Trump’s second term might have a surprising effect on America’s fertility rate.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. 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. 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. “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. 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 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.