BUG

This page is magic and will break the site if you hover over it. I do not know why, but it’s kinda cool, so I’m not going out of my way to fix it

About this

I really have no idea how this happened
Tbh just read the word doc at FamilyPolicy26-27.docx

Family Policy

Authors: Patrick Foos, Larsen Hale, and the friends of the people

Executive Summary

It’s time to debate family policy. Today, in the status quo, the fertility rate is far below replacement, the childcare system is broken and expensive, and families are struggling to afford the bare necessities to raise their children. Across the political aisle, everyone knows that the system is broken, but no one can agree on how to solve the problem. Donald Trump has voiced support for variants of these policies and legislation on the topic has originated from Democrats and Republicans alike. Debating real solutions to these pressing problems in the time when solutions are being forged and refined is an ideal use of a year of debate.

It’s timely

Here’s the key number to understand timeliness: 1.79 – that’s the United States TFR. Replacement rate is 2.1. Current policy is permitting and/or encouraging a decline in the United States population, and Trump’s immigration policies have only magnified this, and population growth has declined to historic lows in recent years. Baby bonuses, tax code modifications, IVF access, and a multitude of other policy options are being implemented internationally, but in the US, policy is slow, divided, and stuck in inter- and intra-party conflict.

That said, the policy area is neither dead nor boring. Populist tendencies emerging in the Republican party are driving interest in new programs to build up families and increase births; Democrats and progressives support similar policies for their capacity to reduce economic strain on families, and provide employment; and even fiscal conservatives and silicon valley have their own interests in maintaining a population that is key to maintaining industrial capitalism, expansive welfare programs, and economic growth. Debating this now gives debaters a look into an emerging area of policy where the US lags behind its international counterparts, preparing them not only for the discussions of today but also tomorrow, and which affect them more than any prior generation.

In the Age of 1NR trump solvency takeouts, international uncertainty and tariff thumpers, and enormous political polarization, the ideal topic is one that both sides of the political spectrum can understand, even if the specific reasons for why the policy counts aren’t shared.

It’s inherent

While Trump made a number of claims about policies he would support on the campaign trail, actual change has amounted to tiny modifications on IVF treatments and data tracking, modification to the Child Tax Credit, and $1,000 savings account with his name on them. That’s not much and …

Let’s talk about the CTC increase in OBBBA. It’s not nearly as big as you would think. The increase was tiny, adjusted for inflation, it’s less than it was in 2017, and it applies to very few families. The topic is very much still inherent.

Hughes, senior analyst at ITEP, 26

(Joe Hughes; Hughes is a senior analyst who supports ITEP in monitoring federal tax policies; 3-10-2026; accessed: 5-1-2026; ITEP; "The Child Tax Credit Leaves Out Millions of Children in 2026. There Are Better Alternatives."; https://itep.org/child-tax-credit-2026-obbba-trump-taxes/) FJP

Last year’s tax law, the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), includes among its many provisions a small increase to the Child Tax Credit (CTC), but it leaves in place many problems with the current credit – namely that it leaves out many of the poorest children from its full benefits. This and other problems with the CTC would be eliminated by a bill known as the American Family Act, which would reinstate and expand upon a version of the CTC that was in effect for one year during the pandemic. OBBBA increases the maximum CTC for any child from $2,000 (the level it would be if Congress had simply extended the tax rules in effect in 2025) to $2,200, but leaves in place restrictions based on earnings and other income. Notably, the $2,200 credit level is lower than it would be if Congress had simply adjusted the credit for inflation in the 2017 tax law that set the amount at $2,000. While a handful of children are ineligible for the full CTC because their families are too rich, a much larger number of children are ineligible for the full CTC because their families are too poor. This is because the part of the CTC that can otherwise benefit many low- and middle-income families (the refundable portion) is subject to restrictions that OBBBA left in place and which the American Family Act would eliminate. This analysis of OBBBA’s Child Tax Credit provision and alternatives to it finds that: Under the American Family Act, no children would be denied the full Child Tax Credit (CTC) because their families earn too little. Under OBBBA and the rules it leaves in place, many children are barred from receiving the full credit in 2026, including: 30 percent of all children in the U.S. Virtually all (99 percent) of children among the poorest fifth of Americans, the families who most need help. About 40 to 50 percent of children in Black, Hispanic and Native American families About 22 percent of children in white families. A higher share of families with young children.

And if you think the $1,000 dollar Trump accounts are going to be a major shift, that’s wrong too, for a bundle of reasons including:

1---It’s only $1,000, the average out-of-pocket cost of birth is more than three times that amount

2---It doesn’t go to parents, and it doesn’t come for almost twenty years

Agreement on the issue and broad disagreements on the optimal policy strategy to pursue on the topic, combined with fiscal hawks in the House ready to gridlock major proposals this Congress mean that the political ground will be stable, even in the midst of international uncertainty and domestic mayhem in other policy zones.

There’s disagreement

One of the things about this topic which makes it unique is that the problem is legible across the political divide. It isn’t polarized in the same way that so many topics of recent years are, despite significant disagreements on how solutions should be implemented

Brown, 25

(Patrick T. Brown; Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center; 6-2-2025; accessed: 5-1-2026; Institute for Family Studies; "Pronatalism is Not Popular—Yet"; https://ifstudies.org/blog/pronatalism-is-not-popular-yet) FJP

But what do the American people think of these natalist energies? Would an unabashed embrace of policies explicitly aimed at inducing fertility be welcomed, opposed, or ignored? Much depends on the policy, the design, and the messenger. And a new survey from Yahoo and YouGov gives us some of the best looks at the popularity of some of the ideas covered in the Times’ reporting. To start, it appears that the long-term consequences of falling birth rates have yet to fully permeate the public consciousness. Across the board, less than 1 in 10 Americans proclaim themselves “very” worried about declining fertility. About one-quarter of adults say they are “somewhat” worried about falling fertility, with the majority of Americans not finding much to be concerned about. (In 2022, a different YouGov poll found that Americans were more than twice as likely to believe overpopulation would be a bigger problem than underpopulation.) And political differences on the question are scarce; only 8% of self-identified Republican voters are "very worried" about declining birth rates, though more Republicans than Democrats declared themselves “somewhat” concerned. Perhaps this sanguine attitude helps explain the fact that avowedly pro-natalist policies, such as those pitched in the Times piece, aren’t runaway winners. When asked if the “U.S. government should give Americans greater incentives to have children?,” only one-third of Americans say there should be more incentives for would-be parents, with men (39%) being more likely than women (28%) to support the idea. Racial minorities also supported the idea more than whites. But there are real differences among some demographic subgroups. Perhaps unsurprisingly, young people—who by definition stand to gain the most from any transfer scheme that prioritizes the fertile over those who can no longer have children—are most likely to support government action to boost birth rates. Gen X and older are decidedly cool on the question. And while voters who identify as Republican are a little more likely to support the idea in theory, Democrats and independents aren’t far behind; suggesting that while pro-natal policy isn’t a sure-fire political winner, it hasn’t yet been politically polarized.

Balancing desires for universal coverage with cost effectiveness and maximizing benefit is tricky and hashing out what approaches work best is controversial to say the least

McCloskey, economist, 22

(Abby M. McCloskey; McCloskey is an economist and political commentator. She is also the founder of McCloskey Policy LLC; Winter 2022; accessed: 5-1-2026; National Affairs; "The Future of Family Policy"; https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-future-of-family-policy) FJP

It is amid this environment of outdated public programs and mounting challenges for American families that Democrats have cast their vision for universal, publicly funded care. Though well-intended, their approach is the wrong one for children, parents, and the economy. The salience of the left's family-policy agenda can be attributed in part to its contrast with a policy vacuum on the right, making the choice a seemingly binary one between doing something and doing nothing. Indeed, for years, the state of family policy has largely been one of Democrats calling for universal, far-reaching, expensive programs to reshape child care, while Republicans, not wanting to tip the scales against stay-at-home parents or create yet another major government program, either deny the need for reform or put forth limited changes that fail to address the specific challenges at hand. There's certainly merit to conservatives' cautious approach — particularly in its desire to avoid heavy-handed government involvement in family life, along with its recognition that economic growth can do much to help alleviate the financial pressures facing families. But in practice, the strategy has failed to deliver support where it's most needed, and has thus served as an implicit defense of an unpopular and unsustainable status quo. As a May 2021 Bipartisan Policy Center/Morning Consult poll found, among America's parents, 88% believe expanding government support would be beneficial for parents and children, including 95% of liberals and 79% of conservatives. Part of the right's problem is that what goes in comes out. A mere glance at the rosters of the top think tanks in the nation shows that there exists a significant imbalance between the right and the left when it comes to the number of scholars focused on family-policy issues, which limits the dynamism necessary to generate creative, inclusive, and innovative reforms. Such trends extend to Congress: Research shows that female legislators are more likely than their male counterparts to work on issues directly connected to women and young children, yet Republicans continue to trail Democrats in female representation. Though some Republican policymakers were more supportive of measures like paid parental leave or child care during the Trump administration, they are again putting distance between themselves and such reforms, no doubt to draw a greater distinction between the GOP and spendthrift Democrats. But this tactic further cements the impression of a binary choice. There are better ways to deliver meaningful support to American families. Conservative values can inform family policy in ways that recognize the diversity of caregiving needs and priorities among families, direct interventions to where they are most needed, promote parental choice and involvement, and advance fiscal responsibility, if for no other reason than to protect the rising generation that such policies seek to benefit. THE LEFT'S UNIVERSALITY If there's one word to describe the Democrats' approach to family policy, it's "universality." When their adherence to universality takes on an ideological bent, it not only drives up costs, it also supersedes what research suggests is most beneficial for children and parents. President Joe Biden's universal-preschool plan, wherein all three- and four-year-olds would have access to publicly funded preschool irrespective of their family's income, is a prime example. The White House claims this approach would improve all children's educational outcomes, but the research supporting this claim is limited. While a Brookings study of the long-running universal-preschool programs in Georgia and Oklahoma found improved academic outcomes and increased parental involvement for at-risk children, it found "no positive effect" among higher-income children. Indeed, most studies confirm that the greatest benefits of universal preschool accrue to children from low-income families, who wouldn't otherwise have access to high-quality care inside or outside the home. This raises the question of why lawmakers are not pursuing more targeted preschool programs. In theory, universal preschool could create healthy peer effects and build up social capital. But in practice, it often hasn't worked out this way. In public K-12 education, children from low-income families tend to be concentrated in the worst-performing schools, where achievement gaps between them and their higher-income peers have held steady for years. These trends extend to universal preschool: Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, recently uncovered growing achievement gaps among four-year-olds in New York City's universal-preschool program, with black and Latino preschoolers predominating in the lowest-performing schools. In other words, the very population with the greatest potential to benefit from universal preschool has the least access to the kind of high-quality programming that could change lives. In terms of improving children's outcomes through education, there's been no experiment more successful than the highly targeted approaches of the Perry Preschool Project and the Carolina Abecedarian Project, which served low-income black children and their families during the 1960s and 1970s. The Abecedarian Project offered high-quality individualized education to children starting at infancy, when brain development is at its peak, while the Perry Project provided similar services starting at age three, in addition to in-home parental coaching and wrap-around services to families — a nod to the notion that family care is a vital ingredient to any program seeking to improve child welfare. Economist James Heckman, a winner of the Nobel Prize, found that the programs delivered lifelong benefits for these children, with an impressive 13% per-child, per-year gain from improved health, education, and professional outcomes. Recent research by Heckman and others also revealed that the children of those who participated in these programs exhibited improved outcomes, suggesting that investment in early childhood education can help unlock intergenerational economic opportunity with a cost-effectiveness unmatched by nearly any other anti-poverty intervention. There's every reason in the world to seek to replicate these investments through public spending, private funding, or some combination thereof. And given the potential for such dramatic lifelong gains, even a cost of $50,000 per child would pale in comparison to the future benefits. But that's not what Democrats are proposing to do; instead, they conflate the outcomes of these targeted programs with the effects of a universal one — something Heckman does not mince words about, calling it "a political ploy." By making programs free for middle- and upper-income parents who would have otherwise paid for them, universal preschool dilutes resources that could be used to fund intensive early childhood programs for the poor at no cost to them. A study of Washington, D.C.'s universal-preschool program found that nearly half of its enrollees would have enrolled in private preschool had it not been for the publicly funded option. At $19,463 per child per year — the running cost of D.C.'s program — this is a steep price to pay to duplicate private efforts while generating questionable outcomes. The Democrats' argument for universality extends beyond universal access to the possibility of a universal provider: the government. Though there's much to take issue with in the current system, one prominent benefit is the diversity of providers available. Today, the early childhood space operates much like a school-choice or voucher system, wherein low-income families can receive block-grant funding and middle-income families can use the CDCTC to help pay for the child-care services of their choosing. This allows parents to select from among a wide variety of paid-care arrangements, including traditional daycare, in-home care, faith-based providers, providers with non-traditional hours, and others. Surveys show that parents value this choice: A January 2020 poll found that, among parents who said they were using their ideal child-care arrangement, 34% favored parent-provided care, while 10% favored care provided by other relatives. But in the quest for universality, Democrats want to change all that. The road to a universal government provider is most obvious with the potential for preschool to be added to the public K-12 system, but the shift is happening in more subtle ways as well. It can be seen in strengthened prerequisites for child-care providers, mandates for higher pay, and extensive state-based regulations. Such restrictions are most likely to squeeze out smaller in-home and non-traditional providers, which have already been closing their doors at a rapid pace in recent years. Since public providers can be subsidized with taxpayer dollars, a public solution is likely to further crowd out private ones, thereby reducing parental choice. One-size-fits-all care solutions haven't worked out well when other options are removed: Quebec's universal child-care program, for instance, has been associated with negative outcomes for children on a variety of behavioral and health dimensions, including increased aggression, reduced motor skills, higher rates of physical illness, and strained familial relations. Our public K-12 system is producing questionable results as it is; we shouldn't be tacking additional years onto that system without first demonstrating that we can make measurable improvements in outcomes for the children these schools already serve. The left's desire for universality extends to other areas of family policy as well, most notably in their proposals for paid leave. Behind closed doors, some paid-leave advocates have admitted that they fight against proposals for parental paid leave when the measures don't include paid leave for a much broader set of uses, including medical and family caregiving (with loose definitions attached to the term "family"). Like supporters of universal preschool, these advocates conflate the benefits of more targeted programs with universal ones, shortchanging the people who need the most help. A review of the paid-leave literature by the American Enterprise Institute/Brookings Working Group on Paid Family Leave found that the vast majority of evidence about the benefits of public paid-leave programs is specific to parental leave. This research shows the tremendous societal benefits of having a robust parental-leave program, but it says little about the outcomes of offering paid leave for other purposes. Internationally, too, the most generous paid-leave programs are exclusively for parental leave — and maternity leave, at that — with nothing approaching the comprehensive leave package U.S. lawmakers are now debating. These distinctions reflect the recognition that the months following a child's birth are a unique time, worthy of generous and differentiated public investment. Instead, Democrats have insisted on treating all types of leave the same, equating a family member caring for a distant relative with a mother caring for her newborn. Their misguided quest for universality recently led them to reduce their paid-leave proposal to four weeks for new parents — well before a mother is scheduled for a wellness check or an infant would be accepted into daycare. Not only are the benefits of universal programs questionable, they come at a steep cost. Democrats have proposed to pay for universal preschool (estimated to cost the federal government $109 billion over six years), four weeks of paid family and medical leave for all workers per year (estimated to cost $205 billion), and child-care offsets for nearly all families (estimated to cost close to $1 trillion once budget gimmicks are omitted) with higher taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals. Yet over the long term, according to the Congressional Budget Office, as much as a quarter of the corporate-tax incidence is borne by workers. It's hard to imagine many single-parent workers being thrilled about offsetting the cost of universal preschool for married millionaires' children. And while a higher tax on the wealthiest Americans could help pay for such priorities, these individuals are not an endless source of tax revenue. At some point, their taxes will need to be put toward our debt obligations, which are already the size of our entire economy. It's dishonest to continue the charade that workers can receive further benefits with no reduction in their take-home pay, or that increasingly generous programs will not add to the historic debt accumulating at their expense. THE LIMITS OF A CHILD ALLOWANCE Until the last decade, Republicans' family policy (to the extent it can even be called such) consisted of promoting pro-growth economic policies and limited government. The idea was that a broad base of prosperity would lift all boats and maximize family choice. Though such contentions are not wrong, they are at best incomplete, and their ability to address the acute and mounting pressures facing families in recent years has worn thin. While the party's base is more willing to spend money to support families than it once was, a broad hesitancy to address the issues facing parents persists among Republican lawmakers. The GOP is also plagued with its own universality problem: Whereas Democrats' desire for universality presents as a quest to provide access to all Americans irrespective of need, Republicans' universality concerns present as a reluctance to tip the scales against any specific work or family arrangement. Given that policies like paid parental leave and child care accrue only to working parents, some lawmakers worry that offering support to this population puts parents who choose to stay home and supply child care themselves at a disadvantage. This concern has steered Republicans in Congress away from addressing family-related challenges directly, if at all. To the extent that there has been broad agreement among Republican lawmakers on family policy, it has coalesced around the Child Tax Credit (CTC) — a benefit granted to taxpayers for each qualifying dependent child. In 2017, a Republican-led Congress doubled the CTC from $1,000 per child, per family, to $2,000 per child under the age of 17 ($1,400 for low-income families). An expanded CTC also appears in the reconciliation package currently under consideration in Congress. At root, the CTC represents a blank check to American families irrespective of their situation or needs. Its greatest benefit is that it can be used for anything — child-care costs, food, clothing, school supplies, paid leave — in fact, it need not be spent on children at all. Because of its broad application, supporters can claim to address a host of issues with a single solution. But conservative supporters have tended to oversell the benefits that can accrue from this relatively limited sum. A minimum-wage-earning single mother who uses the credit to finance six weeks of paid leave after giving birth will have nothing left over for child-care expenses, which average out to over $15,000 for infants. This means she is likely to leave the labor force entirely or, if she remains employed, to place her child in substandard care. While the CTC can offer some measure of relief, it is unlikely to open up additional opportunities or choices. This leaves many of the aforementioned challenges unaddressed, as well as open to an alternative answer from the left. Without an easily identifiable incentive to point to, the CTC's supporters often pivot to its macroeconomic benefits. But this is akin to arguing that sending out a stimulus check to families would boost GDP — it may do so in the short run, but unless it is put to productive use and paid for, it won't do so in the long term. And if economic growth is the goal, why limit payments to parents with children? Others have rightfully pointed out that the CTC has resulted in dramatic declines in child poverty. Robert Orr of the Niskanen Center calculated that the Republicans' CTC expansion brought more than 750,000 individuals out of poverty in 2018, half of which were children — a true policy victory. But this doesn't explain why the credit continues all the way up the income spectrum: The poverty line for a family with two children is $25,000, but the CTC doesn't begin to phase out until family income surpasses $400,000. And if combatting poverty is the goal, it raises the question of why the CTC is smallest for our neediest families, many of whom are ineligible for the credit entirely. To meaningfully address the challenges facing American parents, the size of the credit would need to be much larger, as well as more accessible to low-income families, than it is now. Republican lawmakers are starting to move in that direction. Senator Mitt Romney has proposed a child allowance equal to $4,200 per child under age six ($350 per month) and $3,000 per child ages six to 17 ($250 per month). His allowance would be fully refundable, meaning that it would benefit low-income families as much as middle-class families, and would be delivered monthly — a necessity for parents who live paycheck to paycheck. At that size, the CTC would change the issue set facing a family. Those with multiple children could receive up to $1,250 per month, or $15,000 per year, meaning that a single mother earning $40,000 annually could shift to part-time work to raise her children and still bring in close to the same take-home pay. Her child-care costs would be cut nearly in half. Senator Romney should be applauded for putting forward an innovative family policy — something that's eluded many of his conservative colleagues. But his proposal raises several concerns. Most fundamentally, in a time of limited resources, it's unclear why nearly every American family with children should be receiving a large government payment: The credit wouldn't fully phase out until a married household hits nearly $500,000 in income, meaning that a high-income family could be receiving monthly deposits of $1,000 or more from Uncle Sam. Yet if the credit were more tightly targeted by income, paying low-income families up to $15,000 each year — a large share of their household income — could induce a whole range of unintended consequences. In essence, the credit would serve as a universal basic income with a critical difference: It would not continue indefinitely. This could create perverse incentives for low-income parents to scale back employment when their children are young only to have the government support disappear later on, leaving them with limited ability to reconnect to the labor force and facing significant wage penalties if they do so. A credit this size is also incredibly expensive — in fact, its cost is on par with any Democratic approach. To his credit, Romney pays for his plan by eliminating several other programs, including the CDCTC, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, state and local tax deductions, and more. His strategy is superior to the Republicans' financing of their 2017 expansion of the CTC through deficit spending, to say nothing of the Democrats' reflexive reach for higher taxes. But in doing so, some of the important elements of existing programs would be lost, such as the work incentive tied to the Earned Income Tax Credit — one of the most effective anti-poverty programs we have available. Finally, the Romney plan fails to address the fact that our current share of expenditures on children is relatively small and shrinking: According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, less than a tenth of federal spending in 2016 was devoted to children, while more than a third was spent on the elderly. We should be seeking to correct this imbalance instead of repurposing a shrinking share of the pie. This latter problem is emblematic of most other proposals on the right, which generally involve reshuffling existing family programs. To be sure, some of the increased flexibility inherent to these plans makes sense — allowing families to frontload their access to CTC benefits while children are young, for instance, is a no-lose proposition that has attracted bipartisan support from lawmakers like senators Bill Cassidy and Kyrsten Sinema. But in other ways, they are unnecessarily limiting. One Republican proposal involves allowing parents to trade part of their future Social Security benefits for paid leave following the birth of a child. This may be elegant from a fiscal perspective, since it minimizes additional expenses. But if the goal is to ensure that every infant can spend its first weeks of life with one or both parents, policymakers should be encouraging take-up of the benefit, not discouraging it. Requiring parents to dip into their retirement safety net to spend time with their newborn child does the latter while doing nothing to address the job protections these mothers and fathers lack. As a country, we've decided that it's in our collective interest to help people maintain a stable living situation during retirement; it's hard to argue that doing so is any less important than ensuring infants are born into stable living situations. Other proposals on the right are more limited still. They include setting up tax-advantaged savings accounts to be used for pregnancy and child-care expenses or paid leave, as well as providing tax credits to companies that offer paid family leave or child-care centers on site, despite limited evidence such credits expand family-policy offerings. While these policies have the advantage of being cost-effective, they would not raise the share of federal social spending devoted to early childhood care. They would also provide limited support to the neediest of families, who would not benefit from non-refundable tax credits or tax-advantaged accounts. Republicans don't have to tie themselves in knots like this. It's okay to support apprenticeships even though not everyone will become an apprentice. It's okay to support health savings accounts even though not everyone will have one. And it's okay to support the acute needs of child care and paid leave even if all parents do not benefit from such programs. The sooner Republicans recognize this, the better off the party — and the country — will be.

