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After five years of marriage, Sarah, 27, and her husband decided that they were finally in a place to start trying to conceive a child. “My husband got a good job offer in Minnesota, so we moved and bought a house. It felt like the right time—we both had stable jobs, we had a home, we loved our new city. There was no more ‘We need to do this before we have a child.’ ” Then Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
“Everything is on hold now. I’m terrified of a national abortion ban. What if I have complications? I’m not ready to die trying to bring a baby into this world, and my husband doesn’t want to risk my life,” said Sarah, who, like other women quoted in this piece, preferred to use only her first name.
In the days following the U.S. election, many young women took to social media to share similar fears about what a second Trump presidency could mean for their own reproductive futures in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade: “We wanted to have another baby soon. And now it feels wildly unsafe to even think about it,” wrote one Threads user. Posts predicting a postelection baby bust racked up tens of thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. “A week ago my partner and I were set on having children in the next 3 years. Today we discussed the possibility of never having children,” another replied.
People say a lot of things online after election results they perceive as disastrous. To those of us who agree with these types of sentiments, it feels obvious, on the level of received wisdom: Liberal-leaning women will be less likely to have babies (on purpose, at least) between 2024 and 2028. On the other hand, millions of women enthusiastically voted for the former president and happily celebrated his victory. So will a Trump 2.0 baby bust actually materialize? And when, if it does, will we know?
The first thing we can do is look at what’s happened in the past. In their paper “Partisan Fertility and Presidential Elections,” published in American Economic Review: Insights in 2022, economist Gordon Dahl, a professor at the University of California San Diego, and his co-authors found that changes in political leadership can have measurable, albeit uneven, effects on fertility. Following the 2016 election of Donald Trump, for example, they found that Republican-leaning counties experienced a “sharp and persistent” increase in fertility relative to Democratic counties. Similarly, the analysis found evidence of falling fertility in Democratic counties relative to Republican counties after George W. Bush won the 2000 election. “There is a partisan divergence on policy priorities and worries about the future. So when their party does not win the presidency, they respond to changes in actual or expected policy they think is important to them when considering whether to have kids,” says Dahl.
Given his past findings and the 2024 election results, Dahl predicts, “Republican fertility will rise relative to Democrats, with an increase in the number of babies in Republican families showing up roughly 9–12 months from now.” But given the gender divide among younger voters, with younger women disproportionately supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, Dahl predicts that Trump’s election will ultimately lower U.S. fertility somewhat overall.
After all, exit polls show that women under the age of 45, those most likely to be making reproductive choices, were the least likely (among age–gender cohorts) to have cast their votes for the president-elect. And early indicators suggest that their disappointment in the election outcome may have already transcended the limits of social media rhetoric. According to Planned Parenthood, appointments for birth control implants increased by 350 percent and appointments for IUDs (a form of long-acting contraception) increased by over 760 percent on Nov. 6, the day after the election. Aid Access, a nonprofit providing access to abortion medication by mail, also reported a 16-fold increase in requests that day. And similar spikes were reported for other forms of birth control and emergency contraception.
This all comes amid a year of hand-wringing over America’s falling fertility rates, which have been trending downward for the better part of two decades and hit a new low in 2023, with just 54.51 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, relative to 69.3 in 2007. Notably, 2023 was also the first year to reflect the fertility effects of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, after which, a 2024 research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found, vasectomies and tubal ligation (a procedure that involves cutting or blocking the fallopian tubes to prevent future pregnancy) had risen abruptly among 18-to-30-year-olds. A recent review of insurance claims confirms these findings, with tubal sterilization rising in every one of the 36 states analyzed, plus Washington D.C., in the latter half of 2022.
“Post Dobbs, the public seems to have adjusted its fertility behavior, in recognition of the transformed scene,” concludes a 2024 analysis of Centers for Disease Control data from the Institute for Research on Women, Gender & Sexuality. Those adjustments range from greater vigilance around birth control and travel across state lines to access abortion care to increases in more permanent contraception procedures, like tubal ligation. All of which may help explain why, despite near-total abortion bans in 14 states and restrictions on abortion access in many more, fertility still fell across all 50 U.S. states in 2023. “Getting a tubal ligation feels like a necessary act of preservation,” said Meg Wheeler, a Massachusetts-based small-business owner and mother of a 7-year-old, in the days after the election. This recent dip suggests that curtailing reproductive rights, or signaling the possibility of further restrictions, like through Trump’s reelection, might lead to longer-term drops in U.S. fertility—even in states that have preserved abortion access.
