Below we highlight three inflection points from 1900 through today to uncover the historic throughline of the pronatalist and family policing agenda and flag its impact on millions of children, families, and communities. In doing so, we reveal three intertwined themes of U.S. policy. First, the family policing system and the pronatalist movement have never been rooted solely, or even primarily, in concerns about child safety or population decline, but rather in racialized social control. Second, despite the rhetoric of “family values” and “child saving,” children’s well-being does not drive family policy, especially in terms of financial resources. Third, in contrast, the carceral logics underlying national family, reproductive, and welfare policy harm many children and families because the majority of families do not fit the white heterosexual nuclear form. Indeed, the natalist movement coupled with an anti-abortion agenda actually leads to more families who do not fit the normative ideal, and who are struggling economically, in turn increasing surveillance and family separation.
Dating back to colonial times, through slavery and the destruction of Indigenous communities, to post-emancipation “Social Purity” and Eugenics movements, the U.S. state has always damaged some families and supported others.
Natalism’s application to only some people was evident in the movement’s first big push at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt gave a speech before the National Congress of Mothers lamenting “race suicide,” claiming that one of the fundamental challenges the country faced was declining procreation and accusing childless (white) women of being “selfish” and “merit[ing] contempt.” Fearmongering about declining birth rates in some populations was coupled with exaggerated rhetoric about Black and immigrant families reproducing at high rates.
Against this backdrop, the nascent welfare state and family policing systems were born. Capital-P Progressives created “orphan trains,” shipping half a million children West out of cities on to purportedly “healthier” lives with white, U.S.-born farming families. Most of these children were not orphans at all, but rather were taken from impoverished immigrant families and were often sent to be indentured servants. At the same time, states enacted “Mothers’ Pension” programs, which supported “fit” and “deserving”—i.e., white—mothers who were most often widowed, willing to financially help those particular children thrive in their own homes.
It is no coincidence that during the 1960s, our next inflection point, civil rights gains by the Black community, including eligibility for some state aid, were coupled with punitive measures that never accompanied the Mothers’ Pensions. These included ongoing sterilization (particularly of Indigenous women and women of color more broadly); the start of the rise of mass incarceration and concomitant family separation, and strict vetting processes and intrusive surveillance for state benefits. This surveillance included surprise midnight house checks, ostensibly to see if children were present and safe, but also to shame unmarried, often non-white, mothers. Notably, these “Operation Bedchecks” also tracked recipients’ sexual relationships, and have never been applied to middle-class recipients of state aid, such as the mortgage tax deduction.