There’s serious conflict on how to support families---supply or demand side childcare funding is more complex than just programmatic efficiency

Stone, senior fellow, 24

(Lyman Stone; Lyman Stone is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He is also the Director of Research at the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence. In 2025, he earned a PhD in Sociology at McGill University with a Population Dynamics specialization; 10-22-2024; accessed: 5-1-2026; Institute for Family Studies; "Pronatal Policy Ideas for 2025"; https://ifstudies.org/blog/pronatal-policy-ideas-for-2025) FJP

Right now, the Federal government spends about $25 billion every year subsidizing child care programs. Many of these programs openly discriminate based on family status, and others do so more subtly. Federal subsidies for child care through the Child Care and Development Block Grant ($8.7 billion), the Child Care Entitlements to the States ($3.5 billion), Head Start ($12.3 billion), Preschool Development Grants ($315 million), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) shares spent on childcare ($2.5 billion), and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit ($12 billion) should all be reviewed. The logic here is simple: all families are taxed to pay for these programs, but only certain families benefit from them. The Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit explicitly bans people from claiming it if one spouse stays home, and limits payments for care provided by family members. It’s a subsidy specifically for non-family-related childcare. In other words, it’s facially discriminatory against families that choose to have a spouse stay home, or who choose to have care provided by an extended network of kin. In other cases, like grants to child care programs, the discrimination is less overt, but the effect is the same: families with a stay-at-home parent (who are, on average, poorer than two-worker households) essentially pay taxes to subsidize child care for other families. In some cases, these programs may be justifiable as anti-poverty programs subsidizing work. But in many cases, child care subsidies are going to not-particularly-poor families who will be working either way. Again, harping on the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit seems reasonable given how blatantly unfair it is: according to data from the IRS Statistics of Income, families with over $100,000 in income in 2021 received more from this program ($4.9 billion) than families with under $50,000 in income ($4.7 billion). There’s no reason to have a program specifically designed to subsidize higher-earning families dropping off their kids at day care. Money saved through reviewing, reducing, or eliminating these programs could be reinvested through an improved, non-marriage-penalizing EITC program to subsidize work, or else through an expanded CTC. Parents could choose to use CTC moneys on child care if they wish.

Novices will love it

Family policy is incredibly accessible.

1---The mechanisms are comprehensible. Lump sum payments to parents, mandating insurance cover IVF, and making preschool free are all self-explanatory policies that have clear, real-life impacts, either because novices plan to have families later in life, or because they have families and friends that would be affected. The controversy is also coherent, program cost-effectiveness, immigration counterplans, and critiques of family and birth don’t need to get into the weeds to understand neg relevance.

2---The impact is real. The average American parent has fewer children than they would like to have in an ideal world, and affordability is something that matters to everyone. Whether or not the President can tariff steel or exports of Blackwells are acceptable are impacts far away from debaters, with numerous mediating influences, but family policy hits close to home.

It’s domestic

We believe this is a domestic topic. It deals with domestic policy and is not explicitly legal (with maybe one or two options for courts). It isn’t international because it is about the United States’ domestic policy. There’s not much more to say on this one.

Proposed resolutions

Family policy is a broad brush, with advocates for housing reform, tax cuts, entitlement increases, and everything in between coming together to make arguments and propose policies. While there are terms of art within that broad umbrella, we believe that a list resolution would be the ideal venue for this topic area. Thus our recommended resolution is:

Proposal One, constrained list---Resolved: The United States federal government should adopt a family policy in one or more of the following ways: baby bonuses, universal early childhood education, substantially expanded access to assisted reproductive technology, substantially expanding the child tax credit, or restricting all or nearly all abortion.

This list provides a variety of affirmative mechanisms with a unified core of policies aimed at increasing birth rates. One or more constrains the total number of affs, but five affs, and variations within them, especially with the different methods of early childhood education (subsidies to providers, payments to parents, hybrid models) as well as differing proposals for the CTC should give a solid variety of aff ground.

Abortion restrictions, while controversial, give teams the option to go beyond typical util based arguments and delve further into ethics than the typical topic. We don’t think this is essential, but it’s a major element of public discourse, promises interesting debates, and fits the theme.

Proposal Two, open-ended list---Resolved: The United States federal government should adopt a family policy, including baby bonuses, universal early childhood education, increased access to assisted reproductive technology, expanding the child tax credit, or restricting all or nearly all abortion.

This list keeps the elements of the prior list, but open the way for more sweeping proposals and reforms that go far beyond the list with “including.” This opens the way for total economic restructuring and other large scale proposals that would change the way families are built in the US.

Proposal Three, pronatalism---Resolved: The United States federal government should adopt a pronatalist policy including baby bonuses, universal early childhood education, increased access to assisted reproductive technology, expanding the child tax credit, or restricting all or nearly all abortion.

While arguably a more specific term, pronatalism is highly politically charged and probably results in effects T debates which no one wants to have. That said, it is an option if the community wants a topic constrained to birthrates rather than family formation broadly.

Proposal Four, open-ended: Resolved: The United States federal government should adopt a substantial family policy in the United States.

This is a broad topic, with the main limiter being ‘substantial.’ While the smell test might cut it for some judges, we’re not sure that this would be and ideal wording. That said, subset affs would face arguments against them as being based in eugenics which could check back against some level of abuse and functionally require affs to be universal or near universal. The geographic limiter is also something that might be important, lack of specification could lead to international support for family policies (we’ll defer to the expertise of others on this point).

What are we arguing on the Aff?

Baby Bonuses

Affs can defend baby bonuses, which serve as an income smoothing and allow earlier and more frequent births

Sargeant, senior policy analyst, 25

(Leah Sargeant; Sargeant is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center specializing in work and family with the center’s Social Policy team; 4-22-2025; accessed: 5-1-2026; Niskanen Center; "Newborn needs: The case for an American baby bonus"; https://www.niskanencenter.org/newborn-needs-the-case-for-an-american-baby-bonus/) FJP

Every new baby is a blessing, but also a substantial shock to a family’s financial stability. A new baby comes with new recurring costs—diapers, wipes, and clothes, as well as bigger investments the family must make—a crib, a safer neighborhood, a sized-up car to fit three carseats.[1] The surrounding community helps meet the family’s needs with baby showers and meal trains. The federal government can help smooth the income shocks that come with a new baby, so parents are freer to take a chance on their family’s future. A baby bonus is a one-time family benefit that is delivered shortly after a baby is born. It is limited in scope, since it only applies in the first year of a child’s life. It can be delivered at a manageable cost for America even in an era of budget constraints. The support comes when it can have its highest impact, when young couples are early in their careers and a decade or more away from their highest earning years.[2] It can reduce the pressure to delay having children until it’s too late to have any or too late to have as many as the parents hope for. A baby bonus offers parents the flexibility to spend on the most important needs facing their family. For some families, that may mean being able to afford the basic necessities—diapers and food. For others, a baby bonus can be used to prepare the house to host a grandparent for several months, to help with childcare and recovery. For many, a baby bonus may become a form of paid family leave, offering a modest benefit that allows families to use the unpaid Family Medical Leave Act weeks they’ve qualified for but could not otherwise afford to take. A baby bonus is a budget-conscious, carefully targeted family benefit that helps parents at a time when many American families are on track to have fewer children than they hoped for.[3] It helps support families when their need is greatest. The nation benefits in turn, by helping couples be freer to make the best choices for their children, and to raise them to keep America growing. Peer nations like Australia and New Zealand have successfully implemented a baby bonus as a way to set a floor of support for all parents. A baby bonus ensures that parents who are excluded from paid family leave or unable to qualify for other family benefits have a form of support to help them prioritize baby bonding and recovery after birth. An American baby bonus can be affordable and simple. Qualification and registration can be integrated into our existing payment structures administered by the IRS. The overall cost of a $2,000 baby bonus is modest in comparison to other family benefit programs. This one-time program would offer support when parents need it most, without creating dependency.

These policies can also be used to remedy poverty and income disparities

Segers, 25

(Grace Segers; Segers is a staff writer at The New Republic, where she covers policy and politics; 5-9-2025; accessed: 5-1-2026; New Republic; "Forget Fertility Rates—Here’s What a Baby Bonus Would Mean for Poverty"; https://newrepublic.com/article/195031/fertility-rates-baby-bonus-poverty) FJP

However, this kind of grant could still be a significant boost for new parents at a particularly vulnerable period. One recent study found that poverty rates increase by roughly one-third in the first month of childhood, a trend particularly affecting Black, Latina, and first-time mothers. Poverty in early childhood can have significant negative consequences, as poor children may have lower cognitive development, as well as worse health and educational outcomes, than their higher-income peers. A federal grant given to new parents upon birth could help absorb the economic shocks and dramatically reduce poverty rates in that first month of childhood. One 2023 study found that a $1,800 baby bonus would cut the poverty rate among mothers of newborns from roughly 26 percent to under 3 percent in the month of birth. That decrease would be even more significant if it was paired with a monthly expanded child tax credit, akin to what was temporarily implemented for six months in 2021.

Fernández-Villaverde, 26

(Jesús Fernández-Villaverde; Nonresident Senior Fellow at AEI; 4-7-2026; accessed: 4-30-2026; American Enterprise Institute - AEI; "Rapid Fertility Decline Is an Existential Crisis"; https://www.aei.org/op-eds/rapid-fertility-decline-is-an-existential-crisis/) FJP

The implications of declining fertility in the US are the most crucial economic issue of our time. Consider the fundamental accounting equation for economic growth. Output growth is equal to the growth rate of output per worker (a measure of productivity) plus the growth rate of the labor force. Since the Civil War, the long-term average growth rate of output per worker in the US has been approximately 1.9% annually. This rate has occasionally been higher (as seen in the 1950s and 1960s) and at other times lower (as observed in the 1970s and 2010s). However, deviations from this historical average have generally not been significant. Therefore, when the number of workers increased by about 1% annually, US economic growth remained around 2.9% per year. During strong years—particularly during economic expansions when productivity surged—the economy achieved growth rates of 4% or more. In weaker years, when productivity slowed or fell, output grew by only 1% or 2%. Total output only shrank for an entire year on rare occasions. Fast forward to the 2040s, when the growth rate of workers may be -1% per year. Even if we maintain the output per worker growth rate at 1.9% (a big if), the economy will grow at a meager 0.9% annually. In prosperous years, we could reach 2%; in downturns, the economy will contract, not just grow more slowly. Is this an unlikely scenario? Unfortunately, no. We have already witnessed it—it’s called Japan. Between 1991 and 2019, Japan’s GDP grew at an annual rate of 0.83%, significantly lower than the US rate of 2.53%. The main driver of their weak economic performance? Japan’s dramatic demographic collapse. Between 1991 and 2019, a combination of past low fertility and population aging led to a 0.54% annual decline in the number of working-age adults. Total hours worked fell at a similar rate of 0.43% per year; the gap between these figures reflects increased labor force participation among older workers and women. In contrast, the US, bolstered by higher fertility rates and significant immigration, experienced an annual growth of 0.91% in its working-age population, with total hours worked increasing by 1.04%. Consequently, Japan’s GDP per working-age adult grew at a rate of 1.39% per year, compared to 1.65% in the US—a relatively minor gap. When measured by output per hour worked, Japan’s growth was at 1.26% per year, while the US recorded 1.53%. Excluding the early and middle 1990s, when Japan was engulfed in the aftermath of its real estate bubble, Japan’s growth per working-age adult from 1998 to 2019 outpaced that of the US Japan’s weak economic performance over the past 25 years is not a mystery; it is merely the result of a declining population. Demographics shape destiny, even in terms of economic growth. In other words, Japan’s current economic situation (good performance of growth per working-age adult but poor total output growth) foreshadows the future of the US economy. The consequences of significantly slower output growth will be severe for the US economy. While we consider output growth per capita when assessing welfare (and output per capita growth will not decline as sharply as total output growth), total output growth is crucial for addressing the funding of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, servicing our public debt, and financing our armed forces in the face of increasing international competition. Once we begin to contemplate the fiscal implications of a declining population, it becomes difficult to focus on anything else.

Early Childhood Education

Affs can defend universal early childhood care and education---and can debate whether supply or demand side subsidies are the optimal strategy to both improve childcare outcomes and also reduce poverty and ensure worker security

Bilik et. al., 25

(Lena Bilik, Mary Beth Salomone Testa, Suzanne Kahn, Nina Dastur, and Meredith Loomis Quinlan; employees at The Roosevelt Institute, a think tank, a student network, and the nonprofit partner to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum; 7-21-2025; accessed: 4-30-2026; Roosevelt Institute; "Building a Vision for Universal Public Childcare: Principles for a Childcare System That Works for Workers and Families"; https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/building-a-vision-for-universal-public-childcare/) FJP

The current early childhood care and education (ECE) system in the US is broken. Families struggle to access and afford ECE, and ECE providers across the workforce struggle to get by on chronically low wages. Half of families live in a childcare desert. At the same time, the ECE field faces a growing threat of corporate capture and private equity takeover. Some states are also seeing a push toward deregulation. The US needs bold, transformative public investments to create a public, universal ECE system that can meet the needs of families. Over the past year, the Roosevelt Institute and Community Change hosted a series of conversations with a group of parents, childcare providers, and grassroots organizers to explore a proposal for a universal public ECE system. The conversations deliberately raised and worked through tensions and disagreement among existing stakeholders over how to imagine such a system. In particular, we discussed how to ensure that current stakeholders in the system—especially workers—do not get left behind in a transition to a public ECE system. This paper offers a forward-looking framework to join ongoing conversations to imagine a truly public, universal ECE system. ECE providers we spoke with know that the system is broken and needs to be transformed and that a shift to a public universal system would involve trade-offs because of the entrenched interests established by the current system. Informed by and reflective of our conversations as well as our examination of other ECE systems around the country and around the world, this report proposes a public, universal ECE system that is affordable, coordinated, safe and high-quality, and inclusive and culturally competent. It proposes a system that would have an affirmative obligation to build out more supply and capacity; make ECE jobs good jobs with collective bargaining rights, a thriving wage, and good benefits; and include robust stakeholder engagement and transition support for small, independent providers to be a part of the new system. The public system we propose rests on supply-side investments, where the federal government provides funding directly to providers and programs through grants and contracts—instead of providing subsidies to families and leaving them to identify and secure care on their own. In many ways our proposal is structurally similar to the existing Early Head Start program, with consistent high quality standards and the ability for care to be provided both by public providers directly as well as by small homes and centers that contract with the state and become nonprofits, or join nonprofit networks. Each of the components of our proposal is necessary to build a public childcare system that expands the ECE workforce and ensures adequate space and staffing levels alongside the quality required to meet the needs of all children and families, all while protecting public funding for ECE from corporate capture. We believe a truly high-quality, universally accessible system will build an engaged constituency of supporters that will sustain it. Our proposal aims to build a public infrastructure of care that is sustainable, affordable, high-quality, and universally accessible first and foremost. The system should meet the needs of families, including but not limited to: the needs of children with disabilities; the financial needs of families; the need for full-day, full-year care; the need for high-quality and age-appropriate youth development, care, and education; and the need for young children to have attentive, consistent adult relationships. We also envision ECE that above all provides safe, nurturing learning opportunities for all children. In order to build a public system that does all of that, we must offer ECE providers family-sustaining wages and benefits at parity with K-12 educators. We must understand such an ECE system as sitting within a broader care system that, ideally, includes one year of paid parental leave as well as comprehensive care beyond ECE including universal preschool, after-school, and summer care. We hope that this paper advances the conversation to transform the ECE system toward an accord that the field can mobilize around.

And there’s legislation on the topic like the CCFWA which uses more of a demand side approach than the prior advocate

Center for American Progress, 25(Early Childhood Policy Team; The Center for American Progress is an independent, nonpartisan policy institute that is dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans through bold, progressive ideas, as well as strong leadership and concerted action; 1-15-2025; accessed: 4-30-2026; Center for American Progress; "Fact Sheet: What To Know About the Child Care for Working Families Act"; https://www.americanprogress.org/article/fact-sheet-what-to-know-about-the-child-care-for-working-families-act/) FJP

The recently reintroduced Child Care for Working Families Act would further invest in care infrastructure to reduce costs for families, support early childhood learning and development, and bolster the child care workforce. This fact sheet explains why the Child Care for Working Families Act is a critical step toward building a free, universal, mixed-delivery birth-through-5 early care and education system. Investments in child care are investments in children, families, and the economy The U.S. economy loses an estimated $122 billion in revenue, productivity, and earnings annually due to the country’s lack of investment in child care. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sets the affordability benchmark for child care at 7 percent of annual family income; under this metric, 43 percent of families with young children currently pay unaffordable rates for child care, and 134,000 families are pushed into poverty by child care expenses every year. Child care costs rose from 2020 to 2024 to surpass an average annual price of $13,000, consuming 10 percent of a married couple’s median household income and more than one-third of a single parent’s median household income. High-quality child care enables parents to participate in the workforce, search for a job, or obtain education, ultimately boosting both economic growth and family financial stability. The Child Care for Working Families Act would make child care more affordable and accessible to families by: Capping costs for working families at 7 percent of their income, reducing median annual household child care expenses by two-thirds for low- and middle-income families. Making child care free for families earning below 85 percent of their state’s median income. Expanding categorical eligibility so that more low-income families will automatically qualify for support.

