Latest news with #NatalCon
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Health
- The Guardian
Making America pregnant again: the pro-natalist movement
Why is pro-natalism – the idea that society should focus on producing children – a growing movement in the US? The Guardian US columnist Moira Donegan tells Helen Pidd: 'This is not something that average people in the US are crying out for. People are having the number of children that they desire and think that they can support, right? 'What we have instead is a pro-natalist movement that's getting a lot of attention and perceives themselves to have allies in the new Trump administration, and particularly in the form of Vice-president JD Vance and the world's richest man and presidential adviser, Elon Musk.' The second annual natal conference, or NatalCon, was held in April in Austin, Texas. It brought together the various groups who want there to be more babies in the US – and they were an unusual collective. Doneghan says: 'So you have folks who we might think of as sort of the traditional old-school pronatalists, right? Like traditionalist Catholics who are very invested in a cultural model in which marriage is the sole legitimate expression of sexuality and in which that sexuality is sort of unmediated by any use of birth control or non-reproductive practices. 'But there's also people who have a different approach. So there's a lot of these techno-futurists, who are advancing the use of artificial reproductive technology, including things that are very frowned on by the Catholic church, such as IVF. These are also people who tend to be very into gene editing. Something I think is really important to hammer down about the pro-natalist movement is that they're not just looking for more babies, they're looking for more of what they consider higher-quality babies … which is a judgment that they're making that might have, I think frequently does have, racial connotations.' Support the Guardian today:
Vogue
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Vogue
The Dark History of the Far Right's Natalism
I had my first child in December; he will also be my only child. I'm going one-and-done with kids for the same reasons many women in the United States are having fewer babies, and later in life. Faced with economic uncertainty, climate change, and vanishing reproductive rights, it feels like a prudent choice. Most importantly, it's what I want. The Trump administration is trying to figure out how to change my mind, and doing a terrible job of it. On April 21, The New York Times published an article about various incentives the White House is kicking around in hopes of reversing the country's historically low birth rate. Among them are a $5,000 'baby bonus'—cash in hand for each infant delivered—and a 'National Medal of Motherhood' bestowed on women with six or more children. The public response to the Times story was fast, and much of it was furious. Social media was flooded with references to The Handmaid's Tale. Bewildered parents wondered who could be convinced to have a baby for $5,000. (A recent study found that it costs nearly $300,000 to raise a child in the United States.) Why not enact policies, such as paid family leave and universal preschool, that would actually ease the burden of parenting? The simple fact is that many of the pronatal voices with Trump's ear either don't care about this burden, or don't see it as a burden at all. Among them are Vice President J.D. Vance, who has suggested that parents should have more voting power than other citizens, and Elon Musk, who has fathered at least a dozen children he seems to play little part in raising. Behind these men is a chorus of pronatal activists desperate to kickstart a baby boom. Many of them recently attended NatalCon, the subject of another viral Times article. A running theme of that event, held in Austin, Texas, in March, was that bearing children is a woman's obligation. 'Women need to take their jobs seriously,' one female attendee told the Times reporter. 'Not their jobs. Their duty.' This sentiment should terrify women—not least because we've heard it before, emanating from some of history's darkest chapters and ugliest corners. The natalism promoted by the Trump administration and its allies echoes insidious forces and regimes. In the United States, the far right has long insisted that motherhood is not only a woman's deepest desire and biological destiny, but also a role she must inhabit to avert the collapse of Western civilization. The 14 Words, a popular white-nationalist slogan, is a pronatalist rallying cry: 'We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.' The Turner Diaries, a racist novel published in the 1970s that served as inspiration for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and January 6 insurrectionists, depicts white women as racial soldiers charged with replenishing the world.