But even with postelection fears driving up demand for long-term birth control, sterilization, emergency contraception, and medication abortion, “it is very hard to make projections” when predicting future fertility, says director of the Carolina Population Center and professor of sociology Karen Guzzo,
While in 2023, fertility rates continued to fall in states with near-total abortion bans, policies that limit access to medication abortions or restrictions that would require women to self-manage or leave the country to access abortion care may have a different effect. In Minnesota, where Sarah and her husband live, the law still protects abortion, but “I’m afraid that state laws won’t matter once he gets into office,” Sarah said, referring to Trump’s next term.
The 2024 election did include several wins for reproductive rights, as seven states passed ballot measures protecting abortion, but the Dobbs decision leaves that access to abortion care contingent. And while President-elect Trump has claimed he would veto a federal abortion ban and has criticized some of the most extreme state abortion restrictions, he has also celebrated his part in appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, making such restrictions possible. Those restrictions include Texas’ near-total ban on abortion care, after which, according to an analysis of CDC data by the Gender Equity Policy Institute, the rate of maternal mortality cases rose by 56 percent—a number that’s even more dramatic when compared to the 11 percent increase in maternal mortality cases nationwide in the same time period. Women in states with severe abortion restrictions are now more than twice as likely to die in pregnancy, childbirth, or postpartum than in states with greater abortion access, according to a 2022 analysis from the Commonwealth Fund, an independent health research foundation.
“My son needs a mom more than he needs a sibling,” said Lindsay, an account manager based in West Virginia. Lindsay was seven weeks pregnant when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and a West Virginia law from the 1800s that makes obtaining or performing an abortion a felony resurfaced. Her state Legislature then voted to ban the procedure almost entirely. Four weeks later, Lindsay started having pregnancy complications. By 16 weeks, her doctor had labeled her pregnancy high-risk. “What should have been the happiest time of my life quickly turned out to be the most terrifying and uncertain. I remember grabbing the mask over my mouth and sobbing,” said Lindsay.
While today, the son she was carrying then is a happy and healthy almost-2-year-old, the experience of that high-risk pregnancy paired with her state’s abortion ban was decisive. “We never thought we would have to plan our family based on state and federal laws. Now that Trump is [going to be back] in office, there is a real threat to the ACA [Affordable Care Act], and even potentially restricting access to birth control or sterilization. I have decided to seek a tubal ligation,” said Lindsay.
In Lindsay’s home state of West Virginia, deaths from any cause among women of reproductive age are nearly three times higher than in Hawaii (a state with more protections on abortion access) post-Dobbs, according to the Commonwealth Fund’s analysis. Restricting abortion access and criminalizing abortion care have led to an exodus of health care providers in states with such legislation. The resulting health care deserts have left the health and lives of all women of reproductive age at greater risk, whether or not they are pregnant.
The Commonwealth Fund’s analysis also confirms the disproportionate impact of abortion restrictions on women of color, worsening existing racial inequities across the health care system, including higher rates of maternal mortality and infant death. “As a fat Black woman, I automatically face a lot of discrimination at hospitals and medical facilities everywhere, but specifically in those spaces, where my pain is ignored or they deduce it to mean, Oh, well, maybe it’s because of your size. So I already worry. But now with this [the reelection of Donald Trump], I don’t know what is going to happen,” said Cassandra Kelly, a 39-year-old mother of two who is reconsidering whether she can have another child given her upcoming move to Kentucky to become a caregiver for her grandparents.
After having her first two children, Cassandra experienced two ectopic pregnancies. “I had no clue I was pregnant at all. I was actually on birth control, and I got really sick and I was in so much pain that my doctor was like, ‘You have to go to the ER.’ I sat there for hours until the doctors believed me that I was in pain.” When Cassandra was finally admitted for exploratory surgery, the surgeon discovered her ectopic pregnancy. “He ended up taking my left fallopian tube because the baby was eight weeks and three days and had started to rupture my tube.” The experience led her to become a traveling postpartum doula, and to become an activist with the Southern Birth Justice Network. “I feel like a lot of the people that I’m closest to, even the ones that haven’t been considering pregnancy, are scared,” said Cassandra.
