Kari Lake urges US to adopt Hungary's 'baby bonus' policy to curb abortions. Does it work?

When U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake talks about abortion policy these days, she often points to Hungary as an example America should follow.

Lake, the Republican front-runner, usually presents Hungary as having cut its abortions without changing its laws, and promoting families by reducing women’s tax liability for every child they produce. Their taxes reach zero forever with the fourth child, she says.

Lake has called her visit there last year “a real eye-opening experience” that “completely changed my view of how we should deal with this complicated, difficult issue.”

But Lake has left out critical details in a story that touches on abortion rights, women’s rights and family creation in Hungary, a former Soviet-bloc country whose authoritarian government has become the symbol of Europe’s backsliding on democracy.

For one, abortion rates in Hungary were falling long before the tax change. The government there made abortion more onerous in 2022, and the pro-family policy Lake repeatedly touts effectively punishes women who divorce.

The pleasant, seemingly painless changes as described by Lake stand at odds with the experience of Hungarians critical of life under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

Krisztina Les, coordinator of the reproductive rights project at Patent Association, which supports abortion rights in Hungary, said the tax incentives and abortion outcomes “have nothing to do with each other.”

“(Lake) kind of mixes it up like, ‘Oh, there are less abortions because it’s good to have children.’ There are less abortions for many, many reasons, but not because it’s so much fun to have children here because of these tax policies,” Les said.

Gábor Scheiring, a former member of the Hungarian parliament during Orbán’s return to power in 2010, largely agreed.

Lake’s comment “says nothing about abortion; it’s about the pro-natalist tax subsidies,” said Sheiring, who is now an assistant professor with Georgetown University Qatar and a visiting fellow with the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.

“Those are significant, but also highly regressive. They redistribute money upwards. The more you earn, the more money you get from the Hungarian state. … This family policy is a typical neoconservative show designed to enrich the upper-middle class and strengthen the national bourgeoisie as Orbán and friends call it.”

Lake’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

With immigrants unwelcome in Hungary, more births are needed

Wedged between Austria and Romania in eastern Europe, Hungary has about 9.7 million residents, about the same as the metro-area population of Chicago.

For more than a decade, Orbán has pushed the former Soviet country away from Western-influenced democracy to authoritarianism under his Fidesz political party.

Orbán has reshaped that nation’s judiciary and its politics, sometimes modeled after U.S. conservative policies.

His zealous anti-immigration rhetoric has long drawn comparisons to former President Donald Trump’s views and made Orbán a political outlier in the eurozone.

While some European leaders have looked to immigrants to boost their economies, Orbán has sought to preserve what he casts as Hungarian cultural purity in part by encouraging more births.

“Hungary does not need a single migrant for the economy to work, or the population to sustain itself, or for the country to have a future,” he said in 2016, according to London’s Guardian.

“This is why there is no need for a common European migration policy: Whoever needs migrants can take them, but don’t force them on us, we don’t need them.”

At another point, Orbán said, “For us migration is not a solution but a problem ... not medicine but a poison, we don’t need it and won’t swallow it.”

In 2022, Orbán inveighed against a “mixed-race” future.

“We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race,” he said according to the Associated Press. “Migration has split Europe in two — or I could say that it has split the West in two.”

“One half is a world where European and non-European peoples live together. These countries are no longer nations. They are nothing more than a conglomeration of peoples.”

At a time of falling birth rates, Orbán offered the tax incentives that Lake has lionized.

“In all of Europe there are fewer and fewer children, and the answer of the West to this is migration,” Orbán said in a 2019 speech that is the Hungarian equivalent of the State of the Union. “They want as many migrants to enter as they are missing kids, so that the numbers will add up.

"We Hungarians have a different way of thinking. Instead of just numbers, we want Hungarian children. Migration for us is surrender."

Orbán’s policy aims and governing style has helped make him a hero to the right. Lake praised him in a tweet as “a strong leader — the GREATEST in Europe. That’s why the media attacks him relentlessly.”

Orbán and the American right make a connection

Lake met with Orbán last year during her visit to the Conservative Political Action Conference held in Budapest. She spoke at CPAC then and recorded a video played for CPAC in Hungary again last month.

