Buried in the Donald Trump administration’s recent avalanche of executive orders in the United States was a starkly revealing provision: A Department of Transportation order requiring projects to prioritize federal highway and transit funding to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average. Those with declining birth and marriage rates could face funding cuts.
In my work as a planetary health researcher, I understand the complex dynamics between reproductive rights, population dynamics and environmental sustainability. This new executive order has me worried.
Accounting for demographic trends is indeed fundamental when planning for a country’s infrastructure and transportation needs. But this executive order has nothing to do with sound infrastructure planning. Rather, it reflects the Trump administration’s ideological shift towards mainstreaming “pronatalist” policies across sectors far beyond reproductive rights and healthcare.
Pronatalism is a political ideology that seeks to increase birth rates with policies that encourage people to have more children. Pronatalism can be motivated by cultural, religious, geopolitical or economic imperatives.
Pronatalist policies can manifest in many ways. These could range from soft measures (such as stigmatizing those who choose not to have children) to hard measures (such as restricting access to contraception.
The global picture
The shift towards pronatalist policy is not unique to the United States.
Worldwide, governments are reacting to demographic shifts with alarm, introducing measures to incentivize childbirth. However, these measures fail to acknowledge that the global population is actually still increasing.
For example, Poland and South Korea both offer cash transfers for babies. Russia revived the Stalin-era “Mother Heroine” award for women who have 10 children in less than 10 years. China has replaced its anti-natalist “one-child policy” with an aggressive pronatalist regime — clamping down on vasectomies and tracking menstrual cycles.
Until recently, high infant and child mortality rates meant having many children was essential for maintaining stable populations. But advances in healthcare, sanitation and living standards have significantly reduced mortality rates. This has caused a decline in fertility rates which has reshaped the role of reproduction in modern societies.
Yet many countries view this demographic shift with concern. These fears are largely rooted in cultural, economic and political motivations — fuelling a rise in pronatalist policies globally.
But population policies that prioritize demographic targets over reproductive autonomy — a person’s power to make their own reproductive choices — have repeatedly led to devastating consequences.
For example, until 1989, Romania’s communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu enforced strict pronatalist policies. Abortions were banned, contraception was restricted and women were subjected to invasive pregnancy surveillance. Those without children faced punitive taxation. These measures led to a surge in unsafe abortions, high maternal mortality, overcrowded orphanages and lasting social trauma.
Pronatalist policies also seem to go against what most people want. Across cultures and religions, people overwhelmingly seek to control their fertility when given the choice. Research also shows that when women have access to education and contraception, they tend to choose smaller families.
Alarmist narratives about falling fertility rates distract from a more personal reality as well: that half of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended. Pronatalist policies thus appear to go against the advancement of reproductive autonomy.
Pronatalist narratives also undermine efforts to reduce humanity’s impact on the environment. Population size and growth are both major drivers of environmental degradation and climate change.
Embracing the lower fertility rates we’re seeing could help drive transformative changes needed to ease pressure on natural resources, shrink greenhouse gas emissions and ensure a more sustainable future.
Lower fertility rates in context
The world’s population is expected to grow by an additional two billion people in the coming decades. But we don’t actually know how many people the planet can sustainably support. Its carrying capacity is not a fixed measure. It’s contingent upon technological advancements, consumption patterns, economic structures and the ever-evolving interactions between humans and the environment.
Some ecological economists have even calculated that in order for everyone to have a reasonable standard of living, a truly sustainable global population would be around around 3.2 billion people. Although these estimates are far from certain, what’s clear is that a smaller global population would improve our chances to restore balance.
The fear of population decline and push for pronatalist policies obscures the critical fact that we have yet to address the consequences of the rapid population growth we’ve experienced since the 1950s. Environmental degradation and climate change have both been driven in large part by this rapid growth.
A major argument pronatalists use is that a shrinking population will lead to economic decline. This reasoning is outdated — rooted in economic models that assume perpetual growth and ignore ever-pressing planetary boundaries. While it’s clear that an ageing society presents challenges, lower birth rates don’t necessarily mean lower living standards. On the contrary, a smaller population can be conducive to labour productivity and fairer wealth distribution.
The past two centuries of explosive economic and population growth were an anomaly in human history. The idea that we must endlessly expand is a modern fiction — not a historical norm. We’re now entering “the age of depopulation” — a period characterized by lower fertility levels, and, in time, population decline. We must prepare and embrace this shift instead of trying to reverse it.