The Myth of Pro-Family America

There has been a resurgence in recent years of the conservative pronatalist movement, a politics broadly preoccupied with reproduction and an exultation of the “traditional” role of the parent. This upswell has come both from cultural influencers—think “tradwives” and MAHA—and politicians, like J.D. Vance with his barbs about “childless cat ladies.” This is more than talk: there is a moral panic about declining fertility rates in the United States and the government is prioritizing marital families and traditional gender roles like it is the 1950s. Project 2025, seen as a kind of roadmap to the policy aims of the Trump administration’s ideologues, recommends restricting access to birth control and abortions. And the Secretary of Transportation, a father of nine, recently directed his agency to prioritize projects in communities with high marriage and birth rates.

Somewhat confoundingly, this push for procreation is occurring at the same time as the “child welfare” system—more aptly described as the family policing system—entangles millions of families in surveillance and court processes and removes children to a foster system where they face high rates of abuse and usually fare poorly. Black and Indigenous families are particularly at risk for what Dorothy Roberts has called this “benevolent terror” of state involvement.

Taken together, the pronatalist movement and the family policing system create a paradox: while the state pushes a pronatalism and anti-abortion agenda, it also punishes some families for having children at all. These two directly opposing family policies are rooted in the same factors that explain much of U.S. state intervention into families throughout the nation’s history—race, class, and a stark lack of economic support, benignly described as the “privatization of dependency.” In short, only some families, and only some children, matter. Specifically, white, Christian, heterosexual, marital, and middle-class families are prized, while others are pathologized.

Working in tandem, these agendas lead to contradictory outcomes: the family policing system stigmatizes and separates poor, non-white families while the pronatalist movement reifies two-parent marital households. Both obscure structural inequality, avoid any state obligation of aid, and blame parents already marginalized by race, immigration, or marital status for intergenerational and growing childhood poverty. Tracing these entangled state policies demonstrate that both were built along racialized and “respectability” (class) lines. Despite their overlapping histories, the family policing system and pronatalist movements have yet to be explored together. We aim to start that project here.

Below we highlight three inflection points from 1900 through today to uncover the historic throughline of the pronatalist and family policing agenda and flag its impact on millions of children, families, and communities. In doing so, we reveal three intertwined themes of U.S. policy. First, the family policing system and the pronatalist movement have never been rooted solely, or even primarily, in concerns about child safety or population decline, but rather in racialized social control. Second, despite the rhetoric of “family values” and “child saving,” children’s well-being does not drive family policy, especially in terms of financial resources. Third, in contrast, the carceral logics underlying national family, reproductive, and welfare policy harm many children and families because the majority of families do not fit the white heterosexual nuclear form. Indeed, the natalist movement coupled with an anti-abortion agenda actually leads to more families who do not fit the normative ideal, and who are struggling economically, in turn increasing surveillance and family separation.

Dating back to colonial times, through slavery and the destruction of Indigenous communities, to post-emancipation “Social Purity” and Eugenics movements, the U.S. state has always damaged some families and supported others.

Natalism’s application to only some people was evident in the movement’s first big push at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech before the National Congress of Mothers lamenting “race suicide,” claiming that one of the fundamental challenges the country faced was declining procreation and accusing childless (white) women of being “selfish” and “merit[ing] contempt.” Fearmongering about declining birth rates in some populations was coupled with exaggerated rhetoric about Black and immigrant families reproducing at high rates.

Against this backdrop, the nascent welfare state and family policing systems were born. Capital-P Progressives created “orphan trains,” shipping half a million children West out of cities on to purportedly “healthier” lives with white, U.S.-born farming families. Most of these children were not orphans at all, but rather were taken from impoverished immigrant families and were often sent to be indentured servants. At the same time, states enacted “Mothers’ Pension” programs, which supported “fit” and “deserving”—i.e., white—mothers who were most often widowed, willing to financially help those particular children thrive in their own homes.

It is no coincidence that during the 1960s, our next inflection point, civil rights gains by the Black community, including eligibility for some state aid, were coupled with punitive measures that never accompanied the Mothers’ Pensions. These included ongoing sterilization (particularly of Indigenous women and women of color more broadly); the start of the rise of mass incarceration and concomitant family separation, and strict vetting processes and intrusive surveillance for state benefits. This surveillance included surprise midnight house checks, ostensibly to see if children were present and safe, but also to shame unmarried, often non-white, mothers. Notably, these “Operation Bedchecks” also tracked recipients’ sexual relationships, and have never been applied to middle-class recipients of state aid, such as the mortgage tax deduction.

During these times, the federal government espoused natalist rhetoric, mainly through its fearmongering about the purported woes of single-parent households. Obscuring structural racism and its own role in maintaining it, the government began blaming families themselves for their poverty. In the infamous 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan (President Lyndon Johnson’s assistant secretary of labor) articulated that “ghetto culture” coupled with the “steady expansion” of New Deal social welfare policies led to the “disintegration” of the Black family. In 1965, reflecting the content of the Moynihan report, President Johnson delivered a graduation speech at Howard University arguing that a major factor leading to racial inequity was “the breakdown of the Negro family structure.” Welfare programs then became an avenue for the government to push for a traditional, heterosexual two-parent household, as opposed to addressing poverty through financial support.