She wasn’t the only Arizona politician there: U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., who has long praised Orbán, attended in person both years and commended that country on another policy front: border security.

“Hungary’s immigration policy should serve as a model to the United States in terms of border, border security and immigration enforcement,” he said in April, according to an account by CNN.

In a 2023 interview with “Hungary Today,” Lake praised what Trump has called the “special friendship” America has with Hungary.

“Your policies have focused on families, and as a result, children are playing on safe streets,” she said. “It also involves giving people freedoms, prioritizing their security, and putting your own citizens first.”

In April, Lake released a video about her views on abortion rights after the Arizona Supreme Court upheld an 1864 near-total ban on abortion. Lake had long advocated for that law to go back into effect, but backpedaled when the state’s highest court ordered it to happen.

She cited Hungary’s tax incentives as a policy prescription to help manage the “difficult issue.”

“In Hungary, what they did I thought was so amazing. They started with their tax rate, and when you get married, they give you a cut in your tax rate. … By the time a mother has four children, she never pays taxes again. That’s called a baby bonus. I think we should do that here in America. We bail out banks and multinational corporations all the time. When’s the last time we’ve given an assist to a struggling mother in a family?”

Incentivizing family growth a priority in Hungary

In 2010, when Orbán began his second stint as prime minister, Hungary had the lowest birth rate in the 27-member European Union, records show. Every member of the EU recorded birth rates below the 2.1 children per woman generally regarded as the replacement rate needed to sustain current population levels.

Orbán sought to encourage Hungarian women to have more children and has taken several fitful steps to do so.

In 2015, the government rolled out subsidies for buying or building homes for families having children that got more generous with more kids.

The conservative-leaning Institute for Family Studies estimated that families with two children could receive the equivalent of $18,000 to $35,000. Those with three or more children could get $50,000 to $80,000.

Under Orbán, Hungary’s birth rate rose from the bottom of the EU to about average, according to Eurostat, which compiles the international data.

Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociology professor at Princeton University with a special background in Hungary, said Orbán’s government has succeeded in convincing others his program is working, but there are signs it isn’t.

She pointed to figures from Hungary’s Central Statistical Office showing the country averaged about 92,000 annual births when Orbán’s baby bonuses were announced in 2015.

By mid-2017, when those motivated by the policy change might have begun having children, the average birth rate climbed to nearly 94,000. But as of 2023, the 12-month average number had fallen to 83,000.

That is lower than before the policy began.

“The Hungarians have been very good at advertising their pro-family policies, but I’m afraid that those policies haven’t actually produced a baby boom,” she told The Arizona Republic in an email.

“There was a very short-term uptake followed by a regression to the previous trend. So I’m not sure that Hungary is really the country to copy if you want to create incentives for women to have children.”

Abortion in Hungary stemmed from mass rapes

Meanwhile, Hungarian women have had abortion rights for decades, but that owed to the ravages of war, not women’s rights.

Rapes by Soviet soldiers during World War II — 200,000 in Budapest alone by one estimate — led to a liberalization of abortion rights in eastern Europe, according to a 2023 academic paper on Hungary’s abortion history co-authored by Andrea Pet?, a professor of gender studies at Central European University based in Vienna.

In 1945, Hungary temporarily legalized abortion because of the sexual violence.

Beginning in 1952, it formed two levels of “abortion committees” to consider requests for the procedure. Rejected applicants “were registered with the local maternity ward to monitor them in case they sought an illegal abortion,” Pet? wrote.

After the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1956 and a subsequent uprising against Soviet rule, Hungary permanently legalized abortion. It maintained the review committees with varying degrees of authority to deny abortions into the late 1980s.

The country allowed abortions up to 12 weeks into pregnancy without requiring justification, a standard that exists to this day. After 12 weeks, a woman can seek an abortion up to 24 weeks into pregnancy but must demonstrate it is a medical necessity or that the fetus most likely faces birth defects.

Hungary made the abortion process more difficult

Whatever the rules, Hungary has seen a substantial drop in abortions that has lasted generations.

Abortions peaked in the late 1960s as the use of contraception rose and in the 1970s Hungary promoted motherhood, Pet? wrote.

