Trump Can’t Put A $5,000 Price Tag On Black Women’s Bodies

Would you birth a baby for a Birkin? Or pay off your student loans? Contribute towards a down payment for that dream home? It’s almost an unbelievable question to ask on Beyoncé’s internet in 2025, yet it can’t be ignored: What’s your price for parenthood? Donald Trump thinks he has an answer, and it’s as ludicrous as you may think: $5,000. I’ll let you digest that for a minute. 

You good? Alright.

According to The New York Times, Trump and his advisors are reviewing proposals to jolt the nation’s slumping birth rate by encouraging Americans to crank out a conveyor belt of star-spangled kids. One of those proposals includes a $5,000 federal payout for new mothers. 

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Trump said in a press briefing on April 22, when asked about the would-be baby bonus. There’s no word yet if or when Trump will decide on these proposed measures. However, one glance at any of those federally-banned history books infers that Black women stand to lose the most from trusting institutions to respect our bodily autonomy, especially when those institutions are predominantly governed by white, politically conservative men. Trump’s plan is just the latest chapter in America’s long patriarchal history of using—you guessed it—money to control the population’s most valuable and vulnerable.

We can’t talk about vulnerability without recounting the immeasurable debt American medicine owes us. Do yourself a favor and take a moment to revisit the legacy of Fannie Lou Hammer, a Jim Crow Era civil rights activist from Mississippi who, in 1961, underwent surgery to have a uterine tumor removed. The white male doctor, however, instead performed a hysterectomy without her consent. Hammer was among countless low-income Black women forcibly sterilized through the crudely named “Mississippi appendectomy,” as they’ve come to be immortalized.

American plantation physician J. Marion Sims, a white man, is credited for early advancements in obstetrics and gynecology in the 1800s. Yet, he operated repeatedly—without anesthesia—on three enslaved Black women known only as Betsey, Lucy and Anarcha. More than a century later, their anguish and his cruelty are largely downplayed, if not erased entirely from the public consciousness. And there’s too many more stories centering America’s full embrace of eugenics, finding Black people “unfit” to breed and therefore enacting a state-sanctioned culling of the herd. Learn about these forgotten narratives through the National Institute of Health before these stories, too, are erased. 

Just another reason why some folks in Washington don’t want us to read this history—or remember.

What does any of this have to do with a $5,000 baby bonus, you ask? Think about it: before the abolition of slavery, Black women birthed babies that, in turn, were viewed as property—born to be sold. Only then did they have renewable value, which is why I can’t help but fear that, under Trump’s authoritarian rule, we will find ourselves in a perilous situation and manipulated. Or, at worst, brutalized to drive Washington’s bottom line. And in doing so, lead to the potential harm Black and brown children could face in a capitalistic society built on the backs of their forced, free labor.

I fear that should we take the bait, whatever system the government uses to track and allocate this baby bonus will ultimately be used for more sinister purposes. And I fear that there are legitimately Black women who are hurting and that $5,000 could make a huge difference in their lives, but this Faustian bargain extracts too heavy a toll.

The Thirteenth Amendment remains in place (for now), but what is stopping Trump from proposing that Black women “donate” said new babies to the U.S. Government, where they could populate a dedicated wing of one of those work camps Robert Kennedy Jr. seems to be obsessed with? And when they’re big enough, they’ll work in dangerous and often demeaning manufacturing jobs that make Ryan Coogler’s Sinners look like A Goofy Movie. 

Or, they may get deported to Supermax prisons abroad, which, coincidentally, they also helped build. So, basically, slavery with better marketing. 

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told ABC News recently that Trump is “proudly implementing policies to uplift American families.” Leavitt added that Trump “wants America to be a country where all children can safely grow up and achieve the American Dream.” But what does that even mean in a rapidly diversifying country of both ideas and identities?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the national birth rate declined an average of two percent per year between 2015 and 2020, with a four percent drop from 2019 to 2020. In the agency’s 2023 provisional report, the most recent on file, the number of births for Black women declined by four percent between 2022 and 2023, compared to a three percent for white women, and two percent for Asian women.