During our final inflection point, the mid-1990s, following racialized and false narratives of “welfare queens” and “crack babies,” Congress enacted two statutes which brought unprecedented intrusion into families and cuts to financial support that still impacts children today. President Bill Clinton pushed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), demonstrating the bipartisan nature of this family control project. They brought extremely harsh measures including—ironically in a natalist time—“family caps” (strict limits on the number of children who could receive financial support) and other stigmatizing welfare “reforms.” These arrived alongside more family separation and even expedited terminations of parental rights (aptly termed the “civil death penalty”) and funding for adoption over family preservation. Both statutes targeted almost exclusively low-income families, disproportionately Black and Indigenous.

In this era as well, the state expressed moral judgments on what constitutes a “deserving” family and sought to increase reproduction exclusively within that marital model. For example, in 1992, Vice president Dan Quayle delivered an infamous speech criticizing the TV sitcom protagonist Murphy Brown for opting to follow the “lifestyle choice” of being a single mother, sparking a national discussion on “family values.” Tellingly, Quayle’s speech focused less on the show’s titular white middle-class character and more on the argument that the 1992 Los Angeles riots were caused not by anti-Black police violence but rather by the “breakdown of the family structure” and reliance on government support. Promoting the family soon became shorthand for cutting back on government financial aid; welfare reform legislation would cut cash aid, and a portion of the federal welfare budget was diverted into marriage promotion programs.

Today, hundreds of thousands of children continue to be removed from their homes for “neglect,” a reframing of structural poverty that shifts blame onto individual parents. The sexual activity, pregnancies, and parenting of girls and women of color, those with disabilities, and those who are poor are policed and criminalized at an escalating rate. Vice president J. D. Vance and others, as noted above, espouse pronatalism, some conservatives traffic in racist conspiracy with “the Great Replacement theory,” and the Trump administration seeks to limit already scant benefits and even citizenship itself. Politicians simultaneously cut reproductive health care while urging women to have large families rather than careers, despite the increased danger to maternal health from the former and the economic reality that most families need as many working adults as possible.

Money, like race, has always been at the heart of these intertwined projects of natalism and family policing. An aging or otherwise shrinking workforce can lead to economic downturns, and has repeatedly, including now, been cited as a reason for pronatalist policies. At the same time, the rising costs of child care and housing are chief among the reasons people under the age of thirty increasingly say they will likely not have children. Hedge funders and tech bros tout large families as a status symbol—families that are affluent and disproportionately white. In contrast, poor families are punished for having children—remember the family caps to state aid?—or even prevented from doing so.

Although the Supreme Court decided Buck v. Bell (1927) nearly a century ago, its message to low-income people resonates today. In that infamous opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes condemned those “who already sap the strength of the State” and opined that “it is better for all of the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Even if no longer justifying sterilization, the same disdain for those many Americans who cannot juggle the rising costs of basic necessities fuels the welfare and family policing systems today.

Support for children in the United States has always been abysmal. Alone among wealthy nations, the United States does not provide federal paid family leave or health insurance and does not subsidize childcare. Rather than supporting parents directly, the United States has always funneled benefits through marriage, ignoring the fact that almost half of children are born outside of marriage. Child poverty is still high and state agencies’ myopic focus on adoptions has led to hundreds of thousands of “legal orphans,” children aging out of the foster system with no legal family. In the long run, these measures have created intergenerational cycles of poverty that do not auger well for the nation’s future or economy. The desire to impose racialized ideals of “morality” and family structure have outweighed measures proven to help future generations.

Yet the new natalism brings a potential silver lining. Along with ideas both bizarre (motherhood medals, hearkening back to the Nazis) and unscientific (“Christian” birth control methods), some natalism advocates are suggesting baby bonuses and affordable child care and housing. These align with what family defense attorneys have always pushed for: put more money into the hands of parents, without any strings attached.

Not surprisingly to any parent, research shows that the most effective way to help families—far more than parenting classes, awards, or punitive surveillance—is to give them material resources. (In addition to the obvious benefits, cash aid even increases brain activity in babies). Such resources should be universal, come with no strings attached, and be coupled with the dismantling of the surveillance and punitive interventions endemic to the family policing system. By advocating for more resources, maybe, just maybe, the new natalists can use their political and cultural clout to bring real support to children and families of all kinds.

_{Image: Randy Fath / Unsplash}

Contributors

Cynthia Godsoe Cynthia Godsoe is a Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, Dean’s Research Scholar, and the current Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship. Her recent and forthcoming work appears in the UCLA Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Boston University Law Review, and California Law Review Circuit, among other places.

Anna Belle Newport Anna Belle Newport is a litigation fellow at the Family Justice Law Center, an organization seeking justice for those mistreated by the family policing system. Her article on the need for family “Miranda” warnings during child protective services investigations was published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review.

Topics

• Culture & Politics

Tags

• child welfare
• child welfare system
• families
• family policing
• family separation
• racial disparities
• racism