Assisted Reproductive Technology

Expanding access to assisted reproductive technology (like IVF) reduces inequity and is key to reduce infertility---and while state plans show proof of concept, ERISA and Medicaid means that federal action is key

ASRM, 21

(American Society for Reproductive Medicine; The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) is the leading organization worldwide dedicated to the advancement of the science and practice of reproductive medicine; 2021; accessed: 4-29-2026; No Publication; "Disparities in access to effective treatment for infertility in the United States: an Ethics Committee opinion (2021)"; https://www.asrm.org/practice-guidance/ethics-opinions/disparities-in-access-to-effective-treatment-for-infertility-in-the-united-states-an-ethics-committee-opinion-2021/) FJP

The majority of patients who undergo IVF in the United States pay out of pocket for their medical treatment because either they lack health insurance or their insurance policies exclude fertility care, cover infertility diagnosis only, or exclude IVF. One report places the median price of a cycle of IVF in the United States, including medications, at $19,200 (30). A single cycle may represent 50% of an average person’s annual disposable income (14), whereas a full course of treatment, i.e., ≥2 IVF cycles, may cost significantly more (31). Cost pressures influence whether patients seek treatment and the decisions they make during treatment. A 2015 financing industry survey of 213 female fertility patients found that 83% of the patients were concerned or very concerned about the cost; 70% of the women who underwent IVF went into debt. The expense caused significant numbers of patients to delay treatment, whereas nearly 34% reported they had to stop treatment because of unaffordability (32). In another study, women without insurance coverage for IVF were 3 times more likely to discontinue treatment after 1 cycle compared with women with insurance (33). Men with male factor infertility face similar financial pressures when trying to build a family (34). In a survey at an urban academic medical center, almost half of the men reported that the cost of treatment caused financial strain and precluded certain therapeutic options (35). The financial burden is likely to be particularly high for single men and gay couples who often need to compensate both an egg donor and a gestational carrier to build their families (36). Financial pressures and uncertainties are challenging to those hoping for a child (37) and they compel a number of patients each year to leave the United States to pursue treatment in other countries, such as India, where medical prices are substantially lower (38). Non-IVF fertility treatments, too, may be cost-prohibitive for patients at or below median in- come levels. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recognized that ‘‘Infertility treatment can also be expensive, and . [e]conomic, regional, and racial/ethnic disparities in access to and use of infertility services are clearly present’’ (39). Studies confirm that compared with their presence in the US population, persons of middle to lower socio-economic status and persons of African-American or Hispanic ethnicity are underrepresented in the population of treated infertility patients (18, 40). As of this writing, 9 states (Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York, and Rhode Island) provide comprehensive or near-comprehensive coverage for infertility treatment to at least some residents through state law mandates. These mandates require that private insurers cover diagnosis and treatment of infertility, including IVF. Although mandated coverage can result in better overall access, several state mandates carry significant restrictions (for example, Maryland imposes a 2-year waiting period, exempts religious employers, covers only married couples, and requires that the husband’s sperm be used). Mandated coverage is curtailed further by federal law. Under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, state law mandates, including the infertility mandates, cannot regulate or apply to plans that are self-insured, as are the plans of many large employers (41). State-mandated insurance coverage has been shown to increase approximately 3-fold the use of infertility services. This increased use brings the per-capita rate of IVF closer to that in other countries that subsidize IVF, suggesting that the presence of insurance permits the medical community to address fertility needs that remain unmet in other states (42). Broader insurance coverage also is linked to better public health outcomes. A series of studies has shown that in states with mandated insurance coverage, the rate of IVF-related high-order multiple births (≥3 infants) and, in one study, twin births, is significantly lower than in nonmandated states. Observing that fewer embryos are transferred per cycle in the mandated states, researchers believe that insurance coverage reduces the financial pressure to transfer >1 or 2 embryos in anyone (42–46). Indeed, studies suggest that patients choose elective single-embryo transfer more frequently when cost pressure is reduced through insurance coverage or other reduced-price financing (47, 48). With a lower rate of multiple births comes improved maternal and newborn health, both desirable public health goals (49). These data have led some observers to describe the paucity of insurance coverage as creating a situation of moral hazard: ‘‘patients’ immediate financial interests are best met by maximizing their pregnancy chances on each treatment cycle, despite the health risks and long-term costs’’ (50). For patients, the benefits of insurance coverage for infertility are clear: they are able to obtain appropriate, needed medical treatment without incurring sometimes significant financial hardship. For physicians, the benefits include being able to provide care on the basis of the patient’s medical needs rather than on what the patient can afford; facilitating elective single-embryo transfer and similar limits; and sparing physicians from having to turn away patients because of inability to pay, thus serving a social justice goal. As important as they are, insurance mandates are imperfect in achieving equal access to and use of infertility treatments. Most critically, they are able to reach only a portion of the population in the mandated state. As noted above, most mandates apply only to persons who have private insurance, and only to those policies that must comply with the state insurance law. This means that infertility coverage may not be available to people who are uninsured, who obtain health coverage through Medicaid or other government programs, or who obtain health insurance from employers that are either self-insured, too small to be subject to the mandate (e.g., mandates in Illinois, Maryland, and New Jersey apply only to employers over a certain size), or based outside of the mandated state. Studies have shown that even in states with comprehensive infertility mandates, infertility care still is used disproportionately by non-Hispanic white women of high socioeconomic and educational status (51–54). These limitations will be overcome only when fertility treatment is included in all health insurance coverage, whether private or public (e.g., federal employee benefits, retired and active duty military benefits, veterans benefits, Medicaid), just like diseases affecting other major bodily systems. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) strongly supports the inclusion of fertility care in all programs of coverage. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 presented an opportunity to expand coverage for infertility to a much broader swath of the population; unfortunately, there is little indication it will achieve that result. The Affordable Care Act may improve disparities in infertility prevention, as men and women who previously were uninsured have access to sexually transmitted disease screening, treatment, and counseling. In addition, it should prevent infertility from being treated as a pre-existing condition that disqualifies individuals from obtaining future insurance coverage. Alterna tively, the Affordable Care Act did not expand access to infertility treatment except in the states that had infertility mandates before December 2011. In fact, infertility care was not explicitly included in the list of ‘‘Essential Health Benefits’’ that all individual and small-group policies were required to offer. There has been progress, although. In the past, most state insurance laws incorporated a definition of infertility that relied on 6–12 months of unprotected heterosexual inter- course, thus excluding same-sex couples and single individuals from mandated coverage. In 2018, New Jersey remedied this problem in part, amending its law to include women who are single or in same-sex relationships once they prove unable to conceive after a course of intrauterine inseminations. Fertility preservation also has gained ground. Between 2017 and 2019, 7 states (Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, and Rhode Island) passed laws requiring insurers to cover fertility preservation for patients facing gonadotoxic therapy. Apart from state or federal laws, employers may voluntarily choose to include fertility coverage in the benefits they provide to employees. This is, to be sure, a stopgap measure until infertility becomes covered universally, but it often can be achieved far more quickly than a statewide law. Esti- mates of the percentage of employers that provide such a benefit appear mainly in industry surveys. Two recent surveys of human resources departments reported that just over one-quarter of responding employers offered some degree of infertility or IVF coverage, with companies of >500 employees more likely to offer it compared with smaller companies (55, 56). A third survey focused on large employers with ≥20,000 people; the percentage of such employers offering an infertility benefit rose from 29% in 2016 to 44% in 2018 (57). However, the actual content of benefits varies widely, ranging from meaningful coverage to low monetary caps. OTHER DISPARITIES IN ACCESS TO INFERTILITY TREATMENT Economic barriers are not the only impediments to accessing infertility care. Chief among the noneconomic barriers are cultural and societal factors. Researchers who have studied African-American, Hispanic, Muslim, and Asian populations in the United States have noted that communication differences, cultural stigmas (including male and female aversion to being labeled infertile), cultural emphasis on privacy, and unfamiliarity or prior bad experiences with the US medical system can dissuade members of certain racial, ethnic, or religious groups from seeking care for infertility (58–62). Language differences also may discourage non–English- speaking patients from seeking care. Physicians may consciously or unconsciously make assumptions or possess biases about who deserves to be a parent and who wants or deserves treatment (63, 64). Women of color, for example, have reported that some physicians brush off their fertility concerns, assume they can get pregnant easily, emphasize birth control over procreation, and may dissuade them from having children (59). Another obstacle is the burden of pursuing infertility treatment, particularly cycle-based treatments like IVF. In addition to being able to afford treatment, the patient must be able to take substantial time off from work for office visits and be able to travel to medical facilities that may be geographically distant (65–67). Many treatments require repeated visits and the ability to follow complex medical instructions (68). Geographically, the distribution of obstetrician- gynecologists and IVF centers varies widely among states and locales, and there is growing public health awareness that these services are inaccessible in many communities (69–71). As of 2017, 13 US states had ≤5 reproductive endocrinologists in practices accredited by the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) (71). The highest concentrations of IVF centers and male reproductive specialists are found in states with mandated IVF insurance and high median income (72, 73). An estimated 18 million women of reproductive age live in locations with no ART clinics (74). Thus, geographic unavailability may impede many from seeking or obtaining treatment. Patients may be denied access to effective care if the institution at which they seek treatment does not inform them of treatment options, such as IVF, because they conflict with the religious affiliation of the institution. Fair access also is impaired by providers who refuse to treat unpartnered individuals and same-sex couples, a practice that this Committee rejects (75). DISPARITIES IN OUTCOMES OF INFERTILITY TREATMENT As recently summarized, the research on IVF outcomes and race/ethnicity, including 3 studies using data collected from the SART database, suggests that when African-American, Asian, and Hispanic women attain access to ART, they experience lower success rates compared with non-Hispanic white women (58). The findings include evidence of lower implantation and clinical-pregnancy rates as well as increased miscarriage rates among certain minority women. These differences in treatment success are concerning; they are poorly understood and insufficiently studied, with explanations ranging from biologic factors to modifiable behavioral factors (40, 76, 77). Their rectification is critical to achieving reproductive health equity among women and men of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. More research is urgently needed to identify the causes and the remedies for these disparate outcomes. ETHICAL BENEFITS OF IMPROVING ACCESS AND OUTCOMES Reproduction is a fundamental interest and human right, and the access, treatment, and outcome disparities that are associated with infertility care and ART are a form of stratified reproduction that warrants correction (78, 79). Moreover, supporting increased access to reproductive and infertility care, including ART, appropriately recognizes infertility as a disease, in keeping with pronouncements by the WHO, American Medical Association, and worldwide trends. The status of fertility treatment as being available mainly to non-Hispanic whites and the economic elite perpetuates the unfair dismissal of fertility treatment as a lifestyle choice or as a luxury comparable to elective cosmetic surgery. Improved access to ART also serves social justice ends. An Ontario, Canada, governmental panel on reproductive health has articulated these interests this way: “We believe all Ontarians should have opportunities to build a family free from discrimination based on socio-economic status, geography, reproductive health needs, marital status or sexual orientation. The way Ontario’s assisted reproduction system is currently operating is not acceptable. The cost of services means that treatments are out of reach for many people. Social and legal barriers limit access and, in some cases, force people to use less-than-ideal alternatives. We imagine an On- tario where people are given information on fertility and assisted reproduction, those who need assisted reproduction are not limited by what they can afford to pay, and where the services they receive are safe and effective (80).” These interests apply equally in the United States and argue for universal coverage for infertility on par with coverage for other diseases. In December 2014, the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society issued a position statement supporting public funding of IVF in Canada (81). The ASRM has joined the call for greater equity. In its 2020–2025 strategic plan, the ASRM lists as a priority ‘‘Engage with other medical and scientific organizations, payors, employers, and policymakers in advocating for equitable, inclusive, and affordable access to reproductive health and reproductive care’’ (82). To that end, ASRM has established an Access to Care Special Interest Group for members and in September 2015, convened a 2-day summit on improving access to care. This summit resulted in a white paper and a series of articles in the May 2016 issue of Fertility and Sterility which, collectively, present a range of approaches through which the profession can alleviate the exclusion of many from needed fertility care (83). Encouragingly, in a 2017 survey, 78% of SART members favored insurance coverage for anyone who required IVF for infertility treatment (84). Legal scholars have argued that the lack of insurance coverage for infertility in the United States operates to discriminate against significant groups of people and prevents them from obtaining medical assistance to reproduce (79, 85, 86). In contrast, others have argued that expanded insurance coverage is not appropriate. This argument includes several subparts, including a disavowal that infertility is a disease or its treatment a medical necessity; that adoption is a suitable substitute for treatment to have a child (87); that insurance coverage is too expensive or is an unjustified use of limited health care dollars; or that physicians should not be subjected to the difficulties of dealing with insurance companies.

And expanding access to assistive reproductive technology helps cope with falling sperm counts

Pregnantish, no date

(Pregnantish; no date; accessed: 4-29-2026; "The Future Of Fertility: Access, Equity, AI And Innovation –"; https://pregnantish.com/the-future-of-fertility-access-equity-ai-and-innovation/) FJP

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 17.5% of the adult population – roughly 1 in 6 worldwide – experience infertility. We know that statistic is likely greater, as that is just what’s reported. One recent shift here is the rise in male factor infertility and more attention to sperm than in years past. Male factor infertility is a significant and increasing contributor to the global crisis. Research shows a decline in sperm counts around the world. For example, Human Reproduction reported that sperm had decreased by more than 50% from 1973-2011 spanning the globe. Estimates suggest that 15-20% of men worldwide may have low sperm count – defined as fewer than 15 million sperm per milliliter of semen. Research shows a decline in sperm counts around the world. For example, Human Reproduction reported that sperm had decreased by more than 50% from 1973-2011 spanning the globe. Thomas D’Hooghe, Head of Global Medical Affairs, Fertility and Vice President at Merck, shares: “I have spent 25 years in the medical-scientific field, and the landscape of reproductive health has evolved significantly. We are witnessing a trend of advanced reproductive age, and in many regions, the cost of a single treatment cycle with assisted reproductive technology can equate to a year’s salary or the savings of entire families. There remains a pervasive skepticism surrounding assisted reproductive technology globally. To address these challenges, empowering patients to co-lead their fertility treatment is essential for fostering their sense of ownership in their journey toward parenthood. By ensuring that patients are equipped with the right information and support, they can make informed choices that align with their personal circumstances and values. Improving access to treatment is a critical component of this empowerment, as it allows patients from diverse backgrounds to engage in their fertility journeys without financial or systemic barriers. At Merck, one of our strategic pillars is to enhance access to care and influence health policies. With declining fertility rates observed in Europe, America, and Asia, our ‘Fertility Counts’ Initiative stands out as a beacon of hope. We collaborate with health economists to analyze the region’s health economy, reproductive medicine landscape, and social dynamics, aiming to identify successful models/policies enhancing access to infertility care, and advocate for policy changes that empower underserved demographics. This holistic approach not only improves patient outcomes but also helps to create a more inclusive healthcare system that prioritizes the needs of all individuals seeking fertility care.”

Yes, actual people say this is existential

Walsh, Axios correspondent, 21

(Bryan Walsh; Walsh is the Future Correspondent for Axios; 2-23-2021; accessed: 4-29-2026; Axios; "Falling sperm counts could threaten the human race"; https://www.axios.com/2021/02/24/falling-sperm-count-endocrine-disruption) FJP

A new book makes the case that sperm counts have been falling for decades — and a major reason is chemicals in the environment that disrupt the body's hormonal system. Why it matters: The ability to reproduce is fundamental to the viable future of any living thing. If certain chemicals are damaging our fertility over the long term, human beings could end up as an endangered species. What's happening: In 2017, Mt. Sinai Medical School epidemiologist Shanna Swan co-authored a sweeping meta-analysis that came to a startling conclusion: Total sperm count in the Western world had fallen 59% between 1973 and 2011. Together with falling testosterone levels and growing rates of testicular cancer and erectile dysfunction, that translated into a 1% increase per year of adverse reproductive changes for men, according to Swan. Driving the news: Now Swan has written up her conclusions in a new book with a foreboding title: "Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race." "If you look at the curve on sperm count and project it forward — which is always risky — it reaches zero in 2045," says Swan, meaning the median man would have essentially no viable sperm. "That's a little concerning, to say the least." By the numbers: The global fertility rate — the number of births per woman — has fallen from 5.06 in 1964 to 2.4 in 2018. Today, about half the countries in the world — including the U.S. — have fertility rates below the population replacement level of 2.1 births. By 2050, that proportion is projected to rise to two-thirds of nations. Yes, but: There are numerous factors connected to falling fertility rates that appear largely unconnected to sperm counts. The advent of birth control, the global urbanization shift, changing cultural preferences for smaller families, later in age pregnancy and higher child-raising costs all play a part in most human beings in most places actively deciding to have fewer children. Still, there's a gap around the world between the number of children people say they want and the number they actually have, which indicates at least some of the decline in the fertility rate isn't wholly voluntary. In her book, Swan points to increasing miscarriage rates and impaired fecundity even among younger women as additional signs there are biological factors at play along with socioeconomic ones. She notes a rise in boys with clear genital abnormalities, as well as a decline in anogenital distance in infant males and earlier appearance of puberty signs among girls. These outcomes are related to changes in hormones or endocrines — especially androgens, the sex hormones that drive the development of biologically male characteristics. The big picture: Swan and many of her colleagues point the finger at endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment, including phthalates and bisphenol-A, known as "everywhere chemicals" because of their ubiquity in things like plastics, pesticides, cosmetics and even ATM receipts. "Chemicals in our environment and unhealthy lifestyle practices in our modern world are disrupting our hormonal balance, causing various degrees of reproductive havoc," Swan writes. The other side: As Swan herself notes, there are other factors at play impairing male and female fertility beyond environmental chemicals, including smoking tobacco and marijuana and rising levels of obesity. The apparent rise in genital abnormalities could be traced in part back to better reporting, and even changes in sperm counts aren't fully certain because there's little in the way of uniform surveillance, especially outside the Western world. Trade groups — and some scientists — have pushed back against studies that connect endocrine-disrupting chemicals to fertility problems. Our thought bubble: A growing number of scientific institutions have raised the alarm about endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and Swan puts together a strong case that impaired fertility is real and its causes go beyond separate health problems or lifestyle choices. Swan explicitly compares what she sees as a fertility crisis to climate change, another global threat that has been difficult to combat because its causes are also largely invisible and it unfolds over a long time scale. Just as CO2 accumulating in the environment over decades adds momentum to climate change, the damage done to human reproduction may be accumulating, with each new generation starting life with increasingly degraded fertility. She notes that human beings — despite our numbers — arguably already fit three of the five criteria for an endangered species: destruction of our environment, inadequate regulatory mechanisms, and man-made factors that affect our continued existence. The bottom line: "The current state of reproductive affairs can't continue much longer without threatening human survival," Swan writes.

Expanded Child Tax Credit

Other advocates also support a substantial increases to the child tax credit, marriage bonuses, and childcare subsidy reform in the direction of block grants---these proposals span the political spectrum

Hauser, policy director at the Center for Renewing America, 26

(Paige Hauser; Hauser is Policy Director at the Center for Renewing America; 2-12-2026; accessed: 5-1-2026; Center for Renewing America; "Primer: Family Formation and Child-Care Policies"; https://americarenewing.com/issues/primer-family-formation-and-child-care-policies/) FJP

Policy Proposals: A Strengthened Child Tax Credit and Marriage Bonus 1. Strengthened Child Tax Credit The central policy recommendation is to recalibrate the Child Tax Credit (CTC) to directly support families who choose to provide care at home without adversely affecting those who choose other care arrangements. A larger, more generous Child Tax Credit recognizes the inherent value of children and offers direct economic support to families. The Child Tax Credit should be raised to $5,000 per child and be fully refundable, provided one parent works full time. This will substantially increase household income without dictating how that money must be spent. 2. Marriage Bonus Current tax and benefit structures often penalize marriage through loss of benefits or higher marginal tax rates on combined incomes. A $2,500 marriage bonus would reinforce marriage as a valuable social institution that underpins the country and correlates with stability and child well-being. Like the Child Tax Credit, the marriage bonus should be fully refundable as long as one spouse is working full time or is a single-parent working full time. Data indicate that lower and later marriage rates are directly linked to lower birth rates.21 A marriage bonus would also help address the economic pressures that often push at least one parent into the workforce and into seeking alternative child-care arrangements. Combined with the expanded Child Tax Credit, a married couple with three children with at least one parent working full time could claim a $17,500 credit on their annual tax liability, regardless of the children’s ages, as long as the couple remains married. Under existing tax arrangements, their tax credit would amount to only $6,600.22 It’s important to underscore that this family may choose to use these additional resources on child care, but they do not have to. 3. Reform of Child-Care Subsidies into Flexible Monthly Stipends Federal child-care support currently disperses assistance through a patchwork of programs and tax incentives that together spend roughly $30 billion to $32 billion per year,23 yet reach only a fraction of American families. The Child Care and Development Fund, which combines discretionary funding through the Child Care and Development Block Grant with mandatory funding under the Social Security Act’s Child Care Entitlement to States, serves about 1.5 million children per month at an annual federal cost of roughly $12.2 billion.24 Meanwhile, Head Start and Early Head Start serve approximately 700,000 children at a cost of about $12.3 billion annually, primarily through provider-controlled programs.25 The Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) adds roughly $6 billion in annual tax relief,26 but is largely claimed by single-parent or married dual-income households.27 A family formation reform would eliminate most of these disparate programs and credits and consolidate these funds into a single, predictable monthly child-rearing stipend.28 Under this redesign, households with at least one full-time working parent—that is, married families where one parent works full time or single-parent families with full-time employment—would be eligible for a monthly benefit for each child aged zero to five years. At the current federal funding level of $30 billion, a monthly benefit of approximately $109 per child ($1,308 per year) would cover the approximately 23 million U.S. children in this age range,29 delivering broad coverage without increasing federal spending. However, that would yield a relatively small benefit, and those with very high incomes would be eligible, thereby reducing the benefit for the lowest-income families. There are a number of alternative arrangements that would better align with the goal of assisting working families. One scenario would be limiting eligibility to households at or below the median annual income (currently about $81,000), which would cover approximately 11.5 million children ages five and under. At this scale, the program could provide roughly $217 per month per child ($2,604 per year), at the existing $30 billion spending level. Thus, this model would offer meaningful support while targeting families with the greatest financial need. Another alternative would be implementing a $405 monthly ($4,860 per year) child stipend with a phaseout beginning at $80,000 (roughly the median annual household income) up to $100,000, which would provide the full benefit to roughly 11 million children ages five and under and a reduced benefit to an additional 7 million children, bringing total coverage to about 18 million children nationwide. The enhanced stipend with income phaseout would cost approximately $70 billion to $71 billion annually, allowing families across the lower- and middle-income spectrum to receive meaningful support for child-care costs while progressively targeting resources.

Competing proposals from both left and right leaning groups are both confident that existing programs are insufficient for many reasons (especially how much of the credit is refundable)---here’s an example defending a Democrat proposal

Hughes, senior analyst at ITEP, 26

OBBBA’s $200 increase in the CTC is poorly targeted toward supporting working-class families because larger benefits go to families with higher incomes and smaller benefits go to those with lower incomes. The American Family Act would have the opposite result. The largest share of benefits from the OBBBA CTC provision (41 percent) will go to the richest fifth of Americans, declining for each income group until it drops to virtually 0 percent for the poorest fifth of Americans. The impact of the American Family Act would be the opposite, with the largest shares going to low- and middle-income children. While President Trump’s tariff policies are estimated to have raised the price of the typical family’s baby products by $400 in the first half of 2025, OBBBA’s average benefit is $0 for the poorest fifth families with children and $240 for the middle fifth of families with children. Under the American Family Act, the average benefit would be $4,900 for the poorest fifth of families with children and $2,780 for the middle fifth of families with children. Figure 1 Even if this Congress was reluctant to enact the American Family Act because of its cost, it could have easily pursued the far cheaper CTC expansion that was included in a bipartisan bill that passed the House in 2024 and would have provided far more benefits to low- and middle-income families than OBBBA does. The Current Child Tax Credit Leaves Out Most Children in Lower-Income Families The Child Tax Credit currently contains two income restrictions that prevent poorer families from receiving the full credit amount. The credit is partitioned into two amounts, a non-refundable portion and a refundable portion. The non-refundable portion is the amount that families can use to directly offset their tax liability. The refundable portion is the amount that families can receive on top of their tax refund if they have little to no federal individual income tax liability.

