America doesn’t value Black motherhood. Is it any wonder Black fertility is down?

Recently, I was sitting with my baby girl watching “The Princess and the Frog” when something hit me. Tiana, the first Black Disney princess, is the only one whose dream required a double shift to deserve it.

Sure, other princesses work — Mulan fights a war and Belle reads books in a shop. But their stories are about love, magic and destiny. Tiana’s story is about labor as the price of worthiness. She works two jobs and saves every penny, because she doesn’t just get to wish on a star. The movie tells us she has to earn it.

That message — that we have to earn everything first, including our dreams — is a message too many Black girls know by heart. We don’t just get to want — we have to deserve it first. I worry that idea is showing up in our birth rates.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a provisional report showing America’s fertility rate had dropped to a record low in 2025. The numbers don’t break out by race yet, but if the trends hold, we know what they’ll show. From 2023 to 2024, births declined 4 percent for Black women, the steepest drop of any racial group. It is a sharp difference from 30 years ago, when Black women had significantly more children than their white counterparts. Today that gap has nearly closed.  

This isn’t cause for celebration. Black women lost 251,000 jobs between January and August last year, and at the height of the summer, we accounted for nearly 55 percent of all female job losses, despite making up just 14 percent of the female workforce. And it’s the women who did everything “right” who got hit the hardest: college-educated Black women saw their employment rate fall 3.5 percentage points in a single year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. These two facts — collapsing employment and collapsing fertility — are treated as separate stories, but they are not.

Research has consistently found that when Black economic conditions worsen, Black birth rates fall. During the Great Recession, Pew found that Black Americans were more than twice as likely as whites to delay having a child. During the pandemic, while births among white women eventually rebounded, Black birth rates kept falling. This is not a coincidence. Black women are disproportionately their families’ breadwinners, and when our economic security becomes precarious, our birth rates follow.

We are watching it happen again and doing nothing about it.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 1996 welfare-to-work law. Whatever you think of that policy, many of us Black women spent those three decades running from the “welfare queen” stigma. We got the degrees. We waited to get married. We delayed childbearing. We worked, then worked some more. And still, the jobs are gone, our fertility is declining, and the gap between the children we want and the children we have keeps widening. 

So as we come out of Black Maternal Health Week and head into National Infertility Awareness Week, I want to ask: does this country actually care about Black babies? Black women already die in childbirth at three times the rate of white women, so the track record isn’t good. But the Medicaid picture makes it even clearer. 

One in four Black women rely on Medicaid for health coverage. Medicaid covers 65 percent of all births to Black mothers, which is twice the rate of white women. It is one of the most common sources of insurance for Black women of childbearing age. And right now, only three jurisdictions — New York, Utah and Washington, D.C. — offer any Medicaid coverage for infertility treatment at all, and even that is limited to ovulation medications. Meanwhile, 25 states require private insurers to cover some fertility care.  

At the federal level, this Congress just cut nearly a trillion dollars from Medicaid, with nearly 10 million people set to lose benefits over the next 10 years. 

The message is stark: If you have a good job with good insurance, you have options. Lose that job, land on Medicaid, and you have almost nothing. The babies this country is willing to subsidize have always come from families with money. All too often, those aren’t Black babies. 

This isn’t only a Black issue; one in six people struggle with infertility. Expanding Medicaid coverage would help. Congress should pass legislation requiring Medicaid to cover fertility treatments. Democrats have tried with the Access to Fertility Treatment and Care Act, but the bill, which was reintroduced this Congress, has been sitting in committee, with seemingly no bipartisan support.  

But let’s be honest about why the Medicaid conversation stays dead in Washington. This country has never been comfortable giving poor people, especially poor Black women, something they didn’t “earn” first. Babies included. 

You cannot tell Black women to work constantly, gut the federal jobs where we built stability, offer nothing when we can’t have the families we want, and call yourself pro-family. If you want more babies, give Black women stable jobs that don’t disappear. Give us health coverage that treats fertility like the urgent medical issue it is. And stop making us earn the right to dream. 

Tiana got her restaurant. She deserved it. But she also deserved not to have to work two jobs before anyone decided she was worthy of dreaming. 

Reniqua Allen-Lamphere is a journalist, documentary filmmaker and author. She is the founder of Oshun Griot, a fertility platform for people of color, and the author of “Fertility Noir,” forthcoming from Penguin Random House in 2028. 

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