing the progress made by the feminist movement that expanded and normalized women’s presence in the workforce. The exclusionary policies touted by the Trump administration have never been about boosting family growth but instead cementing its vision of what the United States should look like: a country shaped by white Christian nationalism.