Abortion Restrictions

Congress could declare the unborn persons through a statutory interpretation of the 14th amendment and give the Attorney General authority to sue for preventive relief or establish a private cause of action against states that do not prohibit abortion

Jipping, senior legal fellow at Heritage, 22

(Thomas Jipping; Jipping is Senior Legal Fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation; 12-28-2022; accessed: 4-29-2026; Heritage Foundation; "Can the Fourteenth Amendment Be Used to Protect Human Life Before Birth?"; https://www.heritage.org/life/report/can-the-fourteenth-amendment-be-used-protect-human-life-birth) FJP

There exists a sound argument that defining “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment to include human beings before birth is consistent with its original public meaning. There is also a sound argument that, in the absence of a contrary Supreme Court precedent, Congress can legislatively establish that definition for purposes of its power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. The final question, then, is the form and content of Fourteenth Amendment enforcement legislation by which Congress can actually protect persons before birth. The late Professor Ronald Rotunda wrote that Congress can “enact legislation to protect individuals from state action that violates the Equal Protection Clause or the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,”122 including providing for causes of action against states.123 The Supreme Court has upheld this approach under Congress’ similar authority to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment. In Raines v. United States, the Court upheld the provision in the Civil Rights Act of 1957 giving the Attorney General authority to sue for “preventive relief” whenever “any person has engaged in or…is about to engage in any act or practice which would deprive any other person of any right or privilege secured by” the Voting Rights Act. The Court held that the discriminatory conduct charged in that case was “‘state action’…subject to the ban of that Amendment, and that legislation designed to deal with such discrimination is ‘appropriate legislation’ under it.”125

[***Footnote 125 begins***]

Id. at 25. Congress might also explore establishing a private cause of action against states that do not prohibit abortion. It might, for example, provide for third parties to bring an action as a “next friend” of unborn persons. This designation “has long been an accepted basis for jurisdiction in certain circumstances.” Whitmore v. Arkansas, 495 U.S. 149, 162 (1990). It has typically been used in the habeas corpus context “on behalf of detained prisoners who are unable, usually because of mental incompetence or inaccessibility, to seek relief themselves.” Id. See 28 U.S.C. § 2282 (application for a writ of habeas corpus by “the person for whose relief it is intended or by someone acting in his behalf”) (emphasis in original). A third party acting as a “next friend” does not assert his or her own interests but acts solely on behalf of the plaintiff. Id. at 163. In other words, a “next friend” must be “truly dedicated to the best interests of the person on whose behalf he seeks to litigate…and it has been further suggested that a ‘next friend’ must have some significant relationship with the real party in interest.” Id. at 163–64. In the abortion context, the actual litigant would have to establish the unborn person’s standing to challenge the state’s failure to prohibit abortion. Standing requires showing that the plaintiff “has suffered an ‘injury in fact’” that is “actual or imminent, not ‘conjectural’ or ‘hypothetical,’” that is “‘fairly trace[able] to the challenged [state] action’” and “‘likely to be redressed by a favorable decision.’” Id. at 155. One argument might be that a state’s denial of equal protection by failing to prohibit abortion puts the lives of unborn persons at risk.

There’s a courts aff in here too

Craddock, DAAG in OLC, 25

(Joshua J. Craddock; Craddock is Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice. He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy; 5-15-2025; accessed: 4-29-2026; Catholic University Law Review; " Personhood After Personhood After Dobbs"; https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3772&context=lawreview) FJP

All agree that the framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment most immediately intended to protect black Americans against the discriminatory denial of the protection of the laws.14 But the framers deliberately chose the broad phrase “any person” to protect any human being who might be denied due process or equal protection on any ground.15 In the century and a half since the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification, the Supreme Court has recognized numerous classes of human beings as “persons” within the Amendment’s protective ambit, even though those classes were not within the immediate, subjective contemplation of its framers and ratifiers. These include women,16 minor children,17 illegitimate children,18 resident aliens,19 aliens unlawfully present in the United States,20 and Native Americans.21 Unborn children are perhaps the only class of human beings since the Amendment’s ratification whose natural and legal rights the Supreme Court has said that the Fourteenth Amendment failed to equally protect.22 Of course, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment did not expressly state that its protections would extend to unborn children any more than they expressly stated those protections would apply to illegitimate children. In 1868, the law already protected unborn children and recognized them as persons; legislative silence about the Amendment’s application to the unborn persons is thus utterly unsurprising. State laws denying the equal protection of the laws to unborn children were not enacted until nearly a century later.23 The suggestion that such legislative silence excludes unborn children from the meaning of “person” rests on the questionable premise that Congress meant only to achieve specific and immediate ends rather than to create generally applicable rules of decision based on terms with fixed public meanings. Though the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers never considered bastardy, for example, the Supreme Court had no trouble determining in Levy v. Louisiana24 that the Equal Protection Clause applied to illegitimate children simply because they are “not ‘non-persons’”—after all, “they are humans, live, and have their being.”25 It would be counterintuitive to interpret congressional silence about illegitimate children as evidence that such children were meant to be excluded from the Amendment’s protective ambit. Originalist interpreters today understand that what a text requires may be different from what the lawmaker foresees—though given the tenor of the times there can be little doubt that the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment would have welcomed an interpretation securing equal protection to unborn children had they foreseen it. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently explained, originalists must distinguish “between original meaning (which controls) and expectations about how the text would apply (which do not).”26 “Contemporary government actors might have been ‘wrong about the consequences of their own constitutional rule,’ or they ‘might not have fully and faithfully implemented the adopted constitutional rule themselves.’”27 Accordingly, if unborn human beings were included within the original public meaning of “person” in 1868, then the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of due process and equal protection to “any person” must extend to unborn human beings. Section 1 of the Amendment provides that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”28 The original meaning of this Equal Protection Clause was to secure (equal) protection of the fundamental rights of persons29—including the rights to life and personal security, as these had been expounded in William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England and leading American treatises.30 The prevailing originalist view is that a state violates the Equal Protection Clause when it selectively withdraws remedies in tort for injuries or denies the protection of criminal law.31 At a bare minimum, when a state protects some persons in their rights to life and personal security, then it is constitutionally required to protect all persons—including the unborn. A state may not purposefully deny protection to a class of persons for invidious purposes.32 After Dobbs, however, unsettled questions remain about the constitutional status of unborn children. With good reason, Dobbs did not address whether unborn children are persons within the original meaning of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. This Article attempts to provide a roadmap to answer some of those questions.

“If there’s even a 5% chance that we’re right, you vote Aff to save 51,000 lives every year”---yeah, yeah, like it or not, try-or-die framing means that this is an interesting ethical debate (and plus anyone brave enough to run this would be having fun)

Jones et. al., 26

(Isaac Maddow-Zimet, Rachel K. Jones and Emma Stoskopf-Ehrlich; The Guttmacher Institute is a leading research and policy organization committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) worldwide.; March 2026: 4-29-2026; Guttmacher Institute; "Abortion in the United States"; https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-united-states) FJP

An estimated 1,126,000 abortions were provided by US clinicians in 2025, largely unchanged from 2024, when there were 1,124,000 clinician-provided abortions, and an increase of 21% from 2020, the last year of comprehensive national estimates before Dobbs.1 This count includes medication abortions provided via telemedicine by US clinicians, including those provided under the protection of shield laws to patients in states with total bans. It does not include self-managed abortions, such as those using medications mailed from pharmacies outside the United States or sourced from community networks. Evidence suggests self-managed abortions have increased since Dobbs.2

And if you think the K teams will have a field day hitting this aff, you might be right, but don’t count the aff out yet

Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, actual people I swear, no date

(Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising; no date; accessed: 4-30-2026; Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising; "Stances: Abortion — Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising"; https://paaunow.org/stances-abortion) FJP

[IV] We may not discriminate against people for currently being fetuses. [7] Using developmental dependency to dehumanize the preborn in order to justify denial and violation of their human rights is ageist and ableist. The female body would not actively try to make pregnancy happen if it were parasitic. Not only is it dehumanizing to call preborn humans ‘parasites’, but it is also misogynistic pathologization of the female body. A pregnant person’s body takes care of the prenate, and this care is ordinary and instinctual. Bodily sustenance is a reasonable accommodation for preborn people, as it is normal and healthy for their age to be bodily dependent. It’s unethical to discriminate against the preborn for their age-appropriate bodies, abilities, and needs. The belief that the inabilities of a person should entitle us to exterminate them at whim is ableist. [8] Justifying a person’s murder by aspects of their extrinsic identity or temporal circumstances that are beyond their control is oppressive and eugenicist. If you force a person to become reliant upon your body as a foreseeable outcome of your consensually chosen action, and that person is powerless to change their temporary circumstance, then you have an ethical duty to not kill them in order to end their unwilling dependency on you. It’s not progressive to support the systematic exploitation of tiny people with less power than you and to uphold the status quo of systemic oppression against the most vulnerable members of the human family. Abortion enables a society where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live. [V] Abortion is unjustified violence against preborn people. [9] Bodily autonomy does not justify excessive force over a powerless person, so abortion, a disproportionately brutal response to a passive human presence, is abusive violence. The creation of a bodily dependent is a foreseeable risk of consensual coital intercourse. Pregnancy isn't a transactional relationship; it is a fiduciary relationship, a type of aconsensual relationship, meaning that consent is not applicable to it because it is obligatory. Every born person alive today is the beneficiary of a pregnancy, and in reproductive symmetry we are obliged to provide the same benefit to the next generation. Prenates never directly cause pregnant people harm, so they are not aggressors. Instead, we become aggressors when we directly harm preborn babies entrusted to us, betraying them. [10] No one has the right to murder a vulnerable person who is captive and utterly at your mercy, and you may not choose to violently “sacrifice” a helpless dependent in your care. You may not violently “sacrifice” a helpless person to mitigate an outcome of your freely chosen action. Abortion is not like refusing aid to a dying person, it is slaughtering a healthy captive child in exchange for our freedom. We effectively sell the bodies of children as commodities to the abortion industry in trade for freedom from familial bond. You have no right to make your child a “martyr” for your lifestyle, present circumstance, or future trajectory. If you are not willing to pay the ultimate price for your own liberation, you may not force your child to purchase it for you with her life. Forced “martyrdom” is simply murder.

If you’re brave, this might even be the start of a K-Aff, but we’ll give you some other options too:

K-Aff: Paid Domestic Labor

Debaters could argue that domestic labor is something that should be compensated by the federal government in order to reorder the way that labor and wealth is valued and distributed.

If parenting were counted in GDP calculations, it would be minimum 9% of GDP.

Gender.Study, 25

(Gender.Study, 9-19-2025, "Valuing Domestic Work: A Call for Economic Recognition of Household Labor » Gender Studies", Gender Studies, https://gender.study/work-and-enterpreneurship/valuing-domestic-work-economic-recognition/) IMH

Economists measure economic activity using GDP – Gross Domestic Product – which tracks the monetary value of goods and services exchanged in formal markets. The problem is that domestic work happens outside formal markets. A mother who spends hours preparing nutritious meals, managing a household budget, and providing round-the-clock childcare contributes enormously to her family’s wellbeing and to society’s productive capacity. But none of that shows up in GDP.

When the same tasks are performed by paid professionals – chefs, childcare workers, housekeepers, home health aides – they are counted as economic output. The work itself is identical. The only difference is whether money changes hands. This discrepancy reveals a fundamental flaw in how we define and measure economic value.

The numbers, when researchers do attempt to calculate them, are staggering. According to UN Women, if women’s unpaid work were assigned a monetary value, it would exceed 40 percent of GDP in some countries – surpassing entire sectors like manufacturing or transportation. The International Labour Organization estimates that more than 16 billion hours are devoted to unpaid domestic and care work every single day around the world. Valued at a minimum wage rate, that translates to roughly 9 percent of global GDP, or approximately $11 trillion annually. Research from the St. Louis Federal Reserve found that in the United States alone, the dollar value of women’s unpaid work was equivalent to 86 percent of New York State’s entire economic output in 2018 – and in some years actually exceeded it.

Other K Affs

The authorial team for this paper isn’t wildly experienced with kritiks, but we’re confident that, if nothing else, there is plenty of ground for teams to negate the resolution.

What are we arguing on the Neg?

Degrowth DA

Debaters can defend population decline as a positive change, arguing that the earth is nearing physical limitations and that a shrinking population is better than one that rapidly collapses during crisis.

Rees ’23 [William; 2023; Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia and former director of the School of Community and Regional Planning the UBC, Ph.D. in population ecology from the University of Toronto; The Journal of Population and Sustainability, “Overshoot: Cognitive Obsolescence And The Population Conundrum,” vol. 7]

Overshoot: It’s the population, stupid! The foregoing analysis underscores why H. sapiens’ innate myopia and naïve enthusiasm for technical fixes will not resolve our eco-predicament. Neither climate change nor any other major symptom of overshoot can be solved in isolation from the others, particularly not by reference to the same beliefs, values, assumptions, narratives and behaviours that caused the problems in the first place. Overshoot is a complex systems problem; only by taking a systematic frontal approach can we hope to reduce or eliminate all co-symptoms simultaneously. The proximate driver of overshoot is excess economic throughput, i.e., excess energy and material consumption and pollution. Both rising incomes and growing populations are contributing factors – high-income consumer societies account for 74 per cent of the problem historically (see Hickel et al., 2022a) – but population growth in all income quartiles is currently the greater contributor at the margin (grotesque inequality is a separate socio-political issue) (Rees, 2022b). Certainly population growth has been seen as ‘a leading cause of increased greenhouse gas emissions and accelerating global climate change’ (Cafaro, 2022; also Laublichler, 2022). It follows that the best results from efforts to resolve the human eco-predicament will come from addressing overconsumption and overpopulation directly. The Global Footprint Network shows that the world is in overshoot by ~75 percent (GFN, 2022b). This implies that global energy and material throughput must be reduced by disheartening 43 per cent for sustainability, much more in high-income countries.9 These data, while alarming, are almost certainly conservative. For several practical and theoretical reasons ecological footprint assessments characteristically underestimate the human demand for biocapacity (Rees, 2022b). Obviously, wasteful over-consumption by the wealthy and egregious inequality must be addressed but the world cannot afford to ignore the population component. The human family passed the eight billion mark in November 2022 and is still expanding. While the United Nations suggests that the growth rate has fallen below one per cent (80 million per year), other authorities argue that UN demographers understate population growth for political reasons and that the annual increment is closer to 90 million (O’Sullivan, 2022a). Whatever the growth rate, overshoot makes clear that Earth is already significantly overpopulated. While estimates of the sustainable population vary from a paltry ~50 million to a truly ludicrous one trillion, there is some gravitation toward the view that Earth might support ~two billion people indefinitely at a satisfactory material standard of living (e.g., Cafaro, 2021; Rees, 2022b). This implies a reduction of at least 75 percent in human numbers.10 It is difficult to imagine a politically more daunting challenge. No secular wealthy society or country anywhere, has ever voluntarily permanently renounced its hard-won material wellbeing for the future greater good of humanity at large. Humans are temporal, social and spatial discounters by nature – we would rather risk uncertain future catastrophe that (we hope) will mostly affect total strangers and distant places than accept material sacrifice that would certainly affect our families and home communities today. (Discounting is a prime example of a once-adaptive human trait that may well be obsolete in the modern world.) And of course, the three billion people who still struggle at $5.50 per day to meet basic needs can hardly be expected to douse their flames of hope for a materially brighter future. Managing populations is equally intractable. In many countries, calling for population planning would constitute political suicide. Even the United Nations Population Fund recently ‘decried any expressed concern about population growth as “alarmist”’ (O’Sullivan 2022b); strong advocates of population reduction strategies policies risk being vilified as racist, eco-fascists, eugenicists, anti-human or worse. Such attitudes and accusations are yet another manifestation of innate reductionist simplicity exacerbated by socially-constructed ideological blinders. Bajaj (2022) argues that the UN’s taunt of population alarmism springs from widespread pro-natalist ideology ‘which results in unrelenting pressures – a globally pervasive form of reproductive coercion – experienced primarily by women’. She further emphasises that that ‘pronatalism is integral to our current growth-based economic system, which relies on constant population growth to supply new consumers continually’. Indeed, corporations in the US [and other countries experiencing ‘peak population’] are sensationalising the idea of an economic ‘baby bust’ that threatens the nation with a paucity of workers, a reduced tax base and the loss of international economic clout. Many governments are responding with incentives to increase national fecundity. Regrettably, rhetoric on the ‘need for more workers, consumers, and taxpayers goes beyond just pushing women to have children and supports recent successful moves to ban contraception and abortions’ (Dillard, 2022). It is also ecologically destructive. Bajaj and Stade (2022) posit that addressing overpopulation, and the pronatalism that drives it, must be central to international conservation and development efforts to elevate reproductive rights while also promoting planetary health. Similarly, Shragg (2022; also 2015) argues that taming human population growth is not only decidedly pro-human but also pro-nature in that it slows human-induced ecocide. Bottom line? Pronatalism and similar socially-constructed single-focus beliefs are tragic from the perspective of controlling overshoot. Population stabilisation and decline in rich countries should actually be cause for celebration – each high-income consumer imposes ecological pressure on Earth equivalent to that of ten to twenty people living near-subsistence lifestyles. The greatest ecological leverage would come from absolute population reductions in high-income countries. But that does not mean low-income countries with higher birth-rates get a pass. Human exceptionalism notwithstanding, there is a greater systemic dynamic in play here. Many non-human species experience population outbreaks or ‘booms’ during favourable resource-rich periods. Booms are invariably followed by ‘busts’ as various forms of negative feedback – e.g., resource depletion, competition for habitat, predation, disease – re-assert themselves. There is no reason to believe that human population dynamics differ significantly from those of other species. Most importantly, populations of H. sapiens have the same potential to grow exponentially when relieved of natural negative feedback controls (e.g., disease, food/resource shortages, etc.). In fact, because resources have been plentiful for the past 200 years, and population planning has not been an acceptable policy focus, human numbers are now arguably in the boom phase and, nearing the peak of, a (likely one-off) population boom-bust cycle (Rees, 2020b). As previously noted, H. sapiens has increased eight-fold to eight billion since 1810, in just one 1250th as much time as it took our species to reach its first billion. The dramatic economic and population growth that the past few generations take to be the norm actually define the single most anomalous period in human history. The recent boom was made possible by the scientific revolution – e.g., improved population health – and technologies based on abundant cheap energy, primarily fossil fuels (FFs). The latter: a) provided access to all the other resources necessary to grow the human enterprise and thus; b) temporarily relieved humanity of many forms of pre-industrial negative feedback. This explains the population component of human eco-overshoot. It is also exposes the closing jaws of an unprecedented technological trap. Modern civilisation depends utterly on abundant cheap energy. Consider the fate of the bloated human enterprise, in the absence of a ‘Plan B’, if we are forced to abandon FFs to avoid catastrophic climate change or if FFs become economically depleted – as is inevitable. Without climate-friendly quantitative substitutes for FF, it will not be possible to maintain anything like the present human population at acceptable material standards or to maintain the scale of the human economy. With failing energy supplies, humanity faces the prospect of broken supply lines, food and other resource shortages, local famines, reduced production, declining incomes, rising inequality, widespread unemployment, civil unrest, abandoned cities,11 mass migrations, collapsed economies and possible geopolitical chaos. On the other hand, if the world maintains its fossil-fuelled trajectory in blind allegiance to the growth paradigm and the illusion that ‘technology-will-save-the-day (MTI society’s apparent default position [Figure1]), we risk more and longer heat waves/droughts, accelerated desertification, melting permafrost, methane releases, water shortages, failing agriculture, famines, rising sea levels, the flooding (and eventual loss) of many coastal cities, uninhabitable regions, mass migrations, collapsed economies and possible geopolitical chaos. And we’d still run out of energy. Are not all these things not already emerging in nascent form? In short, pursuit of either narrowly-conceived pathway suggested by our obsolete instincts and MTI sensibilities exposes humanity to the likelihood of a major, potentially catastrophic, population correction (the inevitable bust phase of our one-off global cycle) later in this century (Rees, 2020b).

Politics DA

The links here are complicated and debaters would need to work through coalition dynamics of parents, religious convictions, fiscal hawks, and more to determine how these substantial policies would matter. For example, popular policies would be large enough to warrant rider DAs, Trump PC, or even swing the midterms:

Miller 25

(Claire Cain Miller; ; 3-24-2025; accessed: 5-1-2026; No Publication; "In a Shift, More Republicans Want Government Investment in Children (Published 2025)"; https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/upshot/in-a-shift-more-republicans-want-government-investment-in-children.html) IDH

In a variety of surveys in recent years, majorities of both Democrats and Republicans show support for family policies like paid leave, affordable child care and tax credits for parents. Large majorities are in agreement that the government should do more to regulate social media use for young people. And Americans think that K-12 education needs to be fixed. The latest evidence is a poll of 1,300 parents released Monday by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit. In it, 73 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of independents and 55 percent of Republicans said the federal government spends too little on programs that benefit children.

But at the same time, things like Assisted Reproductive Technology burns MAGA pro-life voters

Trenton Monitor, 25

(Trenton Monitor; 2-20-2025; accessed: 4-30-2026; TrentonMonitor; "IVF order likely to fuel destruction of human embryos, not birth rates, say leaders, experts"; https://trentonmonitor.com/2025/02/20/ivf-order-likely-to-fuel-destruction-of-human-embryos-not-birth-rates-say-leaders-experts/) FJP

Two other factors complicate projections; Brown said an insurance mandate could mean “very large increases” in premiums, while increased IVF availability could also translate to increased demand — “making $55 billion over 10 years a very, very conservative estimate.” “Whether it’s paid for by insurance premiums or by public money,” Stone noted, “there’s a transfer involved here. Older, less fertile, and LGBT couples are receiving a benefit — a benefit they’re likely to use — and younger people with natural fertility are paying for it,” he emphasized. A host of coverage questions also arise, noted Timothy P. Carney, senior fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute: At what age and for how long? Is IVF only for married couples? Would surrogacy — where another woman is impregnated with IVF-conceived embryos and carries the child (or children) to term for the intended parents — be included? “All of those questions are wide open — and it’s not easy to draw lines. Would it be discrimination if you said, ‘No, we only cover married couples,’ or what about not-married couples? What about cohabitating couples?” he asked. “Can you imagine that Congress or Health and Human Services has the bandwidth — the wisdom, the prudence — to make these finer distinctions?” While Carney’s rhetorical question seems to answer itself, he predicted thorny deliberations. “All of those things are totally unexplored — and it would be a really difficult debate. It would raise all sorts of issues,” Carney concluded. Conscience issues must also be considered if the Trump administration ever moves to some type of IVF mandate. “Such a mandate would be immoral,” Father Pacholczyk observed — echoing arguments heard in 2011 when the Obama administration attempted to compel the Little Sisters of the Poor to include abortifacient coverage in their employee health coverage — “since insurers and employers would presumably be forced, and therefore complicit in, financially subsidizing in vitro fertilization procedures for their employees.” It would, Father Pacholczyk added, “constitute an intrusion into the religious works and governance of the church and represent a federally mandated violation of her members’ consciences.” Ultimately, Trump’s embrace of IVF complicates his relationship even further with the American pro-life voting bloc, and particularly with Catholics. “The reality is,” Stone said, “it’s a thing many Catholics and other people who believe life begins at conception may have problems with — that is also unlikely to do anything demographically.”

