They mean what they say

Just in time for the 53rd annual March for Life, Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife Usha announced they are going to have a fourth child—a boy. This is the first time since the 1800s that a second lady will have a baby, the last being Ellen Colfax in 1870, whose husband Schuylar was vice president to Ulysses S. Grant.

It also marks yet another prominent Trump administration official’s pregnancy. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is due with her second child, a girl, in May, and Stephen Miller’s wife, podcast host Katie Miller, is also due with their fourth.

The symbolic good of a sitting second lady of the United States being pregnant, not only with a child, but with her fourth child, is hard to overstate. It’s good for people to see pregnant women and young children in public, especially as fertility rates around the world are at near-catastrophic levels—and falling.

The Vance family has styled itself as being pro-family since before his selection as vice president. The Vances regularly bring their children along to events, and the VP often tweets about his kids and the mundane day-to-day experiences they share, like Saturday morning pancake breakfasts. Many adored his boys’ messy hair and the band-aids on his daughter’s fingers at his inauguration. It is deeply good for children to be seen and heard in a society where there are fewer and fewer of them.

At the March for Life on Jan. 23, Vice President Vance addressed the large crowd bundled together on the chilly National Mall: “Some of you may remember that in my remarks last year, I told you all that one of the things I most wanted in the United States of America was more families and more babies. So, let the record show you have a vice president who practices what he preaches. Usha and I announced this week that we’re expecting our fourth, and it will be our third baby boy.”

Most on the right agree that the collapsing fertility rate and increased difficulty of affording a family in America is a real problem. But not everyone agrees on how to fix it.

Vance himself has been involved with a scrappy but august pro-family think tank called American Compass. Vance spoke at their black tie gala last summer—the first gala I’ve seen in D.C. to invite the entire family, and to which my husband and I brought our own four children.

“Compass,” as it is called, advocates for policies like the Family Income Supplemental Credit (FISC), which would pay families monthly per child—something fiscally conservative Republicans disfavor. If the left insists upon spending taxpayer dollars, Compass’s modus operandi seems to be: may as well spend it on the things we like.

By contrast, Catherine Pakaluk is a representative of the enduring fiscal conservative impulse within family policy debates. In her book Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, Pakaluk warns “there is no historical example of a policy that meaningfully increased birth rates.”

While most researchers are asking why women aren’t having children, Pakaluk sought out the women who were having tons of them—and asked them why. “People will lay down their comforts, dreams, and selves for God, not for subsidies,” she found. Policy that uses progressive means to accomplish conservative ends doesn’t work, is unjust, and is actually harmful, according to Pakaluk: it “takes from some families to give to others.”

In a stirring debate hosted last year by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), Pakaluk had searing words for government efforts to favor families: “Do not give to the state the task of favoring the family when the state cannot tell the difference between a man and a woman, marital intercourse from sodomy, and the womb of a mother from a laboratory.”

“Without religious formation that fosters biblical values, low birth rate trends will not be reversed,” Pakaluk says. What Pakaluk calls for is, by some standards, much more radical than a supplemental credit: canceling public education altogether, along with most social services. “Religious freedom as family policy would mean the government’s taking a step back from providing human services directly, starting with education, and asking churches to become stronger by doing more.”

Pakaluk’s proposals are rooted in a conservative theory of the purpose of government. By her estimation, the government competes with private citizens, businesses, and churches when it offers goods or services they might otherwise provide, weakening them in the process. If government “offers a good or a service that competes with what a vital group might have offered, in every case such a move attacks and undermines that group.”

There are a number of other players on the new pro-family right advancing policies to encourage and support the American family, and they don’t all always agree. The Heritage Foundation recently released its own 150-page family policy proposal, something of a shotgun blast of proposals and programs that have earned both scorn and praise from various corners of the right. The Institute for Family Studies continues to provide much-needed data and statistics regarding falling fertility rates and points of family friction. The Niskanen Center’s Leah Sargeant is promoting a near-term policy proposal: the baby bonus, which my colleague, EPPC Fellow Patrick Brown, has also written on, in addition to a number of other practical, pro-family policy solutions.

Whether public policy helps right fertility decline or not, social pressure certainly doesn’t hurt. And the sitting vice president puts his money where his mouth is, at least in his personal life. No matter who wins the pro-family debate on the new American right, the future looks bright for the American family … at least, for the ones having families, which are overwhelmingly conservative.

Baby Boy Vance is expected to be born, quite auspiciously, in the month of our nation’s 250th birthday. Will the rest of America see a bit of a baby boom in response? Only time will tell.