A Bill for Babies

Congress considers a newborn credit for the fourth trimester

Some exciting news! Last week, Reps. David Valadao (R-CA), Tom Suozzi (D-NY), Blake Moore (R-UT), and Debbie Dingell (D-MI) introduced the Supporting Newborn Parents Act, which would establish a $2000 newborn credit for families right after a baby is born.

The bill is a ways from becoming law, but getting a team of bipartisan, serious representatives behind the effort is a good first step toward seeing this bill included in a big tax package down the road. The bill got endorsements from serious think tanks on the left and right, too.

If you’d like to go into the weeds on the design of the program, I’ve got a detailed writeup here. And I’ve got a short explainer below

For the last two years, I’ve been working as a Senior Policy Analyst at the Niskanen Center, with a focus on family policy. I’ll still be doing some family policy work with them as a Senior Fellow, but, this week, I’ve started a new job as the Editorial Director at the Institute for Progress. This blog remains just for me, without being run by any of my employers, past or present.

And I’ve got a recent piece up at the Dispatch on the flexibility of people’s plans for future children. The data you collect on fertility plans can change a lot depending on how you ask the questions:

One pilot study contrasted how women answered a stark question about whether they were currently trying to get pregnant, offering the options “yes,” “no,” or “don’t know,” and found that only 2 percent of women picked the ambivalent answer. But when they offered the same women a broader set of options (“trying to get pregnant,” “wouldn’t mind getting pregnant,” “don’t know,” “wouldn’t mind avoiding pregnancy” and “trying to avoid a pregnancy”) 10 times as many women (22 percent) picked one of the middle three ambivalent options.

Plus…

In practice, most fertility questions are more complicated than yes or no. It can be helpful to talk about fertility intentions in the aggregate, but not so helpful to ask a friend, “So, are you done, or do you want another?” when she’s holding a newborn in her arms. The answer she may give immediately postpartum isn’t necessarily the answer she’ll give by the time her cycles resume, or when this baby becomes a toddler.

There are some contexts in which “how many children do you want?” is a helpful question. If you know you hope for three or more, then, realistically, you’d like to try to get started sooner. If you want a larger family, then advice that presumes babyhood is a brief, passing interruption of your real life won’t be helpful to you. High attachment parenting has a very different cost for a mother of one than a mother of four. But, for the most part, you only have to make choices about one baby at a time. You can’t decide whether you feel ready for baby N+2 until after you’ve had baby N+1.

I had fun writing this, and I’d be curious about your own experience making plans about future children.

Did you ever feel you were ‘done’? Did that feeling persist or shift?

Have you had times with ambiguous feelings about trying to conceive or avoid? Did you try to take an ambivalent path?

(Have you called your congressperson to ask them to sign on to the Supporting Newborn Parents bill?)