I KNOW you’re lying if you say you’ve never experienced baby fever. Chubby cheeks and breadroll arms are undeniably cute! However, it’s clear that not everybody wants a baby of their own. It’s 2026—having a family isn’t a marker of success…right? Our federal government disagrees. In the past year, the Trump administration has expressed growing concern for the nation’s falling birthrate. As Trump bluntly puts it at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, “I want a baby boom”. 

I get it–babies are adorable, but the obsession spreading all the way to the Oval Office seems like overkill. However, recent policy and actions under this administration have shown that, in Project 2025’s book, there’s no such thing as going too far. As political scientists Michael Tesler, John Sides, and Colette Marcellin report to the New York Times in February 2025, the number of Republican men who agree that women should “return to their traditional roles” has increased from 28% to nearly 50% in the last two years. Interestingly, their study also shows that up until 2022, this belief was on a decline (see attached graph). So, what made us change course? We live in a time of self driving cars, Roomba vacuums, and AI—but we haven’t advanced past falling into patterns of gender regression in 2026. 

This pattern of progressive times turning sour is nothing new. Consider post-Industrial Revolution America. Industrialization brought a plethora of new technology and job opportunities to America—for women especially. The Library of Congress reports that from 1880 and 1910, the number of employed American women increased from 2.6 million to 7.8 million. While they were still limited to low-paying jobs, women were able to live outside of the domestic sphere for the first time in American history. Working for wages gave women a degree of independence and new lives to live. Their interests expanded past the home—and to a degree, they now had the money to act on those interests. The Cato Institute reported in 2022 that as women gained economic and social freedoms through the workforce, the birth rate fell. In fact, the National Bureau of Economic Research reports that from 1800 to 1900, the “total fertility rates fell from seven children per woman to less than four and continued decreasing”.  In a broad context, this was a relatively progressive time for women’s rights. Facing liberation from domestic roles after securing a place in the American workforce, women in several states won the right to custody, the right to maintain and manage their own bank accounts, and the right to own and manage property. 

And then a wave of regression hit. In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt popularized pronatalist ideas in response to the falling birth rate of native-born Americans. While women’s progress continued through this period (women didn’t earn the right to vote until 1920), there was undoubtedly a simultaneous shift in political attitudes towards women’s independence. Pronatalism is the idea that bettering society is achieved through having more children. A facet of pronatalism–and a theory that Teddy Roosevelt heavily promoted–was race suicide. Rooted in the racist idea that “new immigrants” were genetically and culturally subordinate to native born Americans, race suicide was the idea that a majority population was becoming outnumbered and, due to a falling birthrate, replaced by a minority population. In the context of the 1900s, this was native born Americans being outnumbered by new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Mexico. Author George Miller writes that Teddy Roosevelt’s fear of race suicide was “twofold;” saying that “if the “best” (race) failed to reproduce…, their qualities (or genes) would be lost to the nation,” and that  “in time, the “best”(race) would be (outnumbered by) the “lower” races— with Latin Americans, Blacks, and East Europeans.” 

Roosevelt promoted this theory in direct response to women’s increased independence. Fewer women were having kids because they had unlocked new roles in society, so the birth rate was falling. At the same time, the sheer influx of new immigrants in America had simply outnumbered the amount of native-born Americans (according to EBESCO on early immigration). Thus, the birth rate for new immigrants was much higher than that of native born Americans. Roosevelt’s response to this change was a traditionalist one. He aimed to push women back into their traditional role. In a research article from Illinois Wesleyan University, author Sarah Hamilton writes and proves that Roosevelt publicly condemned women by “categorizing” those who didn’t want to have a large families as “criminals against the race,” “objects of detestation,” and victims of  “moral disease.” Roosevelt wrote in an essay that “for women (as indeed for men) the home in its widest and fullest sense should be the prime end of life.” In public speeches he gave to national organizations, he threatened the “extinction” of the American public as a whole and used manipulative language to indoctrinate America into believing in race suicide. 

While it might be comforting to think that we’ve moved on from using the patriarchy to further a racist agenda, we all know how easy it is for toxic exes to linger. In 2025, the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women reported that “the world experienced a significant regression in gender equality,” with “one in four countries reporting backlash against women’s rights”. And guess who made the list? The great USA. As David Wallace-Wells writes for the New York Times in June 2025, “Gender backlash is here–and the regression isn’t just a political problem. It’s a tragedy”. 

The same sequence of events that we witnessed in 1904 is repeating itself in this decade. UPenn Wharton’s Budget Model reports that since 2019, the amount of women earning college degrees has doubled. Uncoincidentally, the American birthrate is plummeting again–which is bad news for the Trump administration. They’ve been using our birthrate as a metric for our country’s success more than ever in recent years. Project 2025, the Trump administration’s 900 page policy blueprint, claims that the “foundation of a well-ordered nation and a healthy society” is a specific kind of “family…: a married mother, father, and children”. AKA, the nuclear family model, which the National Institute of Health has reported as being a manifestation of restrictive, traditional gender norms dating way back to the 1800s. It labels men as “breadwinners,” women as “homemakers,” and excludes women from the public sphere. Even though this model is notorious for being exclusionary to LGBTQ+ families and for limiting women’s independence, Project 2025 states that its first goal is to “restore (this) family as the centerpiece of American life”. 

So, why? If the issue this administration is trying to resolve truly is a declining population, why aren’t immigrants the solution? Throughout American history, immigrants have been the solution to increasing our numbers. More importantly, why do official Department of Homeland Security documents show that over 80% of immigrants detained by ICE in the past year have no criminal record? And how do gender roles tie into this?

This administration’s actions have made it increasingly clear that their goal is to control America’s national identity. This is why the federal government is relying on native-born American women to go back to exclusively being mothers and homemakers. Instead of just embracing immigration, we are relying on the regression of women into their traditional roles to up the American birth rate–just like we did in 1904. We’ve known about this administration’s desire to regulate our national identity, and who gets to exist within it. That’s why ICE has deported legal citizens, detained over 400,000 immigrants, and killed opponents in residential streets. The gender implications of this administration’s actions are here, and they are terrifying.