The question some are asking this Mother’s Day is how much money will it take to motivate women to have babies. The amount floating around the new proposal is $5,000 each. The goal is to raise the population growth rate from the current .98 (which includes net immigration and decreased deaths) to 2.1, the amount needed to maintain a stable population. Perhaps we should ask women, especially working mothers, about how much is enough.
“Having a kid in the U.S. is extremely expensive. Our government is one of…a handful of countries worldwide that does not offer any form of paid parental leave. We have functionally no public daycare,” observed Mary Childs, host of “Planet Money” on NPR in March 2024. Mary was pregnant and paying $2,000 a month for childcare for another child. She discovered that many countries have a population demographic problem, just like the U.S. “They have a ton of aging workers and not enough new babies being born to become future workers and taxpayers.”
Mary examined money, social services (like reproductive care, childcare, paid leave), and the functioning public infrastructure of several countries. She found that South Korea had the most incentives with the longest paid parental leave times in the world for both men and women, wonderful childcare, birthing centers, and family-friendly policies. However, success in South Korea is achieved by working long hours with a gender bias against women at work. “For decades, Korea has had the widest pay gap of the 38 most-developed countries in the world. Women there get paid 30% less than their male counterparts, and… men in Korea do the least amount of housework of everyone in those 38 countries,” reported Elise Hu, host of TED Talks Daily. She added that South Korea has a strong no-babies feminist movement of women who refuse to be a cog in this system.
In the U.S., the culture is similar, with our always-on workforce, praise for 24/7 availability, long workdays, a gender pay gap of 83%, very little policy support for parenting, and dwindling health care resources to keep moms and babies healthy and thriving. Ironically, while cash payouts for having a baby are seen as an incentive, programs that support mothers with children, like SNAP, Medicaid, and grants for Head Start, are under threat of being decreased or eliminated to reduce the debt. And once the child is born, there are staggering infant and maternal mortality rates in the U.S., ranking highest among developed countries.
The biggest problem for those mothers who survive childbirth, though, is the cost of childcare. “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services considers childcare affordable when it takes up no more than 7% of a household’s income. However, according to the 2025 Cost of Care Report, the average parent spends 22% of their household income on childcare costs. That’s more than triple the amount deemed ’affordable’ for families.” It’s more than rent or their mortgage payment.
Charlie Fitzgerald, a 29-year-old Millennial, laid it out for Buzzfeed, “It absolutely baffles me that the government is pretending like they don’t know why we’re not having kids because, frankly, it is glaringly obvious. The economy is a…tire fire right now. The cost of groceries, the cost and availability of baby formula, the cost of diapers, the cost of childcare, the cost of giving birth in the United States.” Charlie goes on to explain that when you’re born poor, you’ll probably stay poor, citing the poverty trap and commented, “Who wants that for their kid?”
“Proposals like ‘baby bonuses’ or ‘menstrual cycle classes’ don’t just miss the point; they leave millions of women unheard, yet again,” says Erin Erenberg, CEO and co-founder of Chamber of Mothers, a nonpartisan 501c3 organization advocating for maternal and parental rights. “Most women we hear from aren’t opting out of motherhood—rather, they simply can’t afford it. That’s not a cultural crisis. That’s a policy failure.”
In February 2021, Congresswoman Grace Meng (D-NY) introduced House Bill 121, nicknamed the “Marshall Plan for Moms,” to recover from the devastation of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Prior to 2020, working women accounted for over 50% of the workforce. One year later, women lost over 5.4 million net jobs or 55%, which resulted in two million jobs. Meng’s press release stated, “[The Pandemic] triggered a financial and emotional calamity for America’s moms, who are shouldering the majority of childcare, domestic work, and remote school responsibilities.” For Congresswoman Meng, it was personal. She is the mother of two young boys.
“Moms throughout America are screaming out for help,” said Congresswoman Meng. “Moms – especially moms of color – have been pushed to the brink of economic, social, and emotional collapse due to this pandemic. Moms were always fighting an uphill battle against gender norms and racial and gender pay equity – and like so many other issues, the pandemic has only exacerbated existing injustices and inequalities.” Her proposal covered everything from programs to support childhood nutrition to essential duty pay for childcare workers, increasing the minimum wage, and other measures to address poverty among mothers of color. Although it had 35 co-sponsors and was referred to several House committees, it never came up for a vote.
What remains of the comprehensive proposal is Moms First, founded by Reshma Saujani. Moms First uses the power of the grassroots community to mobilize action needed for policies that support moms: affordable childcare, paid family leave, and equal pay for moms. The organization’s website points out that “other countries have social safety nets; America has moms.” In other words, our country needs to help our moms, and $5,000 won’t even cover the expenses of having a baby.
Other proposals are making the rounds right now, too, like awarding a “Motherhood Medal” for women having six or more children and adopting a “weighted voting system, in which the votes cast by parents would be valued more highly than those by the childless.” Mother Jones reported on these and other proposals, many of which came from a group of “pronatalists, a loose network of activists who believe that humanity is basically doomed unless people have more kids.”
We’re not doomed. The United Nations projects the world’s population will continue to grow, and that wealthy countries balance their population stability by adding immigrants. In Singapore, for example, when paying $24,000 per baby didn’t work to boost their fertility rates, they allowed more people to immigrate. Not in the U.S.—and not now, with deportation the top story in every news cycle. In a report for Politico about the destabilization of falling birth rates along with reduced immigration, Peder Shaeffer interviewed Jennifer Sciubba, a demographer and president and CEO of the Population Reference Bureau, who warned that “the economic and social impacts of an aging and shrinking population — or the threat of one — might quickly surface as a contentious issue with anti-immigrant policies.” She also expressed worry about the possibility of limiting access to contraceptives and other pronatalist policies.
Prior generations didn’t have to deal with the complexities our society faces today. They designed systems that worked for them—and ultimately created us. Now it’s our turn. We need visionary people—potential moms (and dads)— to make a list of what they need to start a family and maintain it, create a sustainable way of life with adequate paid leave during early parenting, affordable and high-quality childcare, preschool development, and education to create that future generation who will create more of the same. Then, we need our representatives at every level to put that list into policies that invest in the future and address the problems of today, along with actions to ensure that these moms, dads, and children get what they need. Fixing a problem this big requires thinking big and then acting bigger. And it will take all of us to do that together.