Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?

USA Today

18-05-2025

Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream? | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on May 18, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: It's well known that childcare has become extraordinarily expensive, costing many families nearly a quarter of their income. The fertility rate, as we've covered previously on The Excerpt, remains at a historic low. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is floating a range of ideas to encourage people to have more children while encouraging women to stay home to care for them. Have these trends paved the way for the pronatalism movement to gain traction? Karen Guzzo, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, joins The Excerpt to share her expertise on the movement.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, May 18th, 2025. It's well known that child care has become extraordinarily expensive, costing many families nearly a quarter of their income. Recent study out from Lending Tree estimated that it costs $300,000 to raise a child over the course of 18 years. Fertility rate, as we've covered on The Excerpt, remains at an historic low. The Trump administration is also floating ideas to encourage people to have more children, such as a baby bonus. Have these trends paved the way for the pronatalism movement, which is having a moment. Karen Guzzo, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is here to parse this out with us. Thanks for joining me, Karen.
Karen Guzzo:
Yes, happy to be here.
Dana Taylor:
First, can you describe what the Pronatalism movement is and the views that the people who support it espouse?
Karen Guzzo:
So pronatalism is really about raising birth rates at the country level, at the macro level. It's interested in and worried about are birth rates too low? Do they need to be higher? And there's a lot of debate over what it means for fertility rates to be too low and what might be the best ways to address it. But it's really focused on getting the whole country to have more births.
Dana Taylor:
It's costly to choose to have a child, let alone several. Is that just one of the reasons why people are having fewer kids today? What has your research shown on family trends?
Karen Guzzo:
Well, one of the things that's actually driving low fertility rates in the United States is something that's a good news story, which is that there are fewer teen and unintended births. And so births to people who are in their teens and early 20s typically are births to people that are unintended, so that people themselves would say, "This is not really the right time for me." And so we spent a lot of time and a lot of money in the United States trying to discourage people from having births when they were not really ready. So when they were "too young", and too young in quotes, or they weren't stably employed or didn't have a good income or stable relationship. And so we've made a lot of progress in that realm.
But then the flip side of it is people are supposed to wait until they have these things. They're supposed to have enough money and a stable relationship and a good house. And you're right that it's really hard to be able to afford those things. The number one concern over people as to whether they should have kids and how many to have and when to have them, is can I afford it?
Dana Taylor:
On a societal level, what kinds of challenges do a low birth rate percent?
Karen Guzzo:
There are different potential concerns. The biggest one really is that the population starts to age, on the aggregate when you have fewer young people born. And then it ends up being skewed towards older adults. And older adults need more care, both physical care but also they take financial resources. And so in many countries, and not just in the United States, the question is how do we care for the older adults when the population is aging? And so in the United States, we have a social security system that's built on current workers paying into support people who are currently drawing from social security. And so that's a big concern, is how do we actually care for the elderly? Then there are also labor market concerns. So who's going to be working to pay into Social Security, but also to fuel the economy? And we need workers because we also need people to have incomes to become consumers. And so we do worry about the potential ramifications of low birth rates, although there's other solutions besides potentially low birth rates to fix some of these problems.
Dana Taylor:
And what might those be?
Karen Guzzo:
Well, one of the biggest ones would actually be a change in how we structure Social Security. So the way Social Security works is that there's a cap on income. And so you pay up until, I think it's roughly around $175,000 for single people on your payroll taxes. So up until that, you pay social security. Any money you earn above that for a single earner is not taxed for social security. And we could raise that cap or we could eliminate entirely, and that would be a way to increase the monies available. We have to fund social security. That seems to me more plausible than trying to have this massive behavioral change that would require people to have more births. We could also change the income, who's able to draw from Social Security, so we could limit it to people who have lower incomes. We could change the social security age at retirement.
There are things we could do that would adjust our need for social security. In terms of the labor market, one of the biggest and most obvious solutions, and to be frank, one we've relied on in the United States for a long time is immigration. Immigrants play a large role in our labor market. They work in a lot of different fields. They are major contributors. In fact, even undocumented immigrants often pay Social Security taxes. So they're not even drawing out in the system, but they're contributing to it.
Dana Taylor:
What about the trend of tradwives? For listeners who aren't familiar, can you explain what being a tradwife means and does it dovetail with pronatalism?
Karen Guzzo:
Yes. So tradwives are really having a moment over the past few years. It's really taken off due to social media where young, conventionally attractive women, often white, thin and attractive and middle-class are making a life for themselves or presenting a life in which they are staying home with their children. They are sort of in charge solely of home. They are working perhaps to have home farms. They are feeding their kids organic food, they are sewing clothes. They are really sort of embracing domesticity. And that's really what the tradwife moment is about, having clear gender roles where women are in charge of the home and men are in charge of the money and they're the provider and they go out into the world. And so it does dovetail a lot with this pronatalist movement because most tradwives sort of espouse or align with what we might consider as more conservative ideals.
And so, one of the things that's interesting about the pronatalist movement is there's a lot of critique about feminists and working mothers and working women. And that women are spending too much time getting educational, increasing their educational attainment, spending too much time in the labor force, that they're becoming too picky about the potential partners for whom they would marry and have children with. And so part of the tradwife moment seems to be pushing very specific gender roles in that once women are home, of course, then they would want to have more children and that would increase the birth rate. There's some current concerns about this though, is that when women are embracing this lifestyle, and there's nothing wrong with this lifestyle per se, but it does increase their dependency on their partners, their economic dependency. And so if relationships don't work out, this really leaves women financially in trouble. It's especially the case, and sometimes we see this notion of stay at home girlfriends where there isn't even sort of a legal tie between partners. And that makes it especially precarious for women to engage in.