Econ/Debt DA

You didn’t think that this would be free did you? These policies come with price tags that range from the tens of billions to even trillions

McCloskey, economist, 22

Not only are the benefits of universal programs questionable, they come at a steep cost. Democrats have proposed to pay for universal preschool (estimated to cost the federal government $109 billion over six years), four weeks of paid family and medical leave for all workers per year (estimated to cost $205 billion), and child-care offsets for nearly all families (estimated to cost close to $1 trillion once budget gimmicks are omitted) with higher taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals. Yet over the long term, according to the Congressional Budget Office, as much as a quarter of the corporate-tax incidence is borne by workers. It's hard to imagine many single-parent workers being thrilled about offsetting the cost of universal preschool for married millionaires' children. And while a higher tax on the wealthiest Americans could help pay for such priorities, these individuals are not an endless source of tax revenue. At some point, their taxes will need to be put toward our debt obligations, which are already the size of our entire economy. It's dishonest to continue the charade that workers can receive further benefits with no reduction in their take-home pay, or that increasingly generous programs will not add to the historic debt accumulating at their expense.

And IVF isn’t any cheaper

Brown, 25

(Trenton Monitor quoting Brown a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center; 2-20-2025; accessed: 4-30-2026; TrentonMonitor; "IVF order likely to fuel destruction of human embryos, not birth rates, say leaders, experts"; https://trentonmonitor.com/2025/02/20/ivf-order-likely-to-fuel-destruction-of-human-embryos-not-birth-rates-say-leaders-experts/) FJP

Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, has crunched the numbers. “According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the cost per successful IVF outcome ranges somewhere around $61,000, and over 90,000 babies were born via IVF in 2022 (2.5% of all births nationwide),” Brown shared. “If we just take those numbers and assume a second Trump term would cover them with taxpayer money, that would be somewhere around $55 billion over 10 years.” Two other factors complicate projections; Brown said an insurance mandate could mean “very large increases” in premiums, while increased IVF availability could also translate to increased demand — “making $55 billion over 10 years a very, very conservative estimate.”

Overpopulation DA

Debaters also have the option of arguing that the effect of successful fertility rebound is enough to push the system beyond its current capacity by increasing the youth dependency rate

Bloom et. al., 24

(David Bloom, Michael Kuhn, Klaus Prettner; Bloom is the Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography at Harvard University, Kuhn is the Program Director of the newly (2021) established IIASA Economic Frontiers (EF) Program, and Prettner is a Professor of Economics (especially Macroeconomics and Digitalization) at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU); 8-12-2024; accessed: 5-1-2026; ; "Confronting low fertility rates and population decline"; https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/confronting-low-fertility-rates-and-population-decline) FJP

Low and declining fertility also translates into short- and medium-term declines in youth dependency rates, which can further charge the economic growth process by naturally boosting rates of labour force participation, savings, and capital accumulation. This boost, which is known as a demographic dividend (Bloom et al. 2003), contributed up to 2–3 percentage points to the growth rates of income per capita in many countries following the end of the baby boom that occurred in the aftermath of WWII. As such, the trend of falling fertility in high-income countries from the 1950s to the present day has promoted – not impeded – economic activity and improved standards of living.

Immigration CP

Neg teams can argue that population decline can be solved by immigration

Peri, economist, 20

(Giovanni Peri; Peri is the C. Bryan Cameron Distinguished Professor in International Economics at the University of California, Davis and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the Founder and the Director of the UC Davis Global Migration Center an interdisciplinary research center focusing on international migrations and migration policies.; 2-29-2020; accessed: 5-1-2026; IMF; "Can Immigration Solve the Demographic Dilemma? – IMF F&D"; https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2020/03/can-immigration-solve-the-demographic-dilemma-peri) FJP

Yet the discussion over immigration often pays insufficient attention to the Achilles’ heel of the global North: its demographics. Fertility in these countries currently stands at 1.7 and fell below replacement—that is, the level at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next—around 1980. Consequently, the difference in births and deaths would produce population declines and substantial increases in average ages in the North, both of which could disrupt labor markets, threaten the fiscal sustainability of pension systems, and slow down economic growth, unless total net immigration offsets such declines. The persistent historical trends mentioned have inescapable consequences in terms of population. Between 1950 and 2010, the populations of the rich regions of the North increased through net immigration, and since 1990 immigration has been the North’s primary source of population growth. In Europe, immigration accounted for 80 percent of the population growth between 2000 and 2018, while in North America, it constituted 32 percent in that same period. The bottom line is that only net immigration can ensure population stability or growth in the aging advanced economies of the North—and this will happen only if we promote forward-looking immigration policies that allow larger numbers of immigrants and consider their long-run impact, rather than focusing only on the short-term calculations of their (mostly political) costs.

The aff does actually have answers to this

Fernández-Villaverde, 26

(Jesús Fernández-Villaverde; Nonresident Senior Fellow at AEI (and lots more qualifications, goodness gracious); 4-7-2026; accessed: 4-30-2026; American Enterprise Institute - AEI; "Rapid Fertility Decline Is an Existential Crisis"; https://www.aei.org/op-eds/rapid-fertility-decline-is-an-existential-crisis/) FJP

The US has a welfare state. This means that those individuals who are below 60th percentile or so of the income distribution are net receivers of funds from the government during their lifetime (i.e., the net present value of what they contribute less than what they receive later in life, like Social Security and Medicare), those between the 60th and 90th percentile are approximately net zero contributors, and only at the top 10th percentiles are net contributors. In other words, all immigrants that come to the US are below the 90th percentile and won’t help solve the fiscal woes created by low fertility. European countries that have the detailed databases required to compute these numbers carefully have found that not even the second-generation (i.e., the sons of immigrants born in the country) is a net contributor to the welfare state.

We need to assess immigration policy based on various factors in addition to its fiscal implications. My argument is more modest: “If you think that raising the number of low- and middle-skill immigrants will solve the long-term fiscal issues facing the US, you are mistaken.”

States CP

States can do a lot of these policies to at least some degree---creating tax credits, subsidizing daycares, and, infamously, abortion restrictions.

Here’s an example of some childcare policies that were going last year

(Diane Girouard and Rachel Wessler; Policy Analysts, Ccaoa; 3-7-2025; accessed: 5-1-2026; ChildCare Aware of America; "What we’re watching in 2025 state legislative sessions"; https://info.childcareaware.org/blog/what-were-watching-in-state-sessions-which-states-will-step-up-for-child-care-in-2025) FJP

State policymakers play a pivotal role in driving forward child care policies aimed at improving accessibility, affordability, and quality. The 2025 legislative session marks a crucial moment for states to make further investments in child care funding and policies. This blog post offers a first look at what’s ahead for state policymakers in 2025: pathways for investment, potential challenges, and which governors are already prioritizing child care and early learning policies in their early proposals—and calling on their fellow legislators to follow suit.  Opportunities for change  In odd-numbered years all states have a legislative session, and 48 states are starting with a clean slate of bills (just New Jersey and Virginia may consider carry-over bills introduced in the prior year). Additionally, 47 states and the District of Columbia are required to pass new budgets: 31 states will approve an annual budget, and 16 states will pass a biennial budget. Last year, Kentucky, Virginia, and Wyoming enacted a biennial budget for both fiscal year 2025 and 2026 but may still propose revisions to their current budgets. With every state in session, and nearly all states introducing new bills and undergoing the budget process, policymakers in every state have an opportunity to advance proposals that improve the child care system. There’s also some good news about state general fund revenue forecasts. The National Association of State Budget Officers’ (NASBO) 2024 Fiscal Survey of States finds that forecasts for enacted budgets in 2025 will see a 1.9% increase in general fund revenue, which is about 38% higher than their actual level before the pandemic in FY 2019.  With new state sessions come new legislators, presenting a window for state advocates to build relationships and establish new child care champions. In 2024, 1,453 new legislators were elected to state legislative chambers, making up 19.1% of total state legislators. Changes in policymakers, party distributions, and leadership roles create new dynamics that will ultimately shape the direction of what gets passed (and what doesn’t).   With recent changes to federal Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) regulations, states also have action steps they must take to make child care more affordable and accessible. There are several states already implementing some of these policies required under the new federal rule, but other states will need to make progress this year. Given that every state is in session in 2025, and 16 will pass their biennial budgets this year, there is a heightened opportunity in 2025 for states to address legislative changes and funding to implement these improvements ahead of the 2026 deadline.  Potential challenges  While there are ways for states to address child care this year, there are also potential roadblocks that may impede state progress. This is the first legislative session that states will enter without the availability of federal relief funding for child care. NASBO finds that state general fund spending in FY 25 is projected to decrease by 0.3% over FY 2024 levels. This projected decrease follows an increase of 11.8% in state spending FY 2024, which was largely due to one-time expenditures of federal relief funds. The pandemic revealed the capacity of states to improve early learning policies with federal relief funding, and while many have chosen to continue these efforts beyond the expiration of these funds with state investments, others have not. It remains uncertain if there is a path to secure additional federal funding for child care, meaning states will need to step up their investments. Governors make the first move  Governors present their priorities for the new legislative session in their opening address to the legislature (often referred to as the State of the State) and in their proposed Executive Budgets. While not an exhaustive list, these governors are prioritizing child care policies and investments in their opening addresses or in their recommended budget proposals:   Arizona: Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) proposes including $7 million in state funding to support Bright Futures AZ, a legislative package that would establish a public-private cost-sharing program and a child care tax credit for employers. It would also use funds to create a website for parents to find child care, offer tuition assistance for individuals wanting to become an early childhood educator, and allow providers to receive funding for their own children to attend a child care program.  Connecticut: Gov. Ned Lamont (D) proposes $300 million in surplus budget funds to establish a Universal Preschool Endowment, which would make preschool available at no cost for families earning up to $100,000 per year, and a maximum of $20 per day for families earning between $100,000 and $150,000 per year. It is estimated to create 20,000 new or extended day preschool spaces by 2032. Georgia: Gov. Brian Kemp (R) proposes an additional $14 million to reduce preschool class sizes, nearly $4 million to support an additional 500 subsidy slots, and an additional $1.5 million to raise reimbursement rates to the 60th percentile. 

Cap K

Debaters can argue that aff mechanisms are a move to coercive pronatalism with the intent of fueling the machine of industrial capitalism

Bajaj and Stade, 23

(Nandita Bajaj and Kirsten Stade; Bajaj is at Population Balance and Antioch University and Stade is at Population Balance; 2023; accessed: 5-1-2026; Journal of Population and Sustainability; "View of Challenging Pronatalism Is Key to Advancing Reproductive Rights and a Sustainable Population"; https://www.whp-journals.co.uk/JPS/article/view/819/527) FJP

Scientists are in general agreement that human population growth, as well as unsustainable production and consumption, are the main drivers of current levels of unprecedented and likely irreversible environmental destruction. Yet, notwithstanding widespread evidence of ecological overshoot, encompassing urgent concerns such as climate change, the biodiversity crisis, the depletion of soils and material resources, desertification and growing scarcities of fresh water (Rees, 2020; Bradshaw et al., 2021; Crist et al., 2022; IPCC, 2022), there is a tendency in both popular and academic circles to ignore, minimise and dismiss population as a factor in conservation (Bajaj, 2022). Although this tendency is rooted in concern over the history of population stabilisation efforts, which included coercive measures that violated women’s reproductive autonomy, it ignores the prevalence of efforts to advance reproductive freedom through voluntary family planning and contraception in the history of international population activities, as well as the overwhelming benefits of these efforts to women and the environment. It also ignores the extent to which coercive pronatalism – which comprises the social and institutional pressures to bear children – has been a far more pervasive and equally destructive force in women’s lives. In this paper, we begin by establishing the link between human population and environmental destruction, then outline the history of international interest and action toward addressing this link. We review how, since the latter half of the last century, a period of international investment in family planning intended to lower birth rates and stabilise population growth has transitioned to an era in which such efforts have been largely abandoned. Furthermore, we show how disparate forces converged at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, Egypt to cement the shift from a direct focus on family planning to a focus on the rights of women to choose the size of their families (Kopnina and Washington, 2016; Sinding, 2016; Kuhlemann, 2019; Coole, 2021). We discuss how the shift embodied in the Cairo Consensus fails to acknowledge that reproductive choice is strongly shaped by social and institutional pressures. We argue that these pronatalist pressures, driven by patriarchal, social, cultural, political, economic, religious and nationalistic agendas, constitute a form of reproductive coercion that is more widespread and impactful than the coercive population stabilisation efforts of the past and present that have played in the silencing of population discourse. We conclude by arguing that acknowledging and dismantling the many forms of pronatalism, which directly drive population growth, is key to both addressing the environmental crisis and elevating reproductive rights and self-determination. Population and environmental destruction Runaway human population growth and unconstrained consumption have led us to a state of ecological overshoot in which we are straining Earth’s ecosystems far beyond their capacity to regenerate (Rees, 2020; GFN, 2022). The climate crisis and biodiversity collapse are threatening the continuation of life on Earth, causing catastrophic upheaval to human communities and driving many already imperilled species ever closer to the brink of extinction (Crist et al., 2017; Bradshaw et al., 2021). Agriculture alone, and its rapid expansion to meet the needs of our growing population, has been identified as the primary threat to 86 per cent of the species at risk of extinction. This is no surprise, given that deforestation and habitat destruction have converted roughly 40% of the planet’s ice-free land area to crop production and livestock grazing (Crist et al., 2017). The magnitude of the biodiversity crisis can perhaps best be conveyed with the fact that, since the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago, and compounded by the Industrial Revolution and the explosion of human population growth over the past 200 years, the biomass of terrestrial vegetation has diminished by half and that of wild animals by 83 per cent. Of the total biomass of terrestrial vertebrates, 59 per cent is represented by livestock, 36 per cent by human beings, and about five per cent by wild mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians (Bar-On et al., 2018; Bradshaw et al., 2021). Much of this destruction is of course attributable to the consumption habits of wealthy, western populations – consumers of meat, animal products and processed foods in the developed world. But with the human population projected to increase to ten billion by the 2080s, and half of that number among the middle class by 2030, demand for these agricultural products will inevitably grow (Crist et al., 2017). Indeed, as the demographic transition occurs when human populations achieve lower fertility rates, generally after they have reached higher levels of development and thus environmental impact, it is clear that the role of population growth in multiplying the effects of consumption cannot be dismissed (Samways, 2022). Even with respect to climate change, where the vast majority of emissions come from populations in wealthy, low fertility countries, the foremost scientific body concerned with developing solutions to climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), recognises population growth as a substantial driver (IPCC, 2022). In fact, although economic growth has been the most significant driver of the global growth in carbon emissions since 1990, Chaurasia (2020) has shown that population growth accounted for around a third of the increase in emissions, and that improvements in energy efficiency and the transition to renewable energy technologies can only offset part of the emissions increases and other negative environmental effects of growth in population and per capita wealth. In addition, even outside the developed world, the impacts on biodiversity of subsistence agriculture (Kopnina and Washington, 2016), and the bushmeat trade (Ripple et al., 2016), which are growing along with population in the developing world, are undeniably significant. Taken together, the enormity of these challenges represents not just an existential threat to planetary ecosystems and other species but also extraordinary suffering for our own species. The loss and compromise of ecosystems the world over, changed weather patterns, sea level rise, increasing war and conflict, emerging infectious diseases, toxic waste and pollution and food and water shortages are already taking an enormous toll on human communities, especially those who are already the most impoverished (Crist et al., 2022).

Eugenics DA/K

There are a lot of people who don’t like policies intended to increase birth rates---Teams can argue that pro-birth policies are either ethnonationalist or reductive (though debate is already pretty deep in the EA headspace lol)

Munn, research fellow, 24

(Luke Munn; Research Fellow, Digital Cultures & Societies, The University of Queensland; 5-28-2024; accessed: 5-1-2026; Conversation; "Pronatalism is the latest Silicon Valley trend. What is it – and why is it disturbing?"; https://theconversation.com/pronatalism-is-the-latest-silicon-valley-trend-what-is-it-and-why-is-it-disturbing-231059) FJP

Pronatalism, ethnicity and engineering This brings us to a second and more disturbing definition of pronatalism: “a political, ideological, or religious project to encourage childbearing by some or all members of a civil, ethnic, or national group”. In short, the problem for pronatalism is not declining reproduction, but who is reproducing. Pronatalism is inextricably tied to nationalism alongside race, class and ethnicity. In Britain, for instance, the media have doggedly begged or threatened women into having more children for the sake of the nation: “close your eyes and think of England.” Such a framing can quickly become xenophobic. Births “inside” the nation are inevitably contrasted with immigration from the “outside”. This is fertile ground for theories such as the “great replacement” to take root. Immigration is a “misnomer”, writes one popular proponent of the theory, “it is more akin to an invasion, a migratory tsunami, a submerging wave of ethnic substitution”. In this zero-sum world, if “we” are not actively maintaining our numbers, our cities, cultures and livelihoods will swiftly be taken over by “them”. Here, nationalism tips into ethnonationalism and reproductive debates descend into violent racism. “It’s the birthrates, it’s the birthrates, it’s the birthrates,” repeated the Christchurch shooter in his manifesto, a connection discussed in my book about digital hate. It’s no surprise, then, when we see white supremacists attending pronatalist events. The movement resonates with the infamous 14 words of white supremacy: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” These more insidious aspects shed light on the pronatalism exemplified by the Collinses. Firstly, this vision appears to be about reproducing a certain kind of person. The Collinses screen for disability and optimise for intelligence. The logic here is that DNA is all-important. It doesn’t matter that their childrens’ rooms aren’t heated, or they wear iPads around their necks, or that their two-year-old is struck across the face for misbehaviour, because, in the end, nature wins over nurture. Secondly, in the pronatalist vision, the children themselves seem to be beside the point. The child is less an individual, with desires and dignity, than a vehicle for a political project, a dense bundle of futurity. Here we see the strong connections between pronatalism and effective altruism, Both are obsessed with abstract anxieties about “trillions of people to come” in the long-term future. In this numbers game, the child is demoted to a data point. As pronatalism rises, grasping these unspoken logics becomes key.

Increased IVF is a slippery slope to eugenics---Or at least that’s something the neg can argue

Symons, 24

(Xavier Symons; bioethicist and Director of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics at the Australian Catholic University; 12-10-2024; accessed: 4-30-2026; Public Discourse; "Embryo Screening and the New Eugenics"; https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/12/96647/) FJP

We need to treat children as human beings who are our moral equals and who, even in their embryonic stage, ought to be treated as persons and not as objects to be made and manipulated. This is not to say that we do not try to prevent and cure disease where possible. But this admirable aim should not be confused with technologies that objectify early human life and rob it of its moral standing. To be clear, PGD does not “cure” genetic flaws in IVF-conceived embryos. Rather, it allows us to identify embryos that do not possess genetic abnormalities and to implant these embryos alone. This is an important distinction as some may be tempted to justify PGD by saying that it is a treatment for genetic disease. This is a mistake. It is not a treatment, but rather, a form of diagnosis that allows us to determine if an embryo carries a specific genetic mutation, then avoid implanting those particular embryos that are deemed defective. The implications of genetic screening, however, extend far beyond the potential to prevent genetic diseases. By selecting embryos based on genetic information, society has found itself on a slippery slope toward a so-called “positive eugenics” that aims not only at health but also the selection of “desirable” non-disease traits. While PGD may offer enhanced choice to prospective parents, it is not a cure, and we must consider how the line between enhancing fertility treatments and selective eugenics is being blurred. IVF and its accompanying procedures have been framed as a public good that allows people to have healthy children and prevent the transmission of genetic disease. President Donald Trump recently described IVF as “beautiful” and pledged to support the availability of IVF services available in every US state. But this framing of IVF as an unqualified good ignores the fact that practitioners are ushering in a new age of genetic selection under the auspices of therapy. To avoid this dystopian outcome, we need to seriously reconsider the use of genetic screening as “treatment” for genetic disease. More broadly, we also need to re-embrace the joy of risk that comes as part of accepting human life as a gift that is graciously received, not tailored to our preferences and risk appetite. This, rather than the reinstatement of eugenic norms, is what true progress in our use of biomedical technologies looks like.

Queer Theory K

Debaters can argue that reproductive futurism structures all politics and that prioritizing an imaginary Child justifies present heteronormative oppression.