“You might say, ‘I had such a horrible pregnancy experience, I don’t want to risk not being a mom to my current kid for this idea of a future kid,’ ” says Guzzo, the director at the Carolina Population Center, noting that the majority of women seeking abortion care in the United States are already mothers. In fact, in low-fertility countries, women with one child are much more likely than men to be opposed to having another child. And that gender gap increases with the existing number of children, according to a 2019 paper by economists Matthias Doepke and Fabian Kindermann that was published in the American Economic Review. “There’s a cost of having children that is borne primarily by the mothers,” says Doepke, citing factors like the unequal distribution of child care responsibilities and the motherhood penalty, where women’s earnings fall after the birth of their first child in a way that men’s typically do not. “We argue that’s kind of a big obstacle to fertility being higher,” he says.
As reproductive rights are chipped away, putting more women’s lives and futures at risk, the realized costs of both pregnancy and motherhood are rising—both relative to the cost of fatherhood and in absolute terms. New research by sociologists Bethany G. Everett and Catherine J. Taylor, published in American Sociological Review, suggests that abortion restrictions in the U.S. are related to lower educational attainment and economic stability for women living under such restrictions, whereas women in locations with greater access to abortion have higher rates of college graduation, higher incomes, and lower levels of economic instability in the long term. All of which suggest that the cost of motherhood is even higher when it isn’t actively chosen.
“If a society makes it easier to combine working and having families, then you will get more of both. You have to make those things more compatible,” says Doepke—for women as much as men. But the data suggests that restricting reproductive rights does the opposite, making it even harder for women to combine their personal and professional aspirations while driving up the cost of motherhood relative to fatherhood, another gender gap that has been repeatedly tied to falling fertility.
“The views that have gotten more support after the election are the ones trying to push us back in a more conservative direction, and I just don’t think that’s going to work. If anything, it’s going to make birth rates even lower,” says Doepke. “You will maybe have some children born because abortion is not accessible, but overall, those conditions are not very amenable to having a high fertility rate.”
“When Biden won in 2020, I had a lot of hope that we could kind of turn things around for my son’s generation. And that’s not really the case anymore,” said Emily, a California-based mother of a 7-year-old, after seeing the 2024 election returns. Like so many women I heard from while reporting this piece, she fears the incoming administration’s federal policies could render her state’s robust reproductive protections moot—especially after she faced complications throughout her first pregnancy and childbirth.
After her son was born, Emily was diagnosed with lupus. To reduce the risk of similar complications in future pregnancies, she was advised to wait until her lupus had been in remission for at least a year before trying to conceive again. That’s when she came across the story of Candi Miller in ProPublica. Miller, a Georgia mother who was also diagnosed with lupus, along with diabetes and hypertension, died after being unable to access legal abortion care in her state. “I just can’t fathom my child losing his mother for a pregnancy,” said Emily. “I had always thought of myself as having at least two children,” she said, but “I don’t feel comfortable having more kids. Both for the sake of my kid and my own personal safety. Given the circumstances, the best for the family that I do have is to keep it smaller and to keep us tighter knit and able to look out for each other, spend our resources wisely, and just [put] ourselves in the best possible situation with whatever’s coming next.”
Far from the stereotypes of career-obsessed #girlbosses or self-indulgent “childless cat ladies” so often imagined as the cause of America’s falling fertility rates, stories like Emily’s and Cassandra’s and Lindsay’s, emerging in the aftermath of the 2024 election, point to how many women across the U.S. are downshifting their reproductive plans, not because they want to, but because of their actual experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood in an increasingly hostile landscape for all three.
At the individual level, this falling fertility emerges far from any cold calculation of opportunity cost but rather through a painful reckoning with the shifting landscape of motherhood in America—one that for many young women, especially in the aftermath of the 2024 election, is increasingly characterized by fear, disillusionment, and grief.
“I still have hope that maybe after these four years are over, we can still right the ship and move forward,” said Sarah. “Our hearts still want a child, but our heads know it’s not the right time now. And we’re both dealing with that in different ways, because it’s hard to accept. I think we’re both dealing with the grief of what could have been.”