Meanwhile, Hispanic women’s birth rates rose by one percent. If those numbers are any indication of the Trump Administration’s plan to restore the “American Dream,” it becomes clear why mass deportations—of both undocumented and legal residents—and increasing national birth rates remain top of mind: Make America Great Again (For the Right Kind of American!).  

All of this to say, is it a far stretch to question if the American Dream, propped up by the white nuclear family of four and equally white picket fence, is merely another scene from Trump’s bygone ‘50s sitcom fantasy? One where minorities, immigrants and LGBTIA+ people knew their place in the fine margins of the screen?

It’s more than a little ironic that the federal government is considering paying American women to birth babies when we were one scapegoated as “Welfare Queens” in the 1970s and ‘80s. Ronald Regan’s 1976 presidential campaign fueled the painful and now iconic stereotype that Black women leech money from hard-working taxpayers, popping out Bebe’s kids, each from a different man, then making it rain food stamps while twerking their way to the bank. 

But under the guise of rewarding all American women with five grand, it suddenly becomes en vogue to fall into a federal safety net? Black women may not explicitly be named as the exception here, but we’ve seen this play out throughout the Kardashification of American culture, from talon-length acrylics to BBLs and failings of contemporary white feminist movements. Autonomy is for everyone but us.

Perhaps the most insulting part of this potential baby cash is that $5,000 doesn’t go as far as it used to, and it’s certainly not a particularly strong start to actually raise a child. According to data analyzed by Fair Health, the average cost for a vaginal childbirth in America is $28,654, including negotiated out-pocket patient costs. For a cesarean section, that price ticks up to $37,653. 

Of course, final costs vary by state and insurance policy and may increase should there be any medical complications. All the more reason that $5,000 is barely scratching the surface. That money could be better invested into expanding high-quality maternal health services to all Americans, whether they have health insurance or not. But let the pro-privatization pundits tell it, a good-faith effort to actually improve the lives of American mothers will only usher in a new generation of “Welfare Queens.”

Black women still have the highest mortality rates in the country. According to the CDC, 49.9 out of every 100,000 Black women died during childbirth in 2022, significantly outpacing white women (19.0), Hispanic women (16.9), and Asian women (13.2). We are more likely to have our health concerns downplayed or ignored. We remember what happened to Serena Williams, who experienced a pulmonary embolism, developing blot clots in her lungs and a slew of other life-threatening complications shortly after welcoming her eldest daughter, Olympia, in 2017. 

Reflecting back on that traumatic experience, and revealing that doctors consistently ignored her complaints, Williams wrote in a 2022 essay for Elle, “No one was really listening to what I was saying.” After undergoing multiple surgeries, Williams recalled staying adamant about her own care, insisting her doctor order a bilateral CT scan of her lungs and a heparin drip to address the blood clots. “Being heard and appropriately treated was the difference between life or death for me,” she wrote.

And there are countless others you probably know with similar harrowing stories. Or, maybe it’s you.

With the threat of Trump’s tariffs looming, everything could stand to get more expensive practically overnight, including food, diapers, furniture and clothing, quite literally the basic building blocks for any new parent. Collectively, we’re already crashing out over the price of cis-gendered, MAGA-rich eggs in Trump’s America. I hesitate to believe any of this would be easier when bringing a child into the world for the purpose of cashing a check with his name scrawled on it. 

It feels like the same tactic—or better yet, distraction—Trump used during his first presidential term amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, it was economic stimulus checks from the Federal Reserve that likely would have gone out whether he had been elected or not, because we were living through an unprecedented global crisis. But it was enough to sway some people that Trump had done something for them.

If you take nothing else from my plea, it’s this: My argument is not about who should have children, how many, or when. That decision is as personal as your own DNA or between you and your God. But, I implore you to consider your why. Think long and hard before succumbing to the Trump Administration’s apparent belief that Black women can be easily bought, that we’re nothing more than a swollen teat nursing a nationalistic agenda that doesn’t quantify our worth.