Lennard, 02

(Natasha Lennard; Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Bookforum and the New York Times, among others. She teaches critical journalism at the New School for Social Research in New York; 2-2-2002; accessed: 5-1-2026; New Inquiry; "Against a Dream Deferred"; https://thenewinquiry.com/against-a-dream-deferred/) IDH

I don’t want you to think I don’t like children. I do. I number among the insufferable of our species who ask to hold strangers’ babies in public. At 25, I’ve not been an adult all that long myself. But here’s the thing: I’m not fighting for the children. I’ll go further — I’m on the side of those not fighting for the children. It’s not a palatable political position to occupy. Indeed, according to queer theorist Lee Edelman, it’s an impossible political position. Impossible, he suggests, because the entire political order is underpinned by concerns for The Child and its future. In his 2004 book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Edelman asserts that there is a “consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.” Put simply, reproductive futurism is the belief in, and desire for, a future, which has as its emblem The Child, “the fantasmic beneficiary of every political intervention.” And like Edelman, I argue for the “side outside of the consensus” — a queer opposition to a politics defined by concern for imaginary children and their imagined futures. Much ink has already been spilled over No Future’s challenging polemic and it is beyond the remit of these paragraphs to fully expound on Edelman’s Lacan-inspired argument. Nor will I address whether Edelman is correct in suggesting that the entire logical space of “politics” is exhausted by reproductive futurism. (Some writers, like philosopher Nina Power, have suggested that it’s not — I think she’s wrong, but that’s for a different time). Here I hope only to expand on Edelman’s modest point that reproductive futurism underpins politics from both the right and the left and carries with it an inherent conservatism and heteronormativity. And this being so, I suggest alongside Edelman: fuck the future. Ample examples in contemporary U.S. politics show reproductive futurism at work, where The Child and its projected future set the fulcrum. The Right combines “pro-life” anti-abortion campaigns with child-centric stances against same-sex unions or marriages which warn that the of gay parents is at risk; the future is at risk. (Edelman quotes Pope John Paul II, who said of same-sex unions, “such a caricature [of the ‘authentic’ family] has no future and cannot give future to any society.”) The left, too, leans on this fulcrum. Defenders of abortion rights don’t dare challenge the unmitigated good of a future life, and choose instead to argue from “choice”; environmentalists campaign for the children’s future; and, in recent months, protesters scattered across occupy camps held cardboard signs emblazoned with future-looking slogans — it is for the kids’ future, for a world with jobs and homes and health care, that many are now fighting.-

Fat K

Critical fatness studies is underrepresented in debate, this topic could change that. Debaters could interrogate biases in reproductive healthcare and family formation for fat bodies.

Schon et al. Feb 26

(Vanessa Elliott, Kaitlyn Plummer, Daphna Stroumsa, Ashley Hesson, Erica E. Marsh, Samantha B. Schon; Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Michigan; February 4, 2026; Frontiers in Reproductive Health; "You don't treat your skinny patients like this": a qualitative study of fertility care experiences among women with larger bodies and infertility; https://doi.org/10.3389/frph.2026.1730572) 🤖 🤖

Prior studies show that people with larger bodies experience pervasive weight stigma, which is often directly perpetuated by healthcare providers. Individuals seeking treatment for infertility commonly encounter concrete barriers, such as formalized BMI-based restrictions. These limitations may further compound the isolating and stigmatizing experiences already known to affect women with infertility. Many participants reported receiving shaming and judgmental care throughout their healthcare encounters including fertility care, which for several directly influenced their decision to pursue treatment. Participants often reported receiving abbreviated, substandard diagnostic evaluations that in many cases missed critical diagnoses.

There aren’t many topics that will give you links this good

McPhail et al. 20

(Deborah McPhail et al.; reproductive health scholars; 2020; Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal; "Fat Reproductive Justice: Navigating the Boundaries of Reproductive Health Care"; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338896976_Fat_Reproductive_Justice_Navigating_the_Boundaries_of_Reproductive_Health_Care) 🤖 🤖

We explored the experiences of people in larger bodies seeking fertility and/or pregnancy care through a reproductive justice lens, integrating an understanding of weight stigma with an understanding of who has access to reproductive technologies, who is allowed to become pregnant, and the discourses that surround pregnancy. Participants narratives speak to experiences of being surveilled and controlled in medical settings; this surveillance and control negatively impacted their access to desired care. In order to receive the kinds of care they wanted, many participants had to become self-advocates. This self-advocacy speaks to resistance and resilience; individualizing resilience represents an incomplete solution to navigating the shaming.

Appendix

Definitions

Family Policy

Family policy is a broad term---it encompasses family creation, economic support, childrearing, and caregiving

Bogenschneider, Professor of Human Ecology, 11

(Karen Bogenschneider; Rothermel Bascom Professor of Human Ecology Extension Family Policy Specialist Director, Policy Institute for Family Impact Seminars; 2011; accessed: 4-29-2026; Prepared for the United Nations Expert Group Meeting on ―Assessing Family Policies: Confronting Family Poverty and Social Exclusion & Ensuring Work Family Balance; " Family Policy: Why We Need it and How to Communicate its Value"; https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/family/docs/egm11/Bogenschneider-paper.pdf) FJP

Definitions of Family Policy and the Family Impact Lens in Policymaking

To be taken seriously, family policy requires a common language, its own identify, and a clear articulation of its meaning. At its root is policy, which I define as a plan or course of action carried out through a law, rule, code, or other mechanism in the public sector (e.g., government, judiciary) or the private sector (e.g., employers, nonprofit organizations). Family policy has been conceptualized, not only as an end goal, but also as a criterion for assessing policy impact and as a means for achieving other policy goals (e.g., workplace policies that promote employee productivity by providing care for sick children; Bogenschneider, 2000). As initially defined by Ooms (1990), family policies encompass the four explicit functions of families: (a) family creation (e.g., to marry or divorce, to bear or adopt children); (b) economic support (e.g., to provide financially for members‘ basic needs); (c) childrearing (e.g., to socialize the next generation); and (d) caregiving (e.g., to provide assistance for the disabled, frail, ill, and elderly). Policies that are included under the family policy umbrella include adoption, child care tax credit, family leave, long-term care, school finance, welfare reform, and so forth.

Family policy is a broad umbrella term

Legalclarity, 26

(Legalclarity Team; LegalClarity is a team of dedicated professionals brings clarity to the complexities of the law; 4-5-2026; accessed: 4-29-2026; LegalClarity; "What Is Family Policy? Definition, Goals, and Key Programs"; https://legalclarity.org/what-is-family-policy-a-definition-with-examples/) FJP

Family policy covers the laws, programs, and tax provisions governments use to support and shape family life. It reaches into nearly every corner of a household’s finances and daily routines, from the tax credits that reduce what families owe the IRS to the healthcare programs that cover children in low-income homes. Some of these policies target families directly, while others affect families as a side effect of broader goals like reducing poverty or expanding healthcare access.

Family policy is three pillars---paid family leave, child care, and other economic support

Wielk, senior policy analyst, 25

(Emily Wielk; Senior Policy Analyst, Working Families; 9-25-2025; accessed: 4-29-2026; Bipartisan Policy Center; "The Family Policy Gap: What Parents Say They Need—and How Policymakers Can Deliver"; https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/the-family-policy-gap-what-parents-say-they-need-and-how-policymakers-can-deliver/) FJP

Pro-family policy is not one-size-fits-all, and families need flexibility to meet their unique needs at every stage. As such, addressing the challenges without understanding how paid family leave, child care, and other economic supports (e.g., the Child Tax Credit) create a strong foundation for family stability while boosting businesses and the economy misses the opportunity to design holistic, effective policies. Building on the deep bipartisan interest in finding policies to address these issues and continued momentum to find solutions, policymakers need a roadmap for pragmatic, pro-family policies that offers relief to strained support systems and delivers real wins for working families. BPC’s working families agenda underscores the importance of these three pillars to deliver support by: -Expanding access to paid family leave for more workers to ensure they have protected time off to fulfill caregiving responsibilities throughout their career; -Addressing gaps in access to affordable, reliable child care for millions of families nationwide, which not only ensures parents can go to work today, but builds a workforce for tomorrow; and -Bolstering economic supports for workers and employers, including tax credits, to boost family stability and financial security.

What constitutes pro-family politics is politically contested

Brown, EPPC fellow, 23

(Patrick T. Brown; Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center; 12-14-2023; accessed: 4-29-2026; Ethics & Public Policy Center; "Pro-Family Policy Priorities for States"; https://eppc.org/publication/pro-family-policy-priorities-for-states/) FJP

The Definition of “Pro-Family”

Reflecting the political divide, there was a partisan difference of opinion about what a “pro-family” approach to politics should prioritize. Half of parents, including 66% of Democrats and 37% of Republicans, said a political platform that “introduced new social programs aimed at reducing the cost of living” sounded more “pro-family” than one that “emphasized parents’ values” in schools and protecting children online. 45% of Republican parents, and 16% of Democratic and independent-leaning parents, said the inverse. No survey wording is perfect, and asking about “parent’s rights” may have elicited a different breakdown. But they suggest that a “pro-family” agenda that does not address families’ material concerns will not be seen as substantive as one that does.

Some of the largest partisan differences can be found in capturing what makes a state appealing to families. Half of Democratic parents said the way a state can best support families is by increasing spending on social benefits like child care vouchers or the CTC. Conversely, 72% of Republican parents listed either cutting income or property taxes for children or improving the state’s business climate to attract high-paying jobs as the best way for a state to support families. Independent parents were split in between; a third prioritized cutting income and property taxes for parents, while another one-third encouraged higher social spending on children.

Pronatalism

Pronatalism is policy that encourages reproduction and elevates the role of parenthood

Forati and Bartz, medical professionals, 25

(Rasadokht Forati and Deborah Bartz; Forati is a resident at the Yale School of Medicine, Bartz is a practicing MD; 7-15-2025; accessed: 4-29-2026; Cambridge Core; "The Rise and Fall and Rise of Pronatalism: A Disingenuous Policy that Harms the Health of People and Society"; https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-law-medicine-and-ethics/article/rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-pronatalism-a-disingenuous-policy-that-harms-the-health-of-people-and-society/9FA30DC2ECBB8D47270E6974DFA72CD4) FJP

Pronatalism refers to an attitude or policy that is “pro-birth,” encourages reproduction, and elevates the role of parenthood.Reference Peck and Senderowitz13 It is an ideology that promotes childbearing as a necessary and positive societal contribution most notably from women, often deliberately at the expense of their opportunities in education, governance, and the workforce. Given the wide-reaching population-level effects on reproductive legislation, pronatalism has historically been and continues to be an influential consideration in many countries’ population policies.Reference Sobotka, Matysiak and Brzozowska14 This ideology has gained momentum in recent years, likely in large part because global total fertility rates (TFR) have dramatically declined. From 1950 to 2021, the global TFR has halved, from 4.84 births per woman to 2.23, and is projected to decrease to 1.83 in 2050 and 1.59 by 2100, taking us well below the replacement level of 2.1.15 These large population shifts and their potential implications understandably make people nervous. As fertility rates decline, a population experiences a shift in its demographic structure where the number of elders increases and the working-age population declines. Thus, policymakers of multiple nations have raised concerns about the increased burden this may place on systems that rely on the working class, such as social security programs, the labor and consumer markets, and healthcare.Reference Yenilmez16 Given these economic concerns, particularly in a capitalist democracy, many policymakers throughout the world have consequently promoted and implemented pronatalist policies as a method to increase fertility rates advertised to benefit society.Reference Sobotka17 Recognizing that one of the significant barriers to childbearing is the cost of caring for and raising children, governments have provided parents with child-related tax incentives, childcare subsidies, and extended parental leave, among other forms of support.Reference Thévenon, Rindfuss and Choe18 However, as we outline below, reproductive policies implemented under the guise of an agenda to optimize the national economy have also been introduced to overtly or covertly promote other motivations. Therefore, these policies must be examined with a critical eye.c

It’s a contested term, but it gets the point across

Sherman, 25

(Carter Sherman; reporter; 3-11-2025; accessed: 4-30-2026; ; "The rise of pronatalism: why Musk, Vance and the right want women to have more babies"; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/11/what-is-pronatalism-right-wing-republican) FJP

Pronatalism is so contentious that people often struggle to agree on a definition. Pronatalism could be defined as the belief that having children is good. It could also be defined as the belief that having children is important to the greater good and that people should have babies on behalf of the state, because declining birth rates are a threat to its future. Perhaps most importantly, pronatalism could be defined as the belief that government policy should incentivize people to give birth.

While people on the left might agree with some pronatalist priorities, pronatalism in the US is today ascendant on the right. It has become a key ideological plank in the bridge between tech bro rightwingers like Musk and more traditional, religious conservatives, like the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson – who once said in a House hearing that abortions were harming the economy by eliminating would-be workers.

Baby Bonus

A baby bonus is a one-time family benefit that is delivered shortly after a baby is born

Sargeant, senior policy analyst, 25

A baby bonus is a one-time family benefit that is delivered shortly after a baby is born. It is limited in scope, since it only applies in the first year of a child’s life. It can be delivered at a manageable cost for America even in an era of budget constraints. The support comes when it can have its highest impact, when young couples are early in their careers and a decade or more away from their highest earning years.[2] It can reduce the pressure to delay having children until it’s too late to have any or too late to have as many as the parents hope for.

Early Childhood Education (ECE)

Early childhood education takes place from birth to eight years old but typically refers to education up to kindergarten

Goodwin University, 19

(Goodwin University; Goodwin University is a nonprofit institution of higher education and is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE); 1-16-2019; accessed: 4-30-2026; "What is Early Childhood Education?"; https://www.goodwin.edu/enews/what-is-early-childhood-education/) FJP

[***fonts modified***]

Early childhood education (ECE) is the period of learning that takes place from birth to eight-years-old, according to the National Association for the Education of Young ChildrenOpens a New Window.. Most commonly in teaching, however, it refers to the education of children between birth and kindergarten age – the preschool or “Pre-K” years. In these early years of infancy and toddlerhood, educational experiences – both formal and informal – are seen as fundamental to a child’s cognitive, physical, and emotional development.

Early childhood education gives little ones the opportunity to learn, discover, and play in a safe, nurturing environment outside of their home. In ECE classrooms, children are encouraged to explore colors, letters, numbers, sounds, nature, art, and other topics, while simultaneously fostering curiosity and developing core motor and social skills.

The term is pretty clear

American Public University, 24

(American Public University; 3-26-2024; accessed: 4-30-2026; American Public University; "What Is Early Childhood Education and Why Is It Essential?"; https://www.apu.apus.edu/area-of-study/education/resources/what-is-early-childhood-education-and-why-is-it-essential/) FJP

Early childhood education (ECE) involves the formal education and care of young children by non-family members in specialized settings before those children start primary school.

An early childhood education program typically involves children up to 8 years of age. This type of education is grounded in the understanding that early childhood is a critical period of development, where children learn foundational skills, attitudes, and learning patterns.

It’s got an international standard defining it

UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 12

(UNESCO Institute for Statistics; It’s the UN, what more is there to say; 2012; accessed: 4-30-2026; UNESCO; "International Standard Classification of Education, ISCED 2011"; https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000219109.locale=en) FJP

Programmes at ISCED level 0, or early childhood education, are typically designed with a holistic approach to support children’s early cognitive, physical, social and emotional development and introduce young children to organized instruction outside of the family context. ISCED level 0 refers to early childhood programmes that have an intentional education component. These programmes aim to develop socio-emotional skills necessary for participation in school and society. They also develop some of the skills needed for academic readiness and prepare children for entry into primary education.101.

At this level, programmes are not necessarily highly structured but are designed to provide an organized and purposeful set of learning activities in a safe physical environment. They allow children to learn through interaction with other children under the guidance of staff/educators, typically through creative and play-based activities.102.

ISCED level 0 programmes target children below the age of entry into ISCED level 1. There are two categories of ISCED level 0 programmes: early childhood educational development and pre-primary education. The former has educational content designed for younger children (in the age range of 0 to 2 years), whilst the latter is designed for children from age 3 years to the start of primary education.

Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE)

It’s basically the same thing as ECE

UNESCO, 25

(UNESCO; it’s UNESCO y’all; 2-13-2025; accessed: 4-30-2026; "What you need to know about early childhood care and education"; https://www.unesco.org/en/early-childhood-education/need-know) FJP

Early childhood care and education (ECCE), covering the period from birth to 8 years old, is crucial because it leverages a time of significant brain development in children. Quality ECCE can set the foundation for good health, nutrition, learning success, social-emotional development, and economic productivity throughout life.

Universal Early Childhood Education and Care

Universal Early Childhood Education and Care applies to all children and is not means tested

Schmutz, 24

(Rita Schmutz; Swiss Centre of Expertise in Life Course Research LIVES, University of Lausanne, Switzerland; February 2024; accessed: 5-1-2026; Research in Social Stratification and Mobility; "Is universal early childhood education and care an equalizer? A systematic review and meta-analysis of evidence"; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0276562423001038) FJP

Nevertheless, Kulic et al. (2019) show that the evidence on targeted ECEC lacks external validity. This concern arises from the potential varying effects universal ECEC might have on children compared to targeted programs. Universal ECEC refers to programs not tailored for a specific subgroup of children, unlike means-tested programs. Although attendance in these universal programs is not mandatory, they are available to all age-appropriate children within a given locality. Therefore, the effect of large-scale universal programs may increase inequalities given stratification in access. Even if universal ECEC is open to all children, prior research indicates that parents' economic, cultural, and social resources play a role not only in the decision to enroll their children in preschool and childcare but also in the selection of childcare facilities.

Child Tax Credit

A child tax credit allow taxpayers to reduce income tax liability

(Congressional Research Service ; 11-13-2025; accessed: 5-1-2026; "The Child Tax Credit: How It Works and Who Receives It"; https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R41873) FJP

The child tax credit allows eligible taxpayers to reduce their federal income tax liability by up to $2,200 per qualifying child (indexed to inflation). If their tax liability is less than the value of their child tax credit, they may be eligible for a refundable credit calculated using the earned income formula. Under this formula, a family is eligible for a refund equal to 15% of their earnings in excess of $2,500, up to $1,700 per child, the maximum amount of the refundable portion of the credit. The credit phases out for unmarried parents with income over $200,000 and married couples with income over $400,000. The amount of the credit by income for a taxpayer with one qualifying child is illustrated below.

Assisted Reproductive Technology

Assisted Reproductive Technology helps people get pregnant

Cleveland Clinic, 25

(Cleveland Clinic; 8-25-2025; accessed: 4-29-2026; ; "Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART)"; https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/assisted-reproductive-technology) FJP

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) is a fertility treatment or procedure that helps you get pregnant. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is the most common ART.

ART is a treatment for infertility or when natural conception isn’t possible. It can also be helpful if you have a genetic condition that you don’t want to risk passing on to your child.

Using ART to start a family is a big and important step. Your fertility team knows you’ll have questions. They’ll help you understand the benefits, risks, costs and steps. And they’ll get to know you, your preferences and why you’re seeking help. They’ll suggest procedures and processes that make sense in your situation.

ART isn’t common. Fewer than 2% of all babies born in the U.S. each year are conceived using ART.

Types of ART

Assisted reproductive technology involves a person handling eggs, sperm or embryos. Healthcare providers use different fertility treatments and procedures. Your provider will recommend treatment based on the cause of your infertility and your preferences.

The most common examples are:

IVF: A provider removes eggs from your ovaries and mixes them with sperm to fertilize the egg. Then, they place the fertilized egg into your uterus.

Donor sperm/donor eggs: Your provider uses donated eggs or sperm to help you get pregnant.

Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI): This procedure involves injecting sperm directly into the center of an egg.

Freezing eggs or embryos: This process lets you delay pregnancy while preserving your fertility.

Gestational surrogacy: This is when another female carries the pregnancy.

ART requires surgical removal of ovaries

CDC, 24

(Center for Disease Control ; 12-9-2024; accessed: 4-29-2026; "About ART"; https://www.cdc.gov/art/about/index.html) FJP

In general, ART procedures involve surgically removing eggs from a woman's ovaries, combining them with sperm in the laboratory, and returning them to a female patient or a gestational carrier. ART also includes egg and embryo cryopreservation (freezing) and egg and embryo donation. The most common type of ART is in vitro fertilization (IVF). Other types of ART, such as gamete intrafallopian transfer or zygote intrafallopian transfer, are rarely performed.

ART does NOT include treatments in which only sperm are handled (such as intrauterine insemination). It also does NOT include procedures in which a woman takes drugs only to stimulate egg production without planning to have the eggs surgically retrieved.

Abortion

Abortion terminates a pregnancy

Merriam Webster, no date

(Merriam Webster; simple dictionary; no date; accessed: 5-1-2026; "Definition of ABORTION"; https://www.merriam-webster.com/simple/abortion) FJP

abortion noun abor·tion ə-ˈbȯr-shən Synonyms of abortion Simple Definition 1: the termination of a pregnancy after, accompanied by, resulting in, or closely followed by the death of the embryo or fetus: such as a: spontaneous expulsion of a human fetus during the first 12 weeks of gestation compare miscarriage b: induced expulsion of a human fetus c: expulsion of a fetus by a domestic animal often due to infection at any time before completion of pregnancy compare contagious abortion

USFG

The “United States federal government” means the three branches of the central government. The affirmative does not advocate action by the USFG.

OECD 87

(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Council, 1987, “United States,” The Control and Management of Government Expenditure, p. 179) JD

1. Political and organisational structure of government The United States of America is a federal republic consisting of 50 states. States have their own constitutions and within each State there are at least two additional levels of government, generally designated as counties and cities, towns or villages. The relationships between different levels of government are complex and varied (see Section B for more information). The Federal Government is composed of three branches: the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch. Budgetary decisionmaking is shared primarily by the legislative and executive branches. The general structure of these two branches relative to budget formulation and execution is as follows.

Including

Including introduce a partial list

AHD, 22

(American Heritage Dictionary; 2022; accessed: 12-14-2024; Harper Collins; " The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language"; https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=including) PJF

in·clude (ĭn-kld)

tr.v. in·clud·ed, in·clud·ing, in·cludes

1. To contain or take in as a part, element, or member.

2. To consider as part of or allow into a group or class: thanked the host for including us.

[Middle English includen, from Latin inclūdere, to enclose : in-, in; see IN-2 + claudere, to close.]

in·cluda·ble, in·cludi·ble adj.

