The Trump administration wants women to have more babies while their policies are making the cost of welcoming a child skyrocket—and we now have the receipts to prove it. A new analysis shows Trump’s tariffs have made essential baby products more expensive by a whopping 24 percent in just two months, a change one Democratic senator is calling a “tax on babies.”
The analysis by the Joint Economic Committee—Minority, which the committee released exclusively to Glamour, analyzed how the prices of five essential baby items changed before Trump’s tariffs were implemented on April 1 and June 9. It found the items—a convertible car seat, a bassinet/crib, a stroller, a high chair, and a baby monitor—rose by a total of $98, nearly a quarter increase from their previous total cost.
“New parents already have their budgets stretched thin by all the products that they have to buy for their child—the last thing they need is a new tax on babies created by President Trump,” Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, who is a ranking member on the committee, tells Glamour.
To do their analysis, the committee chose some of the most popular products in each category on Amazon and then noted how much the price had increased since the tariffs were announced on Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” on April 2.
Every single item rose in price, with the most dramatic being the car seat. The product they tracked, the Graco SnugRide Lite LX Infant Car Seat, rose by $43 in this two-month period, with its current price now $139. The other items rose in price by between $10 to $20 in the same time period.
Of course, as any parent knows, you don’t just need to purchase these five essentials. When the registry website Babylist examined a wider range of products babies need, like bouncers, activity centers, carriers, and diaper bags, the report says it found a 17% increase across the board—$400 per family. What this means in practice is that if all new parents in the US had to pay these extra costs in 2025, they would spend $875 million extra compared to before the tariffs went into effect.
While the price increases are an added burden on American parents, they aren’t shocking. When Trump announced the economic sanctions against countries like China and Mexico in April, everyone from politicians to business owners and new parents warned that we were likely to see big price spikes on these key items.
And this is in addition to all the challenges American parents already face, from soaring childcare costs to the loss of reproductive rights and no federal paid leave. Now, as Representative Kelly Morrison, a Democrat from Minnesota, told Glamour at the time, parents are facing yet another burden.
“There was a lot of rhetoric during the campaign about making it easier to have babies in our country. And boy, the policy is not matching the rhetoric,” she said. “If anything, we’re making it much harder to raise a family in the United States. We already make it so hard…we’re rolling back reproductive rights. We don’t offer paid family leave in the United States, and now we’re just going to pile on new expenses.”
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