Cal Thomas: Trump’s baby bonus

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, May 1st. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Up next, WORLD commentator Cal Thomas says there’s a right way and a wrong way to fix the decline in human population.

CAL THOMAS: In Genesis 1:28, God tells Adam and Eve to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth.” President Trump is going God one better…he’s considering adding an incentive by paying couples $5,000 to begat.

The fertility rate in the U.S. has been declining for the last decade. In 2023 it dropped to 1.6 births per woman, the lowest in a century.

There are many reasons. The most obvious is abortion. The Pew Research Center cites figures from the CDC. The last yearly national totals are from 2021. Even with four states not reporting their figures, there were nearly 626-thousand abortions that year. When adding the available statistics from 2019 and 2020…the three years together totalled more than 1.8 million babies. Stopping or severely restricting abortions would go a long way toward solving the birth dearth.

Absent that possibility we are down to the reasons people can't, or won't, have children. Can't is usually biological. Won't is more likely psychological or spiritual. Perhaps the most frequent reason given by “won't couples” includes: the expense of having children, the supposed restrictions on parents' travel, general freedom, the disappointments and pain that can come when kids rebel, or the consequences should parents divorce.

I have suffered from rebellious children, even the death of an adult child. None of it cancels the joy of holding a baby in my arms that I helped produce, hearing that child later tell me he or she loves me, and seeing even the spiritually truant come back to faith and set their lives aright.

Deciding not to have children, for some, creates the pain of regret. Never will they have descendants with their DNA, their values, and a set of accomplishments that adds further meaning to their own lives. Never will they know what their children might have become, or contributed to the world. Their family tree will lack branches. Having a pet is not the same.

Parenting is more than biological. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that tech titan Elon Musk has warned that: “civilization is going to crumble' if people don't start having more children.” Musk has at least 14 children by four different women.

He wants to populate this planet and possibly Mars with children of high intelligence. He even thinks babies should be born by caesarean section so they will have larger brains.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Musk is not the first to think this way. It is an outgrowth of a worldview that is materialistic and sets humans in the place of God.

In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley explains the scientific and compartmentalized nature of his fictional society. He begins at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, “where children are created outside the womb and cloned in order to increase the population.” The reader is then introduced to the class system of this world, where citizens are sorted as embryos to be of a certain class. “The Matrix” film franchise is a modern metaphor that pits inherent human worth against soul-less technology. Musk’s pronatalism is no better.

President Trump's suggestion that $5,000 dollar payments would help produce more children reduces the value of a child to materialistic levels. An appeal made on the level of more important things—eternal things—will work better in the long run. Not only producing more babies, but even good parents and a healthier society.

I’m Cal Thomas.

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