<\/p>\n
The Trump administration<\/span> is quietly turning a federal program designed to help lower-income Americans access birth control and other reproductive health services into an engine for pronationalism, a far-right movement with roots in eugenics that pushes people to have more babies.<\/p>\n On Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services\u2019 Office of Population Affairs published an updated \u201cnotice of funding opportunity,\u201d first announced<\/a> in April, for service providers to apply for grants through Title X, a federal program that provides low and no-cost birth control and other sexual and reproductive health services to roughly 2.8 million people every year.<\/p>\n For months, the federal program had been plagued with uncertainty. Donald Trump eliminated Title X from his 2027<\/a> annual budget \u2014 and last year suddenly froze a large percentage of funds going to Title X recipients before eventually restoring the funding.<\/p>\n But when providers opened the funding notice in April, instead of being met with relief, many were horrified to discover that Health and Human Services had a new mission in mind for the only federal program dedicated to providing contraceptives: getting women to have more babies.<\/p>\n Grants funded through the program will help \u201cbuild body literacy, address infertility, plan and space pregnancies and navigate reproductive health conditions such as endometriosis\u201d and other conditions that affect infertility, the notice said<\/a>. Contraceptives are hardly mentioned, except in a section on \u201covermedicalization,\u201d which appears to commend the fact that \u201creports have shown a decrease in females\u2019 current use of any contraception.\u201d<\/p>\n The notice is a part of a quiet, but significant, push to retool the Department of Health and Human Services into a weapon for a pronatalist movement seeped in the racist history of eugenics<\/a> \u2014 which insists on the supposed biological superiority of white, straight, able-bodied people \u2014 and in the denial<\/a> of women\u2019s bodily autonomy<\/a> and right to exist outside of motherhood.<\/p>\n Providers fighting back against the new requirements in court argue that this will further cede power over vulnerable communities\u2019 health to far-right actors inside of the administration, like Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine<\/a>, a former penile implant surgeon and anti-abortion crusader who is in charge of administering the Title X program.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI would characterize it as really a shift toward this Project 2025 MAHA vision of prioritizing having babies over reproductive autonomy,\u201d said Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health research organization, \u201cand really undermining the program from top to bottom.\u201d<\/p>\n The notice had previously included a pre-merits alignment review<\/a> that would require all grantees to undergo an ideological audit by political appointees based on their commitment to the administration\u2019s priorities, including ending diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and gender-affirming care<\/a> \u2014 even though the statute explicitly requires grantees to promote health equity and provide care to transgender recipients. However, it was later updated to remove the alignment review.<\/p>\n Friedrich-Karnik and other sexual and reproductive health experts argue that under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HHS is seeking to warp a public sexual health program to advance the goals of the administration\u2019s allies in the pronatalist movement ahead of the November midterms. Pronatalists harbor close ties and, in some cases, overlap with white Christian nationalists<\/a> who want not only for there to be more babies, but also more white babies.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to The Intercept\u2019s requests for comment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The pronatalist movement<\/span> in the United States is largely, but not exclusively, divided between two categories: traditional conservatives and tech eugenicists.<\/p>\n Tech pronatalists like Elon Musk, a former<\/a> administration official who is arguably the most prominent member of the movement, advocate for having as many children as possible to create an \u201celite<\/a>\u201d human race with more \u201chigh-IQ\u201d people. Unlike traditional pronatalist conservatives, best exemplified by Vice President JD Vance, whose focus rests more on the nuclear family and defending \u201ctraditional\u201d gender roles<\/a>, tech pronatalists emphasize the use of technology such as in vitro fertilization to have as many children as possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n While pronatalists are often not as explicit as avowed white nationalists about their desire for more white children, they often talk about \u201cdeclining genetic quality<\/a>\u201d in \u201cthe West<\/a>\u201d and generally oppose immigration, even as they decry the falling birth rate and nearing population decline.<\/p>\n Trump, Vance, and Kennedy have all been closely aligned with the pronatalist movement. Kennedy has repeatedly opined<\/a> about declining birth rates and teenage boys\u2019 declining \u201csperm count\u201d; Trump has anointed himself the \u201cfertilization president,\u201d despite the fact that his administration gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention\u2019s IVF team<\/a>; and in his first address<\/a> as vice president, Vance declared: \u201cI want more babies in the United States of America.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n This month, \u201cTrump Accounts\u201d went into effect, providing children born between January 2025 and December 2028 with $1,000 in an effort to boost the population. The president also floated the idea of providing mothers who have six or more children with medals. (After several people<\/a> noted that the Nazis had done the same thing<\/a>, that idea seems to be dead in the water.)<\/p>\n