Synonyms: include, comprise, comprehend, embrace, encompass

These verbs mean to take in or contain as part of something larger. Include often implies an incomplete listing: "Through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included in 'We, the people'" (Barbara C. Jordan).

Comprise usually implies that all of the components are stated: The book comprises 15 chapters.

Comprehend, embrace, and encompass usually refer to the taking in of subordinate elements: My field of study comprehends several disciplines. This theory embraces many facets of human behavior. The debate encompassed all points of view.

Usage Note: The word include generally suggests that what follows is a partial list, not an exhaustive list, of the contents of what the subject refers to. Therefore a sentence like New England includes Connecticut and Rhode Island is acceptable, since it implies that there are states that are also a part of New England but are not mentioned in the list, and in fact this is correct. When a full enumeration is given, a different construction, such as one using comprise or consist of, must be used: New England comprises/consists of (not includes) Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. There are cases, however, in which include does not rule out the possibility of a complete listing, as when the exact makeup of the subject is unknown or yet to be determined. Thus the sentence The bibliography should include all the journal articles you have used does not entail that the bibliography must contain something other than journal articles, though it does leave that possibility open. Another case in which the list following include may be exhaustive is when the list explicitly or implicitly describes what is not included. Thus, We decided to include only those artists who had written works within the last five years is acceptable, since the set of artists not included is implicitly defined as those who have not written works within the last five years. The same goes for cases of explicit exclusion from the list: My shopping list includes everything you told me to buy, and nothing else. See Usage Note at comprise.

Including indicates that a thing is part of a group

Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.

(Cambridge Dictionary; accessed: 12-14-2024; "including"; https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/including) PJF

including

preposition

uk /ɪnˈkluː.dɪŋ/ us /ɪnˈkluː.dɪŋ/

used for saying that a person or thing is part of a particular group or amount:

“Includes” is not exhaustive.

BEA, Circuit Judge, 05-26-2005

(Carlos, U.S. v. Wyatt, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, 408 F.3d 1257 35 Envtl. L. Rep. 20, accessed 09-23-2024.) KEW

Defendants misconstrue section 1864(a) by arguing the statute does not provide sufficient notice because "unmodified and highly visible ropes" are not included within the definition of a "hazardous and injurious device" in section 1864(d)(3). The exclusion of unmodified and visible ropes from this non-exhaustive list does not remove the ropes from the ambit of the definition of "hazardous and injurious device." As noted, the definition begins with a general definition (which, in any event, would encompass the yellow ropes) and then provides a list of devices "include[d]" under the definition. The use of the word "includes" suggests the list is non-exhaustive rather than exclusive. See Hockings, 129 F.3d at 1071; see also Federal Land Bank v. Bismarck Lumber Co., 314 U.S. 95, 100, 62 S.Ct. 1, 86 L.Ed. 65 (1941) ("the term `including' is not one of all-embracing definition, but connotes simply an illustrative application of the general principle.").

Including is non-exhaustive.

Garman, Justice, 02-16-2007

(Rita, People v. Perry, 224 Ill. 2d 312, 330-31 (Ill. 2007), accessed 09-23-2024.) KEW

According to Black's Law Dictionary, "include" means: "To contain as a part of something. The participle including typically indicates a partial list the plaintiff asserted five tort claims, including slander and libel. But some drafters use phrases such as including without limitation and including but not limited to — which mean the same thing." (Emphases in original.) Black's Law Dictionary 777-78 (8th ed. 2004). The law dictionary refers the reader to the term "namely," which means: "By name or particular mention; that is to say the plaintiff asserted two claims, namely wrongful termination and slander. The term indicates what is to be included by name. By contrast, including implies a partial list and indicates that something is not listed." (Emphasis in original.) Black's Law Dictionary 1049 (8th ed. 2004). Similarly, the editor of Black's Law Dictionary observes in another work that: "[I]ncluding is sometimes misused for namely. But it should not be used to introduce an exhaustive list, for it implies that the list is only partial. In the words of one federal court, 'It is hornbook law that the use of the word including indicates that the specified list . . . is illustrative, not exclusive.' Puerto Rico Maritime Shipping Auth. v. I.C.C., 645 F.2d 1102, 1112 n. 26 (D.C. Cir. 1981)." (Emphases in original.) B. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage 431 (1995). Given the statutory definition of "includes" in section 2-10 and the plain and ordinary meaning of the word, the absence of additional verbiage such as "but not limited to" does not render section 15-1 ambiguous. In this section, the word "includes" is used to introduce a list of things of value that illustrate the meaning of the general term "property."

‘Including’ sets a floor and a ceiling---the plan can’t contain anything besides the list given

GAO, 6

(Government Accountability Office; 2-1-2006; accessed: 12-14-2024; "Principles of Federal Appropriations Law: Third Edition, Volume II"; https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-06-382sp.pdf) FJP

Similarly, the term “including” has been held to establish both a maximum and a minimum. A-99732, Jan. 13, 1939. As such, it cannot be augmented from a more general appropriation (19 Comp. Gen. 892 (1940)), nor can it be diverted to other uses within the appropriation (67 Comp. Gen. 401 (1988)).

Adopt

Adopt requires legislation

FAY 92 [THOMAS F. FAY et al, Chief Justice RI Supreme Court, “In re Advisory Opinion to Governor”, Supreme Court of Rhode Island Jun 10, 1992 https://casetext.com/case/in-re-advisory-opinion-to-governor-23]

In support we need only look to this state's historical treatment and understanding of the term. Most notably, the term "adopt" is included in the constitution itself. As previously indicated, article 15, section 4, directed that "on or before June 1, 1988, the general assembly shall adopt implementing legislation for Article III, Sections 7 and 8, and for Article IV, Section 10." (Emphasis added.) The General Assembly, pursuant to this constitutional directive, terminated the pre-existing Conflicts of Interest Commission and established the Ethics Commission. Thereafter, the General Assembly enacted the code of ethics as contained in chapter 14 of title 36, which the commission subsequently adopted. Obviously, by taking the foregoing actions pursuant to this constitutional mandate, the General Assembly itself understood and construed the term "adopt" as requiring it to "develop," "establish," or "enact" legislation to create an ethics commission and, albeit erroneously, a code of ethics.

Adopt requires congress

MR ND [Modern Republic, https://www.modernrepublic.org/adopt#:~:text=The%20parliamentary%20term%20adopt%20or,fought%20during%20the%20revolutionary%20war]

The parliamentary term adopt or adoption refers to the formal approval or acceptance of a bill, resolution, or other measure.

Example: The House voted unanimously to adopt the resolution to honor the African-American soldiers who fought during the revolutionary war.

Substantial

‘substantial’ means considerable.

Joseph W. Dorn & Michael P. Mabile 03, JD, Partner, Law, King & Spalding LLP; JD, Counsel, Law, King & Spalding LLP, Committee for Fairly Traded Venezuelan Cement v. United States, United States Court of Appeals, Federal Circuit, No. 04-1016, 12/16/2003, Westlaw. [italics in original]

In particular, the use of the word “substantial” in the second part of the standard clearly indicates that import concentration can be found where much less than 50 percent of the subject imports enter the region. “A fundamental canon of statutory construction is that, unless otherwise defined, words will be interpreted as taking their ordinary, contemporary, common meaning.”7 To determine the ordinary meaning of a term, it is appropriate to consult dictionary definitions.8

The primary dictionary definition of “substantial” is “of ample or considerable amount, quantity, size, etc.” Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (1994 ed.); Random House Dictionary of the English Language (2d ed. 1987). Neither this nor any other dictionary definition of *19 the word “substantial” requires, or even implies, that something must constitute a majority of the whole in order to be substantial. The Federal courts commonly recognize that a substantial portion, proportion, or percentage does not have to constitute 50 percent and may be much less than 50 percent.9

This ordinary understanding of the term “substantial proportion” compels the conclusion that a regional share of 54 percent of subject imports (or 45 percent in 1999) should ordinarily be a substantial proportion. Thus, the CIT erred by failing to hold that the ITC was required either to find that Florida accounted for a substantial proportion of the subject imports or to provide a detailed explanation *20 why -- despite Florida's large share of the imports -- the particular circumstances of this case do not support such a finding, neither of which the ITC did.10

The CIT's reference to the “context” in which the word “substantial” is used is misplaced. A17-A18. The CIT cites the ITC's argument that “the definition of the term ‘substantial’ that {the Committee} advocates is not supported by ‘the statute or legislative history... in the context of import concentration.” Id.11 This argument, however, simply flies in the face of the rule that, as long as a term is not *21 otherwise defined, it is to be construed as having its ordinary, common meaning. A contrary meaning would require an explicit definition or other plain and specific indicator that Congress intended a different meaning. As noted in NSK, 115 F.3d at 974, where Congress intends to give a term its ordinary meaning, “any explicit definition {is} unnecessary.” Moreover, it is difficult to imagine how -- short of an explicit definition -- the context could possibly affect the meaning of a basic qualifying word such as “substantial.” If Congress had intended a different meaning, it would surely have used a different word (i.e., “major” or “superior”).

Substantial means material

FindLaw Legal Dictionary, ND

[“Substantial,” FindLaw, no date , https://dictionary.findlaw.com/definition/substantial.html, accessed 7-18-2025]

Substantial

substantial adj

1 a : of or relating to substance

b : not illusory

: having merit [failed to raise a constitutional claim]

c : having importance or significance

: material [a step had not been taken toward commission of the crime "W. R. LaFave and A. W. Scott, Jr."]

2 : considerable in quantity

: significantly great [would be a abuse of the provisions of this chapter "U.S. Code"] compare de minimis

sub·stan·ti·al·i·ty [-stan-chē-a-lə-tē]

sub·stan·tial·ly adv

‘Substantial’ means of considerable value.

Sharon Prost 4. Former circuit judge. "Committee For Fairly Traded Venezuelan Cement v. United States." United States Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit. 2004. web.archive.org/web/20061001000000*/http://www.ll.georgetown.edu/federal/judicial/fed/opinions/04opinions/04-1016.html

The URAA and the SAA neither amend nor refine the language of § 1677(4)(C). In fact, they merely suggest, without disqualifying other alternatives, a “clearly higher/substantial proportion” approach. Indeed, the SAA specifically mentions that no “precise mathematical formula” or “‘benchmark’ proportion” is to be used for a dumping concentration analysis. SAA at 860 (citations omitted); see also Venez. Cement, 279 F. Supp. 2d at 1329-30. Furthermore, as the Court of International Trade noted, the SAA emphasizes that the Commission retains the discretion to determine concentration of imports on a “case-by-case basis.” SAA at 860. Finally, the definition of the word “substantial” undercuts the CFTVC’s argument. The word “substantial” generally means “considerable in amount, value or worth.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 2280 (1993). It does not imply a specific number or cut-off. What may be substantial in one situation may not be in another situation. The very breadth of the term “substantial” undercuts the CFTVC’s argument that Congress spoke clearly in establishing a standard for the Commission’s regional antidumping and countervailing duty analyses. It therefore supports the conclusion that the Commission is owed deference in its interpretation of “substantial proportion.” The Commission clearly embarked on its analysis having been given considerable leeway to interpret a particularly broad term.

More Lit

Universal Pre-K

How much can high-quality Universal Pre-K reduce achievement gaps? | National Institute for Early Education Research IMH

“Early childhood education (ECE) programs show promise in reducing achievement gaps, particularly at kindergarten entry. Research suggests that attending high-quality ECE can enhance children’s development, reduce achievement gaps, and have longer-term benefits for children’s development. This research includes meta-analyses of ECE programs; evaluations of landmark ECE programs including the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project, the Abecedarian Project, and the Chicago Child-Parent Centers; and evaluations of larger scale publicly funded programs including Head Start (a federal program for at-risk children) and universally available preschool programs in Boston, New Jersey’s Abbott school districts, and Oklahoma.”

“Despite the known benefits of high-quality ECE, access to such programs remains remarkably low and highly unequal. Although rates of preschool attendance have increased in the last several decades, access varies widely by children’s backgrounds, with African American, Hispanic, and low-income children having lower rates of attendance. We estimated that rates of enrollment in high-quality ECE ranged from under 15 percent of black children to almost 30 percent of non-low-income children. (See Figure 2)”

“Despite a general consensus that high-quality ECE can improve children’s learning and reduce kindergarten entry gaps, policy makers and researchers have disagreed about the relative advantages and disadvantages of targeted and universal ECE programs. On one hand, a means-tested targeted program would (in theory) benefit only those children who are at-risk to begin kindergarten without the necessary school readiness skills, thereby narrowing the gap. On the other hand, a universal program would benefit all children and would improve the school readiness of all children, without actually narrowing the gap. However, there is evidence that universal programs do not affect all children similarly, but have larger effects on ethnic/racial minority children and children from low-income families, compared to white and more affluent children. Therefore, a universal program that increased enrollment of children from low-income and ethnic/racial minority families could have powerful effects in reducing the kindergarten entry achievement gaps.”

“Our results suggest that the achievement gaps could be reduced between 27% and 106%, or between 3 and 12 months of learning. We found that a high-quality UPK program could completely close the Black-White and Hispanic-White kindergarten entry gaps in reading. Other gaps prove to be more difficult to close completely. The Black-White gap in math could be reduced by 45% and the Hispanic-White gap in math by 78%. The income-related achievement gaps may be the most challenging to erase. Our results suggest that a high-quality UPK program could reduce the income-related achievement gap in reading by 41% and math by 27%.”

“measures of the impact we relied on the results from evaluations of Oklahoma’s Four-Year-Old Program in Tulsa and Boston Public Schools’ Public Prekindergarten Programs.”

Effects of a State Pre-kindergarten Program on the Kindergarten Readiness and Attendance of At-Risk Four-Year-Olds | Early Childhood Education Journal | Springer Nature Link

“That center-based (as opposed to home-based) preschools help make children ready for kindergarten is well established (see meta-analyses and research compilations by Duncan & Magnuson, 2013; Fischer et al., 2020; Murano et al., 2020; Yoshikawa et al., 2016), though exceptions do exist (e.g., Allee et al., 2024). Effects on readiness skills have sometimes been found to be more pronounced for children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and particularly for English Language Learners (ELLs, e.g., Bassok et al., 2019; Duncan & Magnuson, 2013; Fischer et al., 2020; Phillips et al., 2017; Watts et al., 2023)”

“Less clear is how preschool participation affects medium- and long-term outcomes. The few randomized control trials of publicly funded pre-K programs (Lipsey et al., 2018; Puma et al., 2010, 2012; Weiland et al., 2020) and many quasi-experimental program evaluations (Duncan & Magnuson, 2013; Yoshikawa et al., 2016) have found that gains in children’s cognitive outcomes at the end of pre-K faded by third grade. The most recent results of the randomized control trial of Tennessee’s state-funded pre-K program show that program participants were significantly behind non-participants on several measures by grade 6 (Durkin et al., 2022); however, a long-term study of North Carolina’s program found lingering positive effects through grade 5 (Watts et al., 2023). Meanwhile, longer-term studies have often found positive effects of preschool participation on academic, social, and even economic outcomes in adolescence and young adulthood (e.g., Amadon et al., 2022; Duncan & Magnuson, 2013; McCoy et al., 2017).”

“Definitions of kindergarten readiness are evolving, as kindergarten itself has evolved since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of (2001), to emphasize academic skills, acquired through paper-and-pencil tasks, over social and behavioral skills, acquired through play and child-directed activities (Bassok et al., 2016; Brown et al., 2023). Many believe, with Bassok et al. (2016), that kindergarten has become “the new first grade.” Meanwhile, qualitative studies have found that many preschool and some kindergarten teachers still tend to emphasize play, child-directed activities, and the development of social-emotional skills (Akaba et al., 2020; Brown et al., 2023; Hustedt et al., 2018).”

Isaiah Stopped Reading because looong.... 😔

Can We Be Hard-Headed About Preschool? A Look at Universal and Targeted Pre-K | Brookings (Limited Pre-K) IMH

“This week I address universal pre-K, the advocacy movement for states to fund free pre-school education for all children. Proponents of universal pre-K would have states fund a free public education for preschoolers just as they presently do for students in the regular school years. I contrast this with targeted pre-K, the policy of investing state funds in programs for children and families in the greatest need.

The movement for universal and targeted state pre-K has been successful in that enrollment in state-funded pre-K programs for 4-year-olds has doubled in the last 10 years, from 14% to 28% of all 4-year-olds. There has been a concomitant increase in annual spending from about $2.5 to $4.5 billion. Annual spending per child for state pre-K is about $4,000. Thirty-nine states offer state-funded pre-K, with 31 of those states having programs that are targeted for low-income families. When children enrolled in Head Start and other public programs, including special education, are combined with those in state funded pre-K, 42% of the 4-year-olds in the nation are enrolled in a taxpayer funded center-based preschool programs. [1]

This relatively recent explosion of public pre-K programs has been underpinned by research findings from two iconic preschool interventions from 30 to 40 years ago whose participants have been followed into adulthood, the Perry Preschool Project and the Abecedarian Project. These programs are estimated to have generated positive returns on investment (e.g., approximately $13 to the general public for every $1 invested in Perry Preschool per the most optimistic analysis[2]). But does that mean that present day state-funded pre-K programs for 4-year-olds are also good public investments?”

“In my view, generalizations to state pre-K programs from research findings on Perry and Abecedarian are prodigious leaps of faith. Perry and Abecedarian were multi-year intensive interventions whereas state pre-K programs are overwhelmingly one year programs for four-year-olds. Costs per participant for Perry and Abecedarian were multiples of the levels of investment in present-day state preschool programs, e.g., $90,000 per child for Abecedarian.[3] Both Perry and Abecedarian were small hothouse programs (less than 100 participants) run by very experienced, committed teams, whereas widely deployed present day preschool programs are, well, widely deployed. The circumstances of the very poor families of the Black children who were served by these model programs 30 to 40 years ago are very different from those faced by the families that are presently served by publicly funded preschool programs. For example, nearly half of the four-year-olds in Head Start today are Hispanics, whereas there were no Hispanic children in Abecedarian or Perry. And 40 years ago other government supports for low-income families were at much lower levels and pre-K was not widely available for anyone, much less the poor. Thus, even without the recent findings from Head Start there would be reason to be skeptical that today’s typical state preschool programs for four-year-olds are producing the large benefits that accrued to participants in Perry and Abecedarian.”

“A study of universal pre-K in Georgia compared changes in Georgia’s 4th grade NAEP scores before and after the implementation of universal pre-K with changes in the NAEP scores of students in other states in comparable periods in which universal pre-K was not introduced. This was not an experiment and therefore required sophisticated estimation models. Under the estimation model preferred by the researcher there was no overall impact on the achievement of Georgia’s 4th graders of their prior access to universal pre-K. Under a more generous estimation model, the overall effects were very small (about 2% of a standard deviation increase in NAEP math scores, which is far less than a 1 point increase).”

“A second study examined the impact of the Texas state pre-K program, which is targeted for low income families, on scores on 3rd grade state tests.[6] The researchers compared scores for children at the school district level before and after the introduction of the pre-K program, using a number of statistical controls. Positive effects ranging between 5% and 10% of a standard deviation on test scores were found, with the largest effects for children who were both economically disadvantaged and limited English proficient. Note that the effects were larger than in the Georgia universal program and were largest for children with the greatest risk, thus providing some support for a targeted approach.”

“Advocates of universal pre-K point to research conducted in Tulsa, OK to support their claim that middle-class children as well as children from low-income at-risk backgrounds can benefit from a pre-K program delivered by the state.[7] The research design involved comparing children who had just missed the birth date cutoff for entry into pre-K with those that just made the cut. The finding was that at the end of the year of participation in state pre-K the slightly older group scored higher on cognitive tests than the slightly younger group, which had not yet had access to the state pre-K program. There were differences favoring the state pre-K group for children from middle class as well as low-income backgrounds, but the effects were larger for low income children.

Unfortunately the research design of the Tulsa study is critically flawed when used to draw conclusions about the impact of a state pre-K program in that it requires the implausible assumption that any differences in tested outcomes for the two groups of children after the slightly older group finished pre-K were due to pre-K participation by the older group vs. lack of access to such participation by the slightly younger group of children. However, there likely were many differences in the learning environments of the two groups of children in addition to their differential access to state pre-K. Imagine that you have adopted two infants who are only a few days apart in age but whose birth dates happen to fall on different sides of the age cutoff date for entry into pre-K. Your slightly older child is starting pre-K and will be starting public school in a year whereas your slightly younger child has two years to go before she will start public school. Do you treat the two children the same at home during the year that the older child is in pre-K or are you likely to work a bit harder with that child to make sure she is ready for kindergarten? Do your two children have the same playmates or is your slightly older child likely to be playing with the 4-year-olds with whom she is going to school whereas your slightly younger child is playing with 3-year-olds? All you need to do is feel that you or other parents who happened to share the circumstances in this hypothetical example would treat their slightly older child differently than their slightly younger child during the slightly older child’s pre-K year to invalidate the Tulsa study as an credible estimate of the impact of a state pre-K program on student achievement.

These three studies fall far short of providing a convincing case for investment in universal pre-K: The Georgia study finds impacts that are at best very small and do not pass a cost-benefit test. The Texas study provides evidence for value in a targeted program and is silent on the effectiveness of a universal program. The Tulsa study and other studies that use a design that compares children who just meet or just miss the age cut-off for pre-K can’t estimate the impact of state pre-K because they are comparing children that may differ in many experiences in addition to their participation in state pre-K.”

