Pronatalism is not necessarily pro-family, but it can be a start.
Pronatalism is not necessarily pro-family, but it can be a start.
V ice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, welcomed Alec Neel Vance into the world last Sunday, the first child born to a sitting vice president since the Ulysses S. Grant administration. Alec is the couple’s fourth child, following nine-year old Ewan, six-year-old Vivek, and four-year-old Mirabel.
“Usha and the baby are happy and healthy, and our kids are overjoyed to meet their little brother,” Vance announced on X. “The incredible military doctors and staff members of Walter Reed Medical Center and the White House Medical Unit have been a blessing.”
The Vances are the latest example in what some regard as a pronatalist trend within the Trump administration — even in American culture at large.
“Every new child is a reminder of the hope, promise, and bright future we’re working to build,” White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles said in her repost of Vance’s baby announcement.
In an excerpt from a June 2026 interview with Usha in honor of Father’s Day, Vance lamented how quickly his kids were growing up. “That’s why I so desperately wanted to have a fourth baby is because I was sick of my kids growing up, and I was not ready to be out of the baby phase,” he told Usha.
It seems others in the administration were also not ready to leave the “baby phase.”
Karoline Leavitt became the first White House press secretary to give birth while actively serving, after her second child, Viviana, was born on May 1 of this year. After the Vances’ baby was born, she reposted the X announcement. “I can’t wait for our babies to meet!” she said. “What a blessing!”
Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, gave birth to their fourth child, Hawthorne, on June 3. “Babies are the absolute best. Our home is filled with so much love, laughter, and joy,” she said in her announcement. “I truly recommend parenthood — it’s a 10/10 life experience.”
Though her nomination was withdrawn before it could be voted on by the Senate, former surgeon general pick Casey Means was over 40 weeks pregnant and went into labor before her October 2025 hearing, delaying it.
“I’m especially glad we’re able to hold this meeting, which was long overdue, but being in labor is one of the best excuses we’ve had to delay a hearing,” Kansas Senator Roger Marshall later said at the rescheduled hearing.
It seems clear that Trump administration births are at least indicative of a broader trend in favor of pronatalism. And it stretches from D.C. to California, with a number of celebrities attracting attention for their pregnancies.
But while we should welcome these cultural shifts, it is also important to draw distinctions and recognize that pronatalism is not necessarily pro-family.
Pronatalism means “pro-birth.” It emphasizes reproduction and high birth rates. Being pro-family usually entails traditional values on marriage, a staunch pro-life stance, and parents’ right to have a say in their children’s education. Pro-family advocates also tend to oppose in vitro fertilization; they push for higher birth rates but not at the expense of sacrificing embryos in the lab.
Comments about childbirth from figures like Vance seem to combine both pro-family and pronatalist rhetoric — but this raises a deeper question: Can these two perspectives, each with its own unique priorities and values, truly be blended? Despite his Catholic faith, Vance is a proponent of IVF. Whether it is a fundamental contradiction for someone to support IVF and be pro-family depends largely on his or her definition of pro-family.
Leaders like Trump and elites like Elon Musk seem to focus exclusively on pronatalism, without the emphasis on traditional values that characterizes a pro-family approach. Musk emphasizes childbirth in a largely pragmatic sense — as a protection against the threat of population decline that “is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”
Indeed, if America’s population begins to decline by 2050, as research suggests, emphasis on pronatalism might not be as pro-family as conservatives would like to think, but more of a survival tactic.
Of course, Musk’s approach to having children can hardly be called pro-family. Musk has had 14 children with four different women. Many were conceived through IVF, and several of the women gave birth long after the couple had broken up.
Moreover, Trump is such a staunch supporter of IVF that he humorously called himself “the fertilization president” during a March 2025 White House event celebrating Women’s History Month. Legislation supported by the Trump administration has also promoted pronatalism, both explicitly and implicitly.
Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, “Trump accounts” were established as tax-advantaged investment accounts for children under 18. The accounts opened for contributions on July 4, and over 6 million accounts were made within five days. The government promised to deposit a $1,000 seed bonus to each account opened for a child born between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2028.
The president also has taken steps to reduce the cost of IVF treatments, signing an executive order in February that directed federal agencies to submit recommendations for lowering its expense. Though controversial among conservatives for its treatment of embryos as cells that can either be used to create a baby or discarded, affordable IVF could encourage more women, even those past traditional childbearing age, to consider motherhood.
Amid the policy push, a partisan gap persists on the matter of parenthood. A June report from the Institute for Family Studies said conservatives have more children than liberals do, while conservatives cite fewer concerns about becoming parents. Referring to this as an “ideological fertility gap,” the study reports that 18 percent of liberals question whether they can be good parents as opposed to 9 percent of conservatives.
Researchers said this confidence, or lack thereof, directly correlates with the number of children a couple chooses to have. Moreover, the study’s conservative respondents, ages 18–54, had an average of 1.4 children versus the 1.1 children averaged by liberal respondents.
Against this backdrop, the Vances are among the political leaders who have embraced family life. JD and Usha have brought their children to political events including the January 2025 inauguration and Vance’s swearing-in as well as on diplomatic trips to places such as Vatican City and India.
When his son Vivek turned four, then–Ohio Senator Vance read Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! to him from the Senate floor and assured him that “Daddy loves you very much.”
Last Wednesday, the Vance family set up a lemonade stand in front of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and Usha explained in a post on Instagram that “the kids chose to donate the proceeds to our friends at the Special Olympics.”
Vance’s social media highlights the family-man image that he and many of his fellow conservative leaders strive to cultivate. In this sense, despite the vice president’s IVF stance, Vance aims to represent not just the pronatalist but also the pro-family position.
Still, it’s worth repeating that pronatalism is not necessarily pro-family.
Pronatalism’s focus is quantitative and champions the growth of the American population. IVF, artificial insemination, and other methods of conception would all be acceptable approaches within pronatalism.
Being pro-family involves something more qualitative: The aim is to encourage the formation of healthy family units that can then produce offspring.
We can, and should, celebrate the famous newborns in Washington, in Hollywood, and beyond. But the work of strengthening American families doesn’t stop there.