Dana Taylor:
You've shared that there are three segments of the pronatalism movement, can you detail those? And how does that break down with the way people reproduce, including the use of in vitro fertilization?
Karen Guzzo:
So there's the Elon Musk tech bro sort of approach to pronatalism. So Elon Musk has said that low fertility is sort of the biggest single threat human civilization is facing, and he seems to be on a personal mission to populate the earth. And this is about using technology to potentially have the best and brightest children. So this is using IVF or other forms of assisted reproductive technologies to try to maximize not only having children, but the success of those children. So trying to find children who would be tall and athletic and intelligent. And there's a lot of concern or how far over into eugenics that gets to be. If we're selecting people based on these more nebulous characteristics, what does that mean for people who might be viewed less favorably or have conditions or characteristics that are less favorable? And the United States has a really long history of eugenicism in terms of who should be reproducing.
And then you have the more religious conservatives who are definitely against IVF and other forms of assisted reproductive technologies. And they're really focused on not only increasing birth rates, but increasing marriage so that most births should happen within marriage. They would prefer people get married young and spend more time in this traditional family type, particularly one in which the father or husband is the main breadwinner and the wife is in charge of the domestic sphere. And they would marry young and have many children and start doing so pretty early. And then you have the third group of folks who are much more concerned about the racial makeup of the United States. So we've had a long history in the United States of wanting the right people to reproduce. So this does tie in with those tech group people. But this is much more explicit about not wanting immigrants to reproduce or people from what this group might consider inferior races or inferior religions.
And so this states back decades in the United States, but it's really been a part of our informal lexicon for a while. So we see strains of this in what is the great replacement theory, which is that the wrong people are coming into the United States to quote-unquote, sort of "outbreed" true Americans. So there's some overlap in all these groups, but it's an uncomfortable alliance, I think.
Dana Taylor:
You mentioned Elon Musk, he is of course the head of the Department of Government efficiency. And reportedly a father of 14 by multiple women who said that low birth rates are a, quote, "Much bigger risk to civilization than global warming." What sort of influence does he have over this movement?
Karen Guzzo:
He has unfortunately, quite a bit of influence. He has a huge microphone in terms of his Twitter presence and social media presence. He's in the White House, he has the ear of very important people. So he is bringing this conversation to the forefront. He is a smart man, but he's not a demographer. And so sometimes he gets some of the basic demography or demographic principles and theories wrong. And one of the things that in particular is concerning is that people who are aligning themselves with Elon Musk will project out 100 years, 200 years, 300 years. And that is not typically something demographers will do because we know that things change really quickly. And there could be great technological advances or other changes that would impact our ability to make population projections far out. But he has this huge microphone, and he clearly is very interested in increasing birth rates. But some of the things that he believes are a little off kilter, I would say.
So for instance, he has said that births should happen through C sections rather than sort of a natural delivery, under the impression that a natural delivery somehow squeezes the brain so that babies born via C-section have bigger brains and are therefore smarter. That's not actually remotely medically accurate, but he has this loud microphone and people are listening to him.
Dana Taylor:
The Trump administration is looking at a $5,000 baby bonus to incentivize parents. Obviously that's a drop in the bucket in comparison to the real cost of health care, child care, food and more. Could it really make a difference in incentivizing people to have more kids?
Karen Guzzo:
It probably won't make a big difference. I will say that I am all for giving families money. Families could always use extra money. That first year is really tough, in particular after a baby is born, because women often have to step back a little bit from work. And there are all these new expenses, including hospital bills and diapers and all those things. So that money would be great, it would really help a lot of people. Is it likely to budge things in an appreciable huge? Probably not. It might help some people on the margins who are like, all right, I was thinking about having another kid. Maybe now's a good time since I'm going to get this bonus. But it's not going to nudge people who were like, I'm not having kids and now I'm going to get this $5,000. So it really might help people who are just not sure about the timing, and they wanted to wait a little longer until they had maybe paid off the last set of hospital bills, but it's not going to make a huge difference.
What I find a little concerning or perhaps even disingenuous, is that we had a really great program through the American Rescue Plan that gave families extra money every month, and it reduced child poverty. It didn't reduce employment very much, and it really helped people a lot. And we got rid of that plan, and it was widely available to people. And so the idea that we would not help people that we knew to be effective, but instead have this sort of scheme for this $5,000 one-time baby bonus, unfortunately to me is a little disingenuous.
Dana Taylor:
And finally, what are the concerns that opponents of pronatalism raise?
Karen Guzzo:
Well, one of the biggest concerns is that it really does privilege a certain type of family. So the $5,000 baby bonus, for instance, some of the policy specifics I've seen are about we should only give these to married couples, or we should only give these to people who make a certain amount of income and we don't want to incentivize poor women to have children. And so this idea that not everyone should be eligible, that only certain families are the right kind of families, that's really concerning. A lot of this concern too also lies in gender roles. Many people find women's independence threatening. And so any movement that is about pushing women out of the labor force, the idea that they should stay home and raise their children and that they should default to these very old-fashioned roles, a lot of people are going to find that really uncomfortable.
Most women do want to have kids, but they want to have them with a good partner. They want to have the option to have a safe delivery, safe pregnancy. In some cases, that's under threat. And so that's really some of the concern. And then again, there's this idea that there's sort of this racial and class-based tinge to who should get to reproduce. So that is really concerning as well. Fundamentally, I think the pronatalist movement is not addressing what people really say they need, which is they need good childcare and they want affordable leave programs.
Dana Taylor:
Karen, thank you so much for being on The Excerpt.
Karen Guzzo:
Thank you for having me. This was great.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks for our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance, our executive producers Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [e-mail]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.