The Paris Olympics and the Limits of 'Pro-Natalism'
Why pro-parent policies aren't necessarily the same as pro-natal ones
In this week’s newsletter:
The Main Event: What can the ‘parent-friendly’ Paris Olympics tell us?
Capitol Hill Updates: Wyden-Smith, KOSA, and some friendly criticism
Et Cetera: Reports, takes, roundups, and two podcast appearances
The Main Event
The Games of the XXXIII Olympiad feel like the first “real” Olympics we’ve had since 2016, after the soft boycott of Beijing 2022, the pandemic weirdness of Tokyo 202(1), and the forgettable wrong time zone of Pyeongchang 2018. And while the outré Opening Ceremonies pushed culture war buttons, a couple stories that won’t make Primetime in Paris illustrate the shortcomings of an excessively “pro-natalist” approach to policymaking.
The Paris games have been called the first gender-equal games, with the same number of female and male athletes going for the gold (or, if you’re a long-distance swimmer going up against Katie Ledecky, the silver.) With that title comes another one - the first Olympic Games to make meaningful strides towards making the competition accessible to athletes with young children, particularly moms. This year’s Olympic Village features a nursery for athletes to breastfeed or spend time with their young children during the competition, part of a larger initiative spearheaded by former American sprinter Allyson Felix to provide more support for moms who are competing at the highest levels.
And we’ve seen examples of this support in action in Paris this week. Egyptian fencer Nada Hafez revealed after being eliminated in the Round of 16 that she had been competing while seven months pregnant. Azerbaijan’s Yaylagul Ramazanova also competed while pregnant, making it to the Round of 16 in archery at six months (“I felt my baby kick me before I shot this last arrow, and then I shot a 10.”) South Korean sharpshooter Kim Yeji won silver while wearing steampunk glasses and her daughter’s elephant doll. Britain’s Helen Glover and New Zealand’s Lucy Spoors and Brooke Francis each have young children and won gold in rowing events. Team USA has 16 mom-athletes on its roster, and 46 parents in total.
It’s a growing movement: U.S. Track & Field recently expanded insurance offerings for new parents. The U.S. volleyball, basketball, and soccer national teams have begun paying for family to travel to events and to provide child care. The LPGA has long provided maternity support and child care at events, and FIFA recently implemented a new protocol providing for 14 weeks of maternity leave (and 8 weeks for adoptive parents) in international soccer. The U.S. Olympic Committee has even established a New Family Fund, providing funding, support and resources for members of Team USA who become parents. (You, if so moved, can donate here.)
For elite-level athletes, this kind of support is necessary to have a family while pursuing their athletic goals. But a certain kind of pro-natalist might say that expanding support for elite athletes is the wrong societal focus. These initiatives, one might hear, tell young female athletes they can have it all, and that balancing childbearing, nursing, and going faster, higher, stronger go hand-in-hand. Think about the women who end up delaying or deferring family life to pursue their Olympic dreams, they might say - shouldn’t we be honest about the long-term consequences? One of the reasons birth rates have declined is because women’s opportunities have expanded; certain strains of pro-natalism mutter that trade-off is one that wasn’t necessarily worth making (or, at least, was dearer than is commonly acknowledged). Maybe a movement narrowly focused on the crisis that is declining birth rates should be calling out a culture that excessively prizes accomplishment, be it Olympic gold or boardroom green, over the homefront.
Not all of these kind of long-run cultural concerns should be dismissed out of hand. Our culture of youth sport, for instance, does have a tendency towards excess that can crowd out other worthwhile pursuits. The brutality of Olympic training in years past is largely, thankfully, behind us, but the cost paid in verbal and sexual abuse was high. Anyone contemplating the highest levels of achievement in a given profession should of course think about the costs and trade-offs associated with it.
But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander - and just like in the classroom and the office place, women are now able to pursue their athletic careers with the same single-minded focus that men have for decades. Because they are never pregnant, recovering from childbirth, or nursing, men tend to have an easier time balancing their professional and personal demands (note that five of the twelve members of the U.S. men’s volleyball team are fathers.) But in a gender-egaliatarian world, turning back the clock on women’s professional, academic, and athletic accomplishments is not desirable even if it were feasible (or, perhaps, vice versa.) As long as there are elite-level female athletes, whose careers often coincide with their peak years of fertility, there will be the need to balance the demands of having kids and competing at the highest levels. Building institutions that accommodate those top performers’ desire to “have it all” requires new thinking, like an on-site Olympic nursery.
If we analogize to public policy discussions, the growing support around elite parent-athletes are like the generous family benefits that many professional-class workers receive. We should encourage (even incentivize or require) corporations - and institutions like the U.S.O.C. - to do the right thing by their employees.
Of course, it does not then follow that the work-life policies that are required to win gold, or to make partner at a law firm, are the right policies for all parents across the spectrum. Chasing a podium in Paris may require additional funds to help family members travel with mom, or subsidized child care. A mom in Paris, Texas, might well prefer straight cash, or a more flexible part-time arrangement rather than the expectation she’ll be back on the clock (or trying to beat the clock in the pool or on the track) mere weeks after birth. Both moms have a claim on social and policy support as a matter of justice, but how to provide that stretches beyond one-size-fits-all prescriptions.