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Baby boom push meets skepticism in Republican Party
Don't count on Republican lawmakers to light the fuse to a new baby boom just yet. The pronatalist movement may be having a moment as it pitches policies that seek to increase the nation's birth rate — with the latest boost being President Trump saying a $5,000 baby bonus 'sounds like a good idea.' But after some poking around on the prospects for the pronatalist policies that seem to be gaining steam, I found skepticism from Republican lawmakers on multiple fronts, as well as fractures in the pronatalist movement itself. Some don't buy into the core premise that fertility rates need a boost to prevent catastrophic economic consequences caused by population collapse. (There were 1.6 births per woman in 2024, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released last week — slightly higher than 2023, but well below the below population replacement level of 2.1 births per woman.) 'With a significant housing shortage and the growing potential for AI to displace jobs, it's difficult to justify aggressive federal incentives aimed at fueling population growth at this point in our nation's trajectory,' one GOP lawmaker told me. Another Republican lawmaker had not thought deeply about population issues, but was more inclined to support policies to increase legal immigration. The latest burst in the pronatalism movement came from a article on the Trump administration fielding ways to encourage women to have more children, including the $5,000 baby bonus idea or reserving 30 percent of Fulbright scholarships for those who are married or have children. But baby bonus incentive programs in other countries have been criticized as largely unsuccessful. Lyman Stone, senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, estimated that a $5,000 baby bonus would have a small effect on births. 'I would say that would probably increase fertility less than 1% — which doesn't mean it's not worth doing, because families with a new kid could use a windfall,' Stone said, adding that he prefers an increase to the Child Tax Credit (more on that later). The various policy ideas are the latest example of how the pronatalist movement has been gaining steam in the last few years. The second Natal Con took place in Austin, Texas, in March and included a number of right-wing speakers, including the Trumpworld-connected commentator Jack Prosobiec. Many of them are encouraged at friendliness to their cause in the Trump administration. Vice President Vance, who famously chastised 'childless cat ladies' (and later expressed regret about that phrasing), has long voiced concern about the nation's birth rate. Trump adviser Elon Musk, a father of at least 14 children from four different women, is the most prominent and connected voice for spawning a 'legion' of children to combat declining birth rates, as the recently reported. But Musk's 'harem drama' — as one of the mothers of his children, Ashley St. Clair, put it — not only makes family-values traditionalists squirm, but his focus on pure births has gotten criticism from others interested in boosting the birth rate. Stone and Brad Wilcox wrote in last week that 'no matter how many tutors you hire or compounds you build, evidence suggests children are more likely to struggle if one of their parents is absent.' Aside from Musk, perhaps the most prominent pronatalists are Simone and Malcolm Collins, parents of four who have invented a religion called Techno-Puritanism 'designed to combat fertility collapse' and have been profiled many, many times. Simone Collins wears 'techno-puritan' clothing that she told NPR was 'intentionally cringe.' Even for some Republicans who would like to see more babies and larger families, the whole pronatalist push is cringe in a bad way. 'I think the term pronatalist is a little odd,' Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah) told me. 'We should just be talking about being pro-family. There's nothing in my core belief system [that] would suggest that we should just be having babies. You need to have families. You need to have dedicated parents in all these situations.' 'It's not a numbers game. It's a strength in numbers game,' Moore added. When it comes to policy, the idea related to boosting birth rates that has the most traction among Republicans is adjusting the Child Tax Credit, currently set at $2,000 per qualifying child. Asked about the pronatalist policies being explored by the Trump administration, Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) pointed to his Family First Act, which would in part expand the Child Tax Credit to $4,200 for kids under 6 and $3,000 for other children, as well as creating a new one-time $2,800 tax credit for pregnant mothers. Moore is leading the legislation in the House. 'Getting married and starting a family are key to the American Dream. But for too many young people, that dream feels out of reach,' Banks said in a statement. 'Congress has a role to play in fixing this and we can start by putting money back in the pockets of hardworking parents.' But in a party full of deficit hawks, the politics of getting such a proposal through is dicey. Republicans opposed a temporary expansion that Democrats ushered through in 2021. 