President Trump and his minions want more babies in this country — if they are white and speak English
Our new Department of Transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, intends to prioritize highway funding for states with higher marriage and birth rates than the national average.
This could be good news for South Dakota, which had the highest birth rate in America as of 2022. At 66.5 births per 1,000 women of child-bearing age, South Dakota ranked first, followed by Alaska, Nebraska, North Dakota, Texas, Louisiana, Utah, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Kansas.
Interestingly enough, the top 10 states in the reproduction competition all voted for Duffy's boss, Donald Trump, in last year’s presidential election. For what it’s worth, Bernie Sanders’ home state of Vermont, which supported Kamala Harris over Trump, had the nation’s lowest birth rate.
Duffy, who was a Republican representative from northern Wisconsin and then a FOX News personality before joining President Trump’s Cabinet, comes by his obsession with birth rates honestly. He and his wife have nine children.
That’s three fewer than Elon Musk, whose children were born to several different women. (Musk apparently doesn’t claim one of his children, who is transgender.) Duffy’s predecessor, Pete Buttigieg, and his husband have two children, both of whom were adopted.
Trump has blamed the catastrophic plane crash in the Potomac River on the approach to Washington’s Reagan National Airport on Buttigieg’s D.E.I. (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies at the department. Presumably, if Buttigieg had hired staffers based on merit, and more DOT employees had been heterosexual white men, that crash would not have happened.
This is not the first time someone in the Trump universe has focused attention on birth rates. Vice President JD Vance has spoken about the need for more babies and denigrated the “childless cat ladies” who tend to vote Democratic but live unhappy lives. That was also a swipe at Harris, who never had any biological children but is nevertheless a stepmother.
It is true that American birth rates, like those of much of the industrialized world, have been in a long-term decline. In 1957, at the height of the Baby Boom, America’s birth rate was 122.9 per 1,000 women of child-bearing age, a statistic which had declined to 54.5 per 1,000 in 2023, or less than half of what it was 66 years earlier.
This downward trend could be attributed to widespread availability of birth control, liberal abortion laws, and the reality that more women today choose to delay starting families as they pursue college educations and careers.
Economics is certainly a factor; it is far more expensive to raise children today than it was in 1957, even allowing for inflation.
Population growth is rightly seen as an environmental issue. A higher birth rate in a modern, industrial society inevitably means that more carbons will be consumed and global climate change will be exacerbated. Population growth also leads to urban sprawl and deforestation.
Clearly, ecological considerations do not concern Trump and Duffy. We could increase our population by welcoming immigrants from Mexico, Venezuela, Haiti and other struggling countries in the Global South, but Trump has echoed fascist Adolf Hitler’s statements about impure blood poisoning Aryan blood when he claimed during the campaign that illegal immigrants are “destroying the blood of our country.”
As many have argued, The MAGA world wants more white, English-speaking babies, not more racial and ethnic diversity. Perhaps red states like South Dakota will adopt policies to encourage larger families, especially white families, with the incentive of generous federal highway funding.
It may be time to make America fertile again.
Jay Davis is a retired Rapid City lawyer and a regular contributor to The South Dakota Standard.
Photo: public domain, wikimedia commons