The effects of universal pre-kindergarten for three-year-old children on mothers’ employment and families’ economic well-being | Review of Economics of the Household | Springer Nature Link (Econ ADV) IMH

This study examined the effects of a universal pre-K program for three-year-olds on parental economic outcomes, leveraging the staggered rollout of New York City’s3K program from 2017 to 2021. Using a difference-in-differences framework with unit fixed effects embedded in an event-study design, I compared within-family changes in out comes as children aged across families residing in districts with and without access to 3 K. In the full sample, 3K availability significantly increased mothers’ employment during the eligibility year. The 95% confidence interval ranges from 0.04 to 7.4 per centage points, overlapping with prior estimates spanning −3 to 4 percentage points (Fitzpatrick, 2010) and 0.06 to 11 percentage points (Humphries et al., 2024). These results align with the theoretical expectation that 3 K encourages mothers’ labor market entry or reentry. Contrary to the hypothesis that 3 K would raise disposable resources— either via increased maternal earnings or savings on child-care expenditures—I find no detectable change in the income-to-needs ratio. Consistent with the rise in hours spent in center-based care and the absence of a detectable decline in total child-care spending, 3 K availability likely shifted children into more paid care. Families appear to have purchased extended-day coverage to match work schedules, offsetting any savings from free 3K with out-of-pocket fees and yielding no net gain in disposable resources. Notably, however, material hardship declines by roughly 8 percentage points (about 22%) despite the absence of measured income gains. This divergence underscores well known limitations of income in capturing economic deprivation (Iceland & Bauman, 2007; Neckerman et al., 2016; Thomas, 2022) and highlights the value of multi dimensional measures. Prior work indicates that hardship responds to mental health and household stability as well as to income (Heflin, 2016; Sullivan et al., 2008), and policies that reduce instability can lessen hardship (Kim & Henly, 2021). The present findings suggest that access to 3K may improve economic well-being through non-income channels—such as employment-related medical care, school meals, improved child care stability, or lower stress. I do not find evidence of lasting effects once children age out of eligibility, as employment among comparison families subsequently converges. To contextualize the reduced-form findings, I relate the estimated effects of 3 K availability to the first-stage increase in 3 K enrollment. The 26.3-percentage-point increase in enrollment implies that the 3.9-percentage-point increase in maternal employment corresponds to an approximate treatment-on-the-treated effect of 14 percentage points. Similarly, the 7.8-percentage-point reduction in material hardship corresponds to an implied effect of-30 percentage points among families whose children enrolled in 3 K. These effects, while estimated in reduced form, suggest economically meaningful benefits of 3 K program participation. Subgroup analyses reveal significant immediate employment increases among mothers in two-parent households, but not among single mothers, mirroring patterns in several pre-K studies (Ilin et al., 2022;Li,2020;Sall,2014). Several mechanisms may account for this: single mothers are more likely to be in the labor force by age two (Byker, 2016), leaving less margin to respond, and they often have access to other publicly funded options (e.g., child-care subsidies, Early Head Start). In addition, the school-day schedule of 3K may not align with standard or nonstandard work hours, making after-3 p.m. coverage more challenging for single parents without a partner to bridge gaps. I do not find evidence that employment gains are concentrated among mothers without younger children. This pattern is consistent with prior evidence for U.S. pre K(Fitzpatrick, 2010; Ilin et al., 2022; Li, 2020; Sall, 2014) but differs from studies of kindergarten for five-year-olds, which often show stronger labor-supply responses among mothers without younger children (Gibbs et al., 2025). One explanation is that three-year-olds are closer in age to younger siblings and can often be placed in the same community-based early education settings, making maternal labor supply less dependent on the presence of a younger child than in school-based programs for older children. Further heterogeneity analyses show meaningful reductions in material hardship among families with lower baseline maternal employment—partnered parents, low-income families, and families with younger children—as well as among families with U.S.-born parents. Except for two-parent households, which exhibit significant employment gains, other groups do not show robust increases in employment or family income (considering both conventional and FDR-adjusted significance), suggesting that universal pre-K may enhance consumption-based well-being through multiple pathways beyond earnings. This study has limitations. The modest sample size may reduce power to detect small effects on family income. The identification strategy assumes that, absent the 3K program, outcomes in treated and comparison districts would have evolved similarly as children aged from one to seven; although family fixed effects address all time-invariant differences, time-varying shocks (e.g., differential COVID-19 impacts) cannot be completely ruled out. Despite these caveats, the study advances the literature in several ways. First, it provides the first evidence that a universal pre-K program can reduce material hardship, underscoring its potential as an economic support. Second, it offers new quasi experimental evidence of positive effects on mothers’ employment by examining New York City’s 3 K program. Third, it contributes to a growing body of work on dynamic parental economic effects of publicly funded early education (Brewer et al., 2022; Humphries et al., 2024) using longitudinal panel data. Finally, the subgroup results indicate that economic impacts are most pronounced among families with lower baseline maternal employment—partnered mothers, low-income families, and families with younger children—highlighting the importance of tailoring program design to hetero generous family needs.

Baby Bonuses

Cash transfer programs and child health and family economic outcomes: a systematic review

Fuller AE, Zaffar N, Cohen E, Pentland M, Siddiqi A, Vandermorris A, Van Den Heuvel M, Birken CS, Guttmann A, de Oliveira C. Cash transfer programs and child health and family economic outcomes: a systematic review. Can J Public Health. 2022 Jun;113(3):433-445. doi: 10.17269/s41997-022-00610-2. Epub 2022 Jan 27. PMID: 35088347; PMCID: PMC8794041. IMH

Children’s health and development are strongly related to family financial circumstances. Family poverty has been identified as an important predictor of adverse child outcomes (Blair & Raver, 2016; Oberg et al., 2016); its influence on child health and development is exerted both through direct reduction in material resources to meet basic needs such as food, shelter, education and health care, and by creating circumstances such as greater parental stress, which in turn are associated with poorer child health and developmental outcomes (Gershoff et al., 2007; Neckerman et al., 2016; Pascoe et al., 2016).

In the setting of family poverty, parents’ own health, including mental health, often suffers, as they face the stresses of trying to meet basic needs for the household under financial constraints, and because they may prioritize scarce household resources towards their children (Fitzsimons et al., 2017; Knowles et al., 2016; Sandel et al., 2018). Parental health is critical to child health as parents buffer the effects of low income on children (Blair & Raver, 2016) and, while there is a strong focus on reducing child poverty in policy and clinical interventions, the importance of promoting parental health cannot be overstated. When aiming to improve child health outcomes, it is important to recognize that parental stress and well-being are likely important intermediate factors in the pathway between poverty and child health and developmental outcomes, and that the stresses of poverty may be experienced uniquely by parents compared to adults without children, given their responsibilities towards their children (Lange et al., 2017).

A multitude of clinical and public health interventions have been developed to address the social and economic concerns of families (Gottlieb et al., 2017), targeting proximal and downstream consequences of poverty and low income, several of which have been specifically designed to benefit children. Beyond these more explicitly health-oriented interventions, there is increasing attention to the value of income transfers to families with children, which have the potential to directly address the root cause of child health consequences of poverty.

There has been some discussion in the economics literature around the types of cash transfers that are most effective (for example cash transfers vs. in-kind transfers, which directly provide goods or services a family may need) (de Oliveira, 2009). A previous systematic review examining the effects of income supplementation on infant health outcomes showed positive effects of certain cash transfer programs on outcomes such as birthweight and infant mortality (Siddiqi et al., 2018). The Manitoba Healthy Baby Prenatal Benefit is one Canadian example of a cash transfer intervention, which provides a prenatal cash benefit to expectant families, and has been shown to reduce income-related inequities in preterm birth, low birthweight, breastfeeding, and other perinatal and neonatal outcomes (Brownell et al., 2018; Brownell et al., 2016). Income supplementation is one policy strategy that has been used to mitigate the effects of poverty on the physical, mental, and behavioural health of children. Canada has had a federal policy of cash transfers to families since the family allowance program began in 1945, which has continued in various forms, including universal child benefits and income tax credits (Pentland et al., 2020). Most recently, the Canada Child Benefit (CCB) was introduced in 2016, and provides a tax-free, income-adjusted cash transfer to families with children (Canada Revenue Agency, 2017). Since the implementation of the CCB, there has been a gradual improvement in household income for families with children, accompanied by a reduction in child poverty (Statistics Canada, 2018).

Given that the stated goals of direct cash transfers often include promoting poverty reduction, female labour force participation, and fertility, as well as supporting the health of children and parents (Federal, Provincial and Territorial Ministers Responsible for Social Services, 2005), an evaluation of their impact on such outcomes is imperative, particularly in the context of Canada’s recent expansion of direct cash transfers in the form of the CCB. An understanding of the scope of evidence describing the effects of cash transfers, including the type and magnitude of transfer, on child and parental health, as well as family economic outcomes, can therefore help inform policymaking, particularly in the Canadian context of our current benefits programs, such as the CCB. A synthesis of this knowledge has become even more urgent in the setting of the COVID-19 pandemic, where family finances have become even more strained (Carroll et al., 2020). In this systematic review, we therefore aimed to examine the association between cash transfer programs and health outcomes in Canadian children (ages 0 to 18), as well as health and economic outcomes of their families.

Do Baby Bonuses Increase Fertility? Evidence From Michigan | Hoover Institution Do Baby Bonuses Increase Fertility? Evidence From Michigan IMH

This paper provides the first evidence on the fertility effects of a baby bonus in the United States. Using administrative birth records and a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that the Rx Kids program increased birth growth rates in municipalities after adoption. The results are robust to alternative specifications and placebo tests, indicating that the observed increase is unlikely to reflect chance or confounding shocks. To interpret these findings, we extend the classic Barro–Becker model of fertility choice to incorporate a per-child subsidy. The model shows formally how a baby bonus lowers the effective cost of child-rearing and shifts the optimal fertility decision, yielding higher steady-state population growth. Our empirical estimates align with these theoretical predictions: the observed fertility increase is consistent with a sizable decline in the implicit price of childbearing. Beyond their local relevance, these results speak to a growing international debate over declining fertility and long-term economic growth. Low fertility carries not only demographic and fiscal risks but also dynamic growth externalities when idea production and aggregate welfare depend on population size. By showing that even a modest, city-level baby bonus can measurably affect fertility behavior, our analysis highlights the potential of targeted pronatalist subsidies to partially offset these externalities. Several caveats remain. First, the long-run persistence of the fertility response is unknown; follow-up data will be essential to assess whether the initial increase endures or represents timing shifts. Second, while our setting is uniquely informative for U.S. policy, external validity to other regions or larger-scale programs may be limited by institutional and cultural differences. Finally, the fiscal cost per marginal birth and the distributional consequences deserve careful evaluation in future work. Overall, the Flint baby bonus offers a rare quasi-experimental test of the Barro–Becker insight that lowering the cost of children raises fertility. Our results suggest that well-designed, unconditional cash transfers at birth could potentially meaningfully influence demographic trajectories and, by extension, the economy’s long-run growth potential. Scaling such a baby bonus to a larger jurisdiction or region would be one next step as an area of future research that attempts to better understand general equilibrium effects of the policy. As declining fertility becomes an increasingly salient policy challenge, these findings provide a rigorous benchmark for the design and evaluation of broader pronatalist strategies.

South Korea proves economic costs of Baby Bonuses don’t outweigh increase in fertility.

Childbearing and the distribution of the reservation price of fertility: The case of the Korean baby bonus program - ScienceDirect IMH

We study the fertility effects of a pro-natalist Korean policy called the “baby bonus” program. Our findings suggest that although the program does increase the likelihood that a female will have a child, over 74% of the baby bonus budget is spent on infra-marginal females, that is, those that would still have chosen to have a child even in the absence of the program. We revisit some results in this literature and conclude that our findings are not specific to the Korean setting but instead part of a more widespread phenomenon. We estimate the share of births in the treated group that would still be observed even in the absence of the policy for similar programs implemented in Quebec and in Israel. Our estimates of the share of infra-marginal births were greater than 90% in every country we analyzed.

We use estimates from conditional choice probabilities obtained from standard binary choice models to report estimates of the unconditional distribution of the reservation price of fertility, which is the exact amount of monetary incentives required to induce a female to have a (or an additional) child. Our estimates of the distribution of the reservation price of fertility highlight a delicate balance that governments must strike: On the one hand, they want the program to induce an effect on birth rates. On the other hand, to do so, they must pay all of those that decide to have a child the exact same amount (a no third-degree discrimination assumption). As a result, the program’s spending must grow at a rate that is much faster than the program’s effect on fertility. Our results suggest that pro-natalist programs such as the Korean baby bonus are bound to have only minuscule effects on fertility levels. This suggests that alternative approaches in order to raise fertility might be more fruitful in achieving the policymakers’ goals.

Baby Bonus alleviates the income shock of birth and helps reduce childhood poverty.

Forget Fertility Rates—Here’s What a Baby Bonus Would Mean for Poverty | The New Republic IMH

President Donald Trump has reasserted his ostensible support for policies that conservative proponents believe will encourage parents to have more children, within a “pronatalist” framework that has been embraced by the likes of Vice President JD Vance and billionaire Elon Musk. Some of these policies incorporate an economic element, such as a one-time payment upon the birth of a child that some conservatives hope would incentivize married couples to have children.

But while it’s uncertain whether such policies would fulfill the explicit pronatalist objective of countering the falling American birth rate sought by the administration and its allies, they could have a significant economic impact by helping to alleviate the high costs of raising children in the United States. Leah Sargeant, a senior analyst for social policy at the Niskanen Center who recently wrote a report exploring the benefits of a $2,000 baby bonus, argued that the support it would offer to families is more relevant than questions of increasing fertility rates.

“What it’s intended to do is to get families who want a baby more of a reason they feel they can sustain the risk,” said Sargeant. “Having a baby is always opting into uncertainty, and the goal is to make it feel like you’re a little more stable to handle the tougher end of the spectrum of what could happen.”

Child-rearing in the United States is expensive, from the price of a hospital childbirth to increasingly high childcare costs. Moreover, unlike other developed countries, the United States does not have a paid family leave program. The expenses continue to add up through childhood: One recent study found that raising a child through age 18 costs parents roughly $300,000. A one-time payment of $5,000, of the sort that Trump proposed on the campaign trail, is not sufficient to single-handedly alleviate the economic shocks of childbearing.

A federal grant given to new parents upon birth could help absorb the economic shocks and dramatically reduce poverty rates in that first month of childhood. One 2023 study found that a $1,800 baby bonus would cut the poverty rate among mothers of newborns from roughly 26 percent to under 3 percent in the month of birth. That decrease would be even more significant if it was paired with a monthly expanded child tax credit, akin to what was temporarily implemented for six months in 2021.

Child Tax Credit

Expanding the Child Tax Credit is an inefficient counter to poverty.

Why we shouldn’t bemoan the loss of the expanded child tax credit | UMD School of Public Policy IMH

A wave of media laments greeted the Census Bureau’s recent report that child poverty more than doubled in 2022 because Congress failed to extend the covid-related expansion of the child tax credit. The program was a godsend to poor families, cutting child poverty nearly in half, and deserved to live on, the conventional wisdom said.

The conventional wisdom is wrong.

The expanded child tax credit, enacted in early 2021 as part of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan, was a perversely inefficient way to fight poverty. It made about 96 percent of all American families with children — meaning children of affluent as well as of nonworking parents — eligible for grants of as much as $3,600 each, based on the children’s age and parents’ income. Of the $93 billion in payments in 2021, $40 billion went to families with annual incomes of more than $60,000. And, because of complicated and easily abused rules, annual improper payments could be about 16 percent of the total — or almost $15 billion.

PaJoFo Ponderings

Explorer

Family Policy Topic Paper

Family Policy

Executive Summary

It’s timely

In the Age of 1NR trump solvency takeouts, international uncertainty and tariff thumpers, and enormous political polarization, the ideal topic is one that both sides of the political spectrum can understand, even if the specific reasons for why the policy counts aren’t shared.

It’s inherent

While Trump made a number of claims about policies he would support on the campaign trail, actual change has amounted to tiny modifications on IVF treatments and data tracking, modification to the Child Tax Credit, and $1,000 savings account with his name on them. That’s not much and …

Let’s talk about the CTC increase in OBBBA. It’s not nearly as big as you would think. The increase was tiny, adjusted for inflation, it’s less than it was in 2017, and it applies to very few families. The topic is very much still inherent.

And if you think the $1,000 dollar Trump accounts are going to be a major shift, that’s wrong too, for a bundle of reasons including:

1---It’s only $1,000, the average out-of-pocket cost of birth is more than three times that amount

2---It doesn’t go to parents, and it doesn’t come for almost twenty years

There’s disagreement

One of the things about this topic which makes it unique is that the problem is legible across the political divide. It isn’t polarized in the same way that so many topics of recent years are, despite significant disagreements on how solutions should be implemented

Balancing desires for universal coverage with cost effectiveness and maximizing benefit is tricky and hashing out what approaches work best is controversial to say the least

There’s serious conflict on how to support families---supply or demand side childcare funding is more complex than just programmatic efficiency

Novices will love it

Family policy is incredibly accessible.

It’s domestic

We believe this is a domestic topic. It deals with domestic policy and is not explicitly legal (with maybe one or two options for courts). It isn’t international because it is about the United States’ domestic policy. There’s not much more to say on this one.

Proposed resolutions

Abortion restrictions, while controversial, give teams the option to go beyond typical util based arguments and delve further into ethics than the typical topic. We don’t think this is essential, but it’s a major element of public discourse, promises interesting debates, and fits the theme.

Proposal Two, open-ended list---Resolved: The United States federal government should adopt a family policy, including baby bonuses, universal early childhood education, increased access to assisted reproductive technology, expanding the child tax credit, or restricting all or nearly all abortion.

This list keeps the elements of the prior list, but open the way for more sweeping proposals and reforms that go far beyond the list with “including.” This opens the way for total economic restructuring and other large scale proposals that would change the way families are built in the US.

While arguably a more specific term, pronatalism is highly politically charged and probably results in effects T debates which no one wants to have. That said, it is an option if the community wants a topic constrained to birthrates rather than family formation broadly.

Proposal Four, open-ended: Resolved: The United States federal government should adopt a substantial family policy in the United States.

What are we arguing on the Aff?

Baby Bonuses

Affs can defend baby bonuses, which serve as an income smoothing and allow earlier and more frequent births

These policies can also be used to remedy poverty and income disparities

Advantages based on increased birthrates see internal links based on economy, social security and entitlements, debt, and national security

Early Childhood Education

Affs can defend universal early childhood care and education---and can debate whether supply or demand side subsidies are the optimal strategy to both improve childcare outcomes and also reduce poverty and ensure worker security

And there’s legislation on the topic like the CCFWA which uses more of a demand side approach than the prior advocate

Assisted Reproductive Technology

Expanding access to assisted reproductive technology (like IVF) reduces inequity and is key to reduce infertility---and while state plans show proof of concept, ERISA and Medicaid means that federal action is key

And expanding access to assistive reproductive technology helps cope with falling sperm counts

Yes, actual people say this is existential

Expanded Child Tax Credit

Other advocates also support a substantial increases to the child tax credit, marriage bonuses, and childcare subsidy reform in the direction of block grants---these proposals span the political spectrum

Competing proposals from both left and right leaning groups are both confident that existing programs are insufficient for many reasons (especially how much of the credit is refundable)---here’s an example defending a Democrat proposal

Abortion Restrictions

Congress could declare the unborn persons through a statutory interpretation of the 14th amendment and give the Attorney General authority to sue for preventive relief or establish a private cause of action against states that do not prohibit abortion

There’s a courts aff in here too

“If there’s even a 5% chance that we’re right, you vote Aff to save 51,000 lives every year”---yeah, yeah, like it or not, try-or-die framing means that this is an interesting ethical debate (and plus anyone brave enough to run this would be having fun)

And if you think the K teams will have a field day hitting this aff, you might be right, but don’t count the aff out yet

If you’re brave, this might even be the start of a K-Aff, but we’ll give you some other options too:

K-Aff: Paid Domestic Labor

Debaters could argue that domestic labor is something that should be compensated by the federal government in order to reorder the way that labor and wealth is valued and distributed.

If parenting were counted in GDP calculations, it would be minimum 9% of GDP.

Other K Affs

The authorial team for this paper isn’t wildly experienced with kritiks, but we’re confident that, if nothing else, there is plenty of ground for teams to negate the resolution.

What are we arguing on the Neg?

Degrowth DA

Debaters can defend population decline as a positive change, arguing that the earth is nearing physical limitations and that a shrinking population is better than one that rapidly collapses during crisis.

Politics DA

But at the same time, things like Assisted Reproductive Technology burns MAGA pro-life voters

Econ/Debt DA

You didn’t think that this would be free did you? These policies come with price tags that range from the tens of billions to even trillions

And IVF isn’t any cheaper

Overpopulation DA

Debaters also have the option of arguing that the effect of successful fertility rebound is enough to push the system beyond its current capacity by increasing the youth dependency rate

Immigration CP

Neg teams can argue that population decline can be solved by immigration

The aff does actually have answers to this

States CP

States can do a lot of these policies to at least some degree---creating tax credits, subsidizing daycares, and, infamously, abortion restrictions.

Here’s an example of some childcare policies that were going last year

Cap K

Debaters can argue that aff mechanisms are a move to coercive pronatalism with the intent of fueling the machine of industrial capitalism

Eugenics DA/K

There are a lot of people who don’t like policies intended to increase birth rates---Teams can argue that pro-birth policies are either ethnonationalist or reductive (though debate is already pretty deep in the EA headspace lol)

Increased IVF is a slippery slope to eugenics---Or at least that’s something the neg can argue

Queer Theory K

Debaters can argue that reproductive futurism structures all politics and that prioritizing an imaginary Child justifies present heteronormative oppression.

Fat K

Critical fatness studies is underrepresented in debate, this topic could change that. Debaters could interrogate biases in reproductive healthcare and family formation for fat bodies.

There aren’t many topics that will give you links this good

Appendix