In 1990, Hungary recorded 90,000 abortions, according to government records. In 2001, it had 56,000. In 2008, Hungary had 44,000 and it has fallen every year since then, reaching 21,000 in 2023, according to preliminary figures.

That means the abortion totals were falling for years before Orbán’s family creation policy.

While Hungary’s main abortion law remains largely unchanged, the government there has added new provisions to discourage the procedure.

In 2000, Hungary began requiring two consultations with doctors three days apart before allowing abortions that must be performed within eight days. And for the first time, Hungary also required women to pay for abortion services.

Patent Association, the Hungarian advocacy organization for women’s reproductive health and safety, has criticized the hurdles the government there has imposed on those seeking abortion services.

“Before the surgery, they must attend two mandatory counseling sessions, during the first of which the employee of the family protection office will try to persuade them to continue the pregnancy,” the organization wrote on its website.

“The legal aid service of Patent Association receives complaints more and more frequently that it is getting hard to book a timely appointment for consultations, so someone can possibly miss the 12-week deadline.”

In 2012, Hungary declared fetal life begins at conception and outlawed medication abortions. It is a statement that has had no practical effect to this point, but could serve as the rationale for future restrictions, said Les, who works for Patent Association.

The way women obtain abortions has also fallen behind other Western practices. Medication abortion is the most common abortion method used in the U.S. since it gained governmental approval more than 20 years ago, but it is forbidden in Hungary.

With the two-pill combination outlawed, women must undergo surgery for the procedure instead.

In September 2022, Hungary followed the lead of U.S. state-level laws to require doctors to present pregnant women with “fetal vital signs presented in a clearly identifiable manner” before an abortion. It is commonly referred to as a “heartbeat” rule.

With the 2022 change, the government didn’t amend the law. Instead, it issued a one-sentence decree mandating women must see evidence of fetal life.

“It was really sneaky,” Les said. “Since then, women need to listen to the fetal heartbeat before being approved to have an abortion. It doesn’t change their minds; it makes them feel awful. … It’s traumatizing.”

After the change, Hungarians did something that seldom happens in that country: They protested.

About a thousand took to the streets of Budapest to protest a change they viewed as cruel to women.

“This was not a request that the population or society has made,” Les said. “This was something Orbán or Fidesz just wanted to do.”

In 2023, the Pew Research Center surveyed people in 24 countries and found that clear majorities in the U.S., 10 European countries and Canada supported legal abortion rights in “all or most cases.”

In Hungary, 81% felt that way, which placed it sixth among the European countries surveyed.

Majorities disapproved of such abortion rights in Mexico, and four countries in Africa and South America.

Women in Hungary face special costs, hurdles

Abortion in Hungary costs the equivalent of about $111 in a country where the average income is $550 monthly, Les said.

Hungary remains a patriarchal country where there is significant pressure to get married and have children, she added.

Abortions in Hungary must be performed at a hospital by a team of doctors. While the country has procedural hurdles for women, those who do need the service receive good health care but are subjected to other social pressure, she said.

“Women who give birth are in the same room as women who wait for an abortion, so that adds another layer of emotional difficulty,” Les said.

Les said the baby bonuses only end income taxes for those who have four or more children. Families still pay a general tax that supports health care and the equivalent of a sales tax. Those who have three children or fewer must repay the loan at low interest rates.

And there are financial penalties for leaving even abusive relationships, Les said.

“These people get married in order to get these loans and to buy a house, and this means they cannot get a divorce. If you get a divorce, you need to pay this loan back with an extra interest rate," Les said.

“On our legal help line, we get tons and tons of women who cannot get divorced from their abusers because of this. They bought the house with this (credit) and all of these subsidies. They don’t have money to pay it back … so they cannot leave their abusers.

“This makes women really vulnerable to domestic abuse.”

Exchanging swipes: Mark Lamb assails Kari Lake as unproven while she calls him 'coward' in GOP Senate forum

Les theorized broad public support for abortion rights is what has prevented more drastic rollbacks from the government.

“We cannot even get close to talk to politicians, for example. We, as in civil society members, are cut off from any decision-making power. Nothing. It’s really hard to catalyze any change.”

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake urges 'baby bonus' policy to curb abortions. Does it work?