'The guys that are most likely to prioritize family formation are Republicans, obviously, but they really don't like increasing the Child Tax Credit,' explained Terry Schilling, president of the conservative American Principles Project and father of seven. He is more optimistic about prospects for education reform initiatives that can help families. Schilling added: 'It's incredibly important that all of the things that we discuss — all the economic incentives around children — are tied to marriage, because we don't want to get into a situation like we did with the Great Society programs, where you create, inadvertently, these loopholes that incentivize fatherless homes.'SCRAMBLE ON TAX CUT CRAFTING: Free-market advocacy groups are consumed with the biggest activity dominating Capitol Hill right now — the partisan tax cut bill that will serve as the vehicle for Trump's ambitious legislative agenda. Advancing American Freedom, the group founded by former Vice President Pence, is out with a memo warning that 'not all tax cuts are created equal.' Its ranking: 'Best bang for buck' are individual income tax cuts, corporate tax cuts, capital gains tax cuts, and reinstating full expensing; expanding the Child Tax Credit is 'dubious'; and 'actually harmful' are exempting tips and overtime from taxes (two campaign promises from Trump), as well as increasing the State and Local Tax deduction. Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity is up with a new ad the Washington, D.C., market calling to eliminate green energy tax credits enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act under President Biden — which the group calls 'Green New Deal giveaways' — as a way to pay for extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cuts signed into law during the first Trump administration. The ad says of the idea: 'It's simple.' That will be politically difficult, however, given more than a dozen more moderate Republicans have called to preserve the tax credits. 1. TRUMP 2028 WATCH: Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), who is leading a longer-than-a-long-shot constitutional amendment that would allow Trump to run for a third term, joined the Republicans for National Renewal's Third Term Project on an X space this week to talk about the push, which was a longtime goal of the group. Ogles claimed he's gotten 'overwhelming' support from Republicans on the proposal, but it still doesn't have any cosponsors. 2. CRYPTO CRINGE: While the cryptocurrency industry is optimistic about the environment for crypto under Trump, my colleague Miranda Nazzarro reports that they did not appreciate the meme coins launched by the president and his family: 'The Trump family's various crypto projects, specifically the launch of two personalized meme coins, led to some frustrations from the industry given concerns about how the coins could benefit the president's family.' They worried 'it could undermine industry's attempts to be taken seriously in Washington.' 3. WORLDS COLLIDE ON WHCA WEEKEND: Rising star Natalie Winters of Bannon's War Room snapped a pic with a masked Taylor Lorenz — the subject of near-constant hate from the right — over the weekend. Who had that on their bingo card? Not 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Irish Independent
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Ellen Coyne: Donald Trump and the right-wing pronatalists want to help women have more babies – is that really such a bad idea?
This was a different kind of trad fest than we're used to. 'NatalCon', which took place in Austin, Texas, in March, was only in its second ever year but it attracted the attention of national and international media.
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
MAGA pro-natalists' ‘newest' ideas are just recycled Democratic policies
America is experiencing a baby slump, and the MAGA pro-natalist movement claims to have just the solutions for it. But they're not what you might expect. According to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Wednesday, the American fertility rate currently sits at around 1.6 per woman — a rate just 1% higher than the record low set in 2023, and significantly lower than the replacement rate of 2.1. The U.S. birth rate, which has been on a steady downward slide since 2007, has the Trumpist right worried about the fall of 'Western civilization.' At one of his first appearances after being sworn in as vice president, JD Vance stated, 'Very simply, I want to see more babies in America.' At the same event, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis awkwardly quipped, 'Florida is not just the place that woke goes to die, it's the place that babies go to live.' Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a father of nine, issued a memo shortly after being confirmed by the Senate stating that his department would be prioritizing federal transportation-related funding to states and districts with marriage and birth rates above the national average. (How are highways made? Well, when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much…) Elon Musk has characterized the drop in birth rates as a catastrophe leading to civilizational 'collapse,' warned that it 'will lead to mass extinction of entire nations' and claimed on Fox News that unless the birth rate increases, 'civilization will disappear.' The father of at least 14 children by at least four different women, he's maybe joked, maybe bragged about 'doing his part' to rectify the global fertility rate. In recent years, natalism has made cultural inroads as well. Simone and Malcolm Collins seem to pop up everywhere in the pro-natalist space, from the baby-fever-afflicted White House to a recent annual conference on natalism known as NatalCon. (They've been profiled by major media outlets so many times that Slate felt the need to run an article on them titled, 'For the Love of God, Stop Profiling This Couple!') The Collinses say they have relied on a sort of Gattaca-adjacent technology to screen all of their embryos before choosing the strongest ones to implant in Simone, thus ensuring their children will be 'highly intelligent.' And no social media feed is safe from the deluge of tradwife and big-family content that makes it look like the only thing standing between ennui and a full life is a brood of four to eight children. Many have described the new MAGA-spiced 'pro-natalism' as just old-fashioned American eugenics in a Tesla. But there's