Is it safe to have a child? Americans rethink family planning ahead of Trump’s return

Chris Peterson wasn’t surprised that Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. But he was surprised by how quickly he and his wife started asking one another: should we try to have another baby before a possible nationwide abortion ban takes effect? Or should we give up on having a second child?

Peterson and his wife, who live in North Carolina, are thousands of dollars in debt because their first child needed to spend weeks in the hospital after being born prematurely. They had wanted to pay off that debt and wait a few years before having a second baby. But now, reproductive rights are again in the balance – Trump has said he would veto a nationwide abortion ban, but his allies are emboldened to push through more restrictions.

Peterson is terrified of what is to come, and that his wife might not be able to get the medical care she needs if they decide to conceive again.

“We should be happy thinking about expanding our family,” said Peterson, who is, like his wife, in his late 30s. “We shouldn’t be worried that we’re going to have medical complications and I might end up being a single father.”

Peterson is not the only American who, in the weeks after the US election, is rethinking plans around having children. On 6 November, the number of people booking vasectomy appointments at Planned Parenthood health centers spiked by 1,200%, IUD appointments by more than 760% and birth control implant appointments by 350%, according to a statement provided to the Guardian by Planned Parenthood. Traffic to Planned Parenthood’s webpages on tubal ligation, vasectomies and IUDs has also surged by more than 1,000% for each.

After the election, the Guardian heard from dozens of people in the US reconsidering whether to have children. Most pointed to fears over the future of reproductive healthcare, the economy and the climate in explaining their concerns.

“I hesitate to bring more children into a world with an uncertain ecological future, assuming that the incoming administration pulls out of the Paris climate accord and ceases to support green energy transition,” a 34-year-old Minnesota mother of one wrote to the Guardian in response to a callout inviting readers to share their thoughts about post-election family planning. Trump pulled the US out of the historic agreement during his first administration; doing so again – which Trump has promised to do – could “cripple” the it, according to the UN secretary general.

“We have two children and I have desperately wanted a third – but now I am fearful of being able to get adequate care if I get pregnant,” wrote another woman who lives in Louisiana. “I can’t risk leaving my two children behind if [I] die because I can’t get adequate care here. It feels like a dystopian novel, and yet here we are.”

These worries are not necessarily new. In 2023, a Pew Research Center survey found that 47% of 18- to 49-year-old US adults say they are unlikely to ever have kids – a steep jump from 2018, when 37% said the same. Of the people who are unlikely to have kids, 38% said “concerns about the state of the world” were a major part of their decision-making. Roughly a quarter pointed to fears about the environment.

Working in disaster relief, Catherine regularly sees the effects of the climate crisis up close. “I’m in Washington DC right now and flowers are blooming. It’s November. This should not be happening,” she said in an interview. “While I have always wanted kids, that choice has become tinged with a level of despair and anger that I didn’t have two years ago.”

She continued: “Why would I bring a child into this world that is dying?”

Earlier this year, Catherine got a copper IUD, which can block pregnancy for more than a decade.

Like developed countries around the world, the United States is in the midst of a fertility slump. In 2023, the US fertility rate fell by 3% and reached a historic low.

But this decline is not evenly distributed across the political spectrum. After Trump won the presidency in 2016, births in Republican-leaning counties rose sharply compared to those that leaned Democratic. Today, Democrats are likelier than Republicans to be childfree – a trend that, the Washington Post has hypothesized, is likely also related to the rightward drift of big-family white Protestants.

That the outcome of the 2024 election has spurred such fear and hesitation around having children is apt – not only are US political parties on diverging paths when it comes to babies, but the election itself was in many ways a referendum on families and fertility. While Kamala Harris made support for abortion rights a key plank in her platform, Donald Trump promised “baby booms” and pledged to give people “baby bonuses”. Trump’s vice-president-elect, JD Vance, has built his political brand on pronatalism, a movement that urges people to have babies to benefit the greater good. Vance has a track record of deriding “childless cat ladies” and raising the alarm about the US fertility rate.

“We want more babies because children are good,” Vance once said. “And we believe children are good, because we are not sociopaths.”

M, a Texan mother of three who asked to go by her first initial because she feels stigmatized for voting for Trump, hopes that Trump’s victory will improve the economy to the point that she and her husband can afford to have a fourth child.

“I still have a child in childcare now – like daycare – and just seeing those costs rise year after year since 2020, it’s been really hard for our family to consider having another baby,” M said. “The possibility of that being alleviated through better economic policy or even just those costs being taken away somewhere else – whether it’s groceries or utilities to whatever it is – that really makes it possible for us to consider having another kid.”

M, who opposes abortion, feels confident that she would be able to get adequate care if she had a miscarriage. (Since Roe v Wade fell, at least three women have died in Texas after doctors reportedly delayed treating them for miscarriages or gave them inadequate miscarriage care.) The climate crisis worries M less than making sure her kids have access to clean water and healthy, chemical-free food.

Not everyone reconsidering having kids has totally ruled it out. N, a 26-year-old from New York, is for now only delaying her plans to have kids until after Trump leaves office. (She asked to go by her first initial because she previously had an abortion.) Ruth, who has a newborn at home and is married to an undocumented person, fears abortion bans and her husband being deported – but still wants to keep the conversation about having a second kid alive.

“We want to be able to dream of having a family the way we want to, on our terms,” said Ruth, who lives in Florida and asked to be identified by her middle name due to her husband’s immigration status. “My husband being an immigrant – we feel that it shouldn’t foreclose our options to build a family. We have just as much of a right to build a family on our terms as anyone else.”

Cover Photo: By The Guardian