It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday and my wonderful kids have already organized a manicure for me. In 1914, when President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday of May a national holiday to express our “love and reverence for the mothers,” white carnations were the gift of choice. Flowers still top the list: Mother’s Day is the second-busiest day of the year for florists, after Valentine’s Day.

This year, President Trump is upping the ante. He is reportedly considering proposals to issue mothers one-time “baby bonuses” upon the birth of their children and to create a “National Medal of Motherhood” for those who have six or more children, taking a page from notorious authoritarian regimes everywhere. Vladamir Putin got the jump on Trump (again), reviving the “Mother Heroine” award in 2022 for mothers with ten or more children.  

Other ideas are circulating in his administration too, such as reserving 30 per cent of Fulbright scholarships for parents or applicants who are married, funding programs to educate women on their menstrual cycles, and deregulating child care to drive down costs for parents. The new Transportation Secretary has ordered that funding for federal highway and transit projects prioritize communities with marriage and birth rates above the national average. 

Social conservatives have laboured for years to entrench the traditional family as the centerpiece of economic and social life. This is their moment. An unholy alliance of Christian fundamentalists and pronatalists like Elon Musk have come together to peddle a grab-bag of policies to encourage women to have more children and to elevate conservative family values. 

As Vice-President Vance said at an anti-abortion rally last January, we want “more babies in the United States of America” and more “beautiful young men and women” to raise them. 

Noticeably lacking from the pronatalist proposals on offer are policies that would actually help mothers and their families raise happy, healthy kids and manage the demands of parenting—things like affordable childcare and preschool, employment protections and paid parental leave, assured access to maternal and infant healthcare, or inclusive recreational programs for children with disabilities. 

“Mothers don’t need a medal around their necks—we need policies that have our backs,” said Elizabeth Tenety, co-founder of the Motherly website. Ditto for Canada.

Here are three policy proposals that would get mothers excited on both sides of the border. 

  • Bring down the cost of housing by expanding non-market supply and effectively controlling rents

The cost of raising a child has always been high. According to Statistics Canada, a middle-income two-parent family with two children can expect to spend over $362,000 to raise that child from birth to age 17. A lower-income family will spend a bit less per child ($294,000), but only by a small margin. These figures are based on spending patterns between 2014 and 2017 and so today’s costs are certainly much higher given the dramatic surge in the cost of shelter. In 2022, 38 per cent of young adults (aged 20 to 29) said that they wouldn’t be able to afford to have a child in the next three years

Significantly expanding non-market housing for low-income households would help rebalance the housing market and cut private profits out of the equation. Strong protections for renters would also make a huge difference for families with children. 

  • Create a more flexible and inclusive system of paid parental leave 

Parental leave programs are an essential support for families caring for young children, providing paid and protected time around the birth or adoption of a child. Canada’s system ranks poorly compared to its peers. The level of support for new parents is very modest and the eligibility criteria are restrictive.

Now’s the time to strengthen Canada’s support for families, taking a page from Quebec’s innovative parental leave system. We could raise the wage replacement rate from 55 to 75 per cent and bring the Maximum Insurable Earnings threshold into line with Quebec’s at $98,000 in 2025. We could lower the eligibility threshold so that more precarious workers who pay into the system can qualify. We could increase program flexibility so that parents could take leave either in one or several blocks of time, on a full-time or part-time basis, and/or spanning several years.

  • Expand access to high quality, affordable child care for all

Research on family policy conclusively shows that where there is affordable, accessible, high quality child care, mothers, children and families all benefit. Mothers—indeed any parent—shouldn’t have to choose between leaving the labour force and affording quality care. Federal investments since 2021 have greatly reduced child care fees for the lucky parents who have subsidized spots. The creation of new spaces, however, is not keeping up with heightened demand. Shortages of qualified staff due to low wages, minimal benefits, and poor working conditions are compounding the problem. New capital funds are urgently needed for the expansion of nonprofit and public spaces, including in Indigenous communities, as well as resources for improving staff recruitment and retention. 

Pronatalism and the threat to women’s reproductive autonomy

Giving mothers medals may seem ridiculous but the resurgence of pronatalism is not. The idealization of motherhood and coercive control of reproduction are two sides of the same coin.

The discussion about how to incentivize motherhood is taking place as Republican governments are severely restricting access to reproductive health care—the impact of which is being experienced most acutely by Black women and other marginalized communities who already have limited access to public supports. Even now, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is slashing maternal and child health programs, the Head Start program for low-income families and child-care supports. 

The Trump administration’s pronatalist devotion to “family formation” seems only to extend to certain kinds of parents. The goal is not to make raising children easier for everyone. The goal is to reward heterosexual married (white, Christian) men and women raising kids the “right way.” In this context, what kind of choices are available to different mothers to have and to raise healthy children? 

Canada has its own history of patriarchal, racist and ableist population policies dating back centuries and resonating in our present, from the violent colonization of Indigenous peoples to the forced sterilization of people with disabilities and the marginalization of migrant care workers. It also has its own barriers to progressive family policy and the provision of universal high quality supports for mothers and kids. 

We’ve arrived at this moment, Melissa Gira Grant writes, because the core project of pronatalism and its conservative authoritarian roots have been “successfully laundered into more neutral-sounding policy proposals.” Population policies that prioritize demographic targets, political agendas or particular family forms over a person’s power to make their own reproductive choices have repeatedly led to devastating consequences.

This Mother’s Day, let’s commit to fighting for progressive family policies and reproductive health and rights for all. These are the gifts that keep on giving and the protections we need to push back the far right everywhere.