What we can learn from this fortnight in Paris is the importance of thinking about the role of institutions in making the everyday lives of parents easier. Pro-parent policies, which make the lives of individual parents easier, may or may not be pro-natal, in the form of raising a society’s birth rate. (Access to paid leave, for example, doesn’t necessarily lead to more births.) Child care at the workplace might not lead to more workers choosing parenthood, but it can make the lives of those working parents easier. This is partly because the cultural shifts necessarily to create a society that is more welcoming of kids, like those written about in Tim Carney’s “Family Unfriendly,” can’t really be directly created by policy or paid for by corporate sponsors.
Whether it’s a library, church, employers, local government, or an Olympic governing body, the institutions where daily life is lived have a choice to prioritize family life or ask individuals to treat it as an add-on. (The Lisbon airport, as one small example, offers free strollers for parents to use, an idea that any U.S. airport should be ready to plagiarize.) That is not the same thing as prioritizing boosting birth rates (though the long-run side effect of a more parent-friendly society may end up producing the side effect of a more pro-natal one as well.) But it’s a goal that is the furthest thing from “weird” - and is achievable on both a small scale as well as an Olympic-sized one.
Capitol Hill Updates
The last week before August means a flurry of Congressional activity before recess, and now we can officially say the little tax deal that almost could has been finally laid to rest. The “Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act,” otherwise known as the Wyden-Smith tax deal, passed the House with flying bipartisan colors back in January, but ran into opposition and the political realities of a Presidential election year. As I wrote for The Dispatch at the time,
“The Wyden-Smith deal would help, though it’s far from a cure-all…if Congress doesn’t act, the $2,000 value of the CTC for all families will be cut in half next year. That reality, and the need to support families in an era of declining birth rates, should push members of Congress to take the Wyden-Smith deal. As a deal for the real-world, the compromise moves the needle in the right direction.”
A very special Family Matters shout-out to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), and Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) for being willing to cross party lines and vote in favor of the bill. It’s not easy to buck leadership in an election year, even if it is on behalf of supporting working-class families and investing in American innovation. Major kudos to them.
The Senate let parents down, but the House wanted in on the action too, with leadership announcing they will not hold a vote on the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which passed the upper chamber by a vote of 91-3 earlier this week. KOSA, sponsored by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), had its detractors, but it also stood as a lowest-common denominator, bipartisan approach to resetting the defaults for how minors are treated online (I could, and indeed have, imagined much more aggressive action to give parents more tools to keep their kids safe online.)
Lastly, a bipartisan approach to child care, introduced this week by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) has some good intentions behind it, and improving the way that Section 45F (the section of the tax code reimburses employers that cover child care expenses) works could be very helpful. But the centerpiece of the bill is built on expanding the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), a flawed tax code provision that only modestly helps parents (and those it does are disproportionately upper-income ones.) On a basic level, it doesn’t make sense to make the CDCTC fully refundable if Republicans are not willing to increase the refundability of the Child Tax Credit. Better bipartisan ideas can and should be developed.
Et Cetera
Reports: How the 2017 Tax Law Made Itemized Charitable Giving a Luxury Good (AEI)…LGBTQ+ Adults Are Coming Out at Younger Ages Than in the Past (Gallup)…Which States Improved Child Tax Credits and EITCs in 2024? (ITEP)…The Experiences of U.S. Adults Who Don’t Have Children (Pew)…Families With Children Often Pay Less In Taxes, But Policymakers Could do More (Tax Policy Center)
Pieces: The movement desperately trying to get people to have more babies (Vox)…How the Kids Online Safety Act Was Dragged Into a Political War (New York Times)…Why Are So Many Americans Choosing to Not Have Children? (New York Times)
Takes: What Is America’s Gender War Actually About? (The Atlantic)…J.D. Vance’s Basket of Deplorables (WSJ Ed Board)…On Family Policy, Neither Party Has a Vision of the Good Life (Jacobin)…Cash alone won’t relieve ‘surviving’ American families (The Hill)…J.D. Vance’s Pro-Family Wisdom (Compact)…The GOP Ticket Goes Soft on Chemical Abortion (National Review)…Project 2025 Wants Parents to Be Paid to Stay Home (Bloomberg)
Roundup: Baltimore, Md.: Why is the mayor fighting to keep Baby Bonus off the ballot?…Utah: Court ruling keeps abortion legal up to 18 weeks…British Columbia: Government claws back child-care benefits from family with newborn…South Carolina: State considers offering child care benefits to state employees…Florida: New poll shows abortion amendment winning
Mentioned: Juicy Ecumenism…PolicySphere…OSV News
On the Air: Interview on the coming demographic crunch with NC Family Policy Matters…Interview on the rewritten GOP platform and the future of pro-life efforts with Baton Rouge Public Radio.
Is Yusuf Dikeç or Stephen Nedoroscik the better folk hero from this year's Olympic Games? How are you going to celebrate August Recess? Send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.