something else going on here. A recent New York Times piece details some of the new ideas MAGA pro-natalist thinkers are batting around as a way to goose the birth rate, and, well, they sound a little familiar. According to the Times' reporting, the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation think tank has formed its own natalist task force — the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family. Heritage's 'newest and boldest' (their words) policy idea is … a tax credit for married couples with children that increases the more children the couple has. That would have been a new and bold idea in 1991, when 16-term Connecticut Democrat and longtime Child Tax Credit advocate Rep. Rosa DeLauro entered Congress. Heritage's bold new idea is to do a version of a law that's been on the books since 1997, except it would only benefit married parents, who typically are in a higher income bracket than single parents and thus don't need as much help. Another pro-natalist pitch put forth in the Times article is to pay women a $5,000 bonus to have babies. Which, again, sounds like a rehashing of the Child Tax Credit, this time increasing the size of the cash payout and making it single-use. By the way, in recent years, Republicans have had opportunities to permanently expand the child tax credit that already exists — and have blocked it at every turn. Columbusing — the act of 'discovering something that is not new' — is happening in abundance among the pro-natalist MAGA right. They're taking long-held center-left policy proposals, throwing a Western-centric, nationalistic sheen on them, and acting as if they're newly discovered innovations in good governance. One Heritage Foundation thinker suggested that rather than prescribing IVF as a panacea, Trump's pro-natalists should invest in getting to the bottom of what causes infertility. 'The idea, called Restorative Reproductive Medicine, revolves around treating the 'root causes' of infertility, and leaving IVF as a last resort,' the Times reported. Great 'new idea,' but it's also well-trod territory. In 2010, for example, pre-eminent American scholar Greta Gaard wrote that reproductive technologies like IVF 'medicalize and thus depoliticize the contemporary phenomenon of decreased fertility in first-world industrialized societies, personalizing and privatizing both the problem and the solution when the root of this phenomenon may be more usefully addressed as a problem of PCBs, POPs, and other toxic by-products of industrialized culture.' The Heritage Foundation seems to have somehow stumbled into embracing an idea rooted in ecofeminism. And scientists have been looking into the root causes of infertility for quite some time. Much of the research has found that, as insinuated by both Gaard and memes shared by MAHA moms on Instagram, environmental factors like air and water pollution are at least partially to blame. For example, a handful of studies have linked exposure to polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to both male and female infertility, which makes the Trump administration's recent move to withdraw limits on PFAS allowed in industrial wastewater — and the other myriad rollbacks to clean air and water standards — counterproductive to the natalist cause. Most young women know how to get pregnant, despite a decadeslong fight from the right to keep sexual and reproductive health information away from them. But another Heritage source featured in the Times piece wonders: Could the issue be that women simply don't know how to get pregnant? Their solution to this imagined problem is also a rerun: teaching young women about their bodies and menstrual cycles, perhaps in a classroom setting. Like, say, a school sex education program. I see no evidence that anybody in pro-natalist MAGA land bothered to ask reproductive-age American women why they don't want to have as many babies as previous generations did. There are myriad factors that contribute to a country's birth rate rising or falling, and researchers still haven't nailed down how, exactly, to convince women to have more children when they'd rather not. A Pew study released last year found that 64% of American women under 50 who don't have any children say they simply do not want to have them. That leaves the Trump White House with an ever-shrinking pool of potential willing mothers to make up the difference. Which might necessitate some kind of incentive for those patriotic birthers willing to get in the birthing stirrups over and over again for the good of their country. Might I suggest, perhaps, a medal for women with six or more children? This idea also has a precedent, although it's older than the proposals that have been basic Democratic fare for four or five decades. In 1927, a program started in Italy called 'Battle for Births,' which aimed to increase the population from 40 million to 60 million by 1950. The state would award women with five or more children a medal for bravery, among other measures designed to reward reproduction and punish childlessness. The most prolific birthers would even have a chance to meet their country's leader — Benito Mussolini. Sadly for the medal winners, the Italian Battle for Births was a failure. The population only increased 7.5 million by 1950. The Italian birth rate is currently among the lowest in Europe, at 1.24. But it might work for us. Goosing the birth rate has flummoxed policymakers for generations. But one factor that's been shown — over and over again — to make women in industrialized countries actually want to have more children was their male partners doing more around the house. One potential solution to raising the birth rate in the U.S. is not handing out medals or writing checks. It's for men to evolve. Let's see how long it takes the Heritage Foundation to come up with that one. This article was originally published on
