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The Star
16-05-2025
- Politics
- The Star
‘Girl boss' mothers in the USA
'WE'RE going to fix the birthrate decline in this room,' said dating app entrepreneur Amanda Bradford, facing a hotel conference room filled with men in blazers and slacks, men ready to offer up their wisdom on the mishaps of modern dating. All these apps, all these swipes, all these meet-ups and make-outs and just not enough babies. This room was ready to fix it. Or at least, given the audience demographics, to dutifully do its part. It was late March and roughly 200 people had flown in for the Natal Conference, an event devoted to discussing collapsing fertility rates. There were churchgoing conservatives and Silicon Valley technologists, parents of five and parents of nine, edgelords in leather jackets and women in Lilly Pulitzer, all sharing a common concern: how to persuade Americans, namely American women, to have more babies. At the evening reception, as attendees mingled over wine in the domed entrance of the Bullock Texas State History Museum, a 31-year-old woman remarked with a twinge of concern that there did not appear to be all that many people wearing yellow wristbands, meaning the singles. Another guest said the room seemed heavily male. 'We were going to have more women,' said economist Bryan Caplan, a father of four. 'But they all got pregnant.' (He meant this literally; the conference organisers said four female speakers had dropped out, citing either pregnancy or caring for a sick child.) Ben Ogilvie, a 25-year-old law student from Chicago, who came single and eager to meet someone, said he was not surprised by the male skew: 'A lot of pronatalist women are themselves having children,' he said. 'They're out there doing the work.' With America's fertility rate at a historic low – 1,616 births per 1,000 women, far under the rate needed to maintain the population size – a 'pronatalist' community has emerged, calling for bigger families and policies that encourage childbearing. Procreation movement This movement has skewed heavily right, made up of cultural conservatives who see conventional family units as the bedrock of society, as well as of technologists concerned that humanity is not replacing itself. Many on the left, including those who share the goal of making it easier for people who want to have big families, have criticised the movement for embracing far-right voices: white supremacists who fear developing countries' outpacing wealthy white people in their childbearing, misogynists calling for a return to traditional gender roles. The Natal Conference was started by Kevin Dolan, a conservative who came up with the idea after watching a Tucker Carlson documentary about falling testosterone levels. Since the inaugural conference, held in December 2023, political winds have shifted for the pronatalists. There, in the White House, is Vice President JD Vance, who has urged Americans to have 'more babies.' Often by President Donald Trump's side is Elon Musk, who posts prolifically about 'population collapse' and has fathered more than a dozen children. Trump has even called himself 'the fertilisation president.' But the push for babies, of course, can only go so far without a crucial element: women. 'Without women, there is no future,' said Clara Chan, who traveled to the conference from Provo, Utah, after learning about it on a pronatal podcast. 'Women need to take their jobs seriously,' she said, then added: 'Not their jobs. Their duty.' Where are the women? There was a lot of talk about women at the Natal Conference, including by some of the male speakers whose children were back home with their mothers. But there were also some women in the room. There were women who came because they found motherhood lonely, and women who came because they found motherhood a total joy and felt judged when they told neighbours they were having a fourth or fifth child. There was a 33-year-old mother of four from Salt Lake City who wanted to meet other mums staying home to raise large families, beyond following Instagram posts from Ballerina Farm. There was a 36-year-old mother of two from British Columbia who wished her neighbours would host more child-friendly gatherings. There was a 31-year-old living in Hong Kong who wanted at least four children, ideally along with a career, and had not found a boyfriend who shared that desire. Many of them say motherhood needs a sort of rebrand, a new set of cultural conversations, both for the young women contemplating it and for those in the thick of raising children. 'It's horrible to be telling young women that having kids is the worst thing you can do for your career,' said Emma Brizius, 37, a mother of five from Dallas. 'That's a death message for society.' Madeline Frazier, a 22-year-old hairdresser from Georgia, who grew up home-schooled with six siblings, echoed this. 'Young single women haven't been shown the blessing of kids,' she said. Some of these women wandered the hotel conference center exhilarated, mingling with star demographers, policy wonks and right-wing Twitter celebrities. Others quietly or openly expressed discomfort with the speaker lineup, which included Jack Posobiec, a Trump loyalist who helped spread the 'Pizzagate' conspiracy theory. 'We are not replacing ourselves,' Posobiec told the crowd. 'Meanwhile, those who don't share our values are.' In the audience, Brizius was uneasy. 'I think it's a very uncompelling argument to tell a group, 'Have more kids to own the libs,'' she said. For Brizius, 37, to leave Dallas for a weekend, putting her husband in charge of their children, is a significant undertaking, one that involves scheduling (Saturday lacrosse for their 9-year-old daughter), finger-food brainstorming (cheese quesadillas for the 5-year-old daughter and 3-year-old sons) and bringing along her clingiest, the 3-year-old triplet Madeline. But the Natal Conference seemed worth it, Brizius explained on Saturday morning, while Madeline, in a blue dress with white trim, toddled off her lap and began fixing zoo animal stickers to a sticker book. Brizius grew up in Indiana as one of four, and as she grew older decided she, too, wanted a large family. In her early 20s, she and her husband were both putting in 60-hour weeks in finance. When they began having children, she stopped working. But she realised that her great-grandmother lived to over 100 and there was all this time stretching ahead, decades to fill with more than child care. She decided, this year, to start a network for other mothers who left corporate offices but wanted a career compatible with raising a large family, whether starting a small business or writing a book. When she came across the website for the Natal Conference, she thought, 'Any woman here would be a natural fit.' 'I knew having five kids wouldn't make me the weirdest person in the room,' she said. At the evening reception, Brizius handed out flyers with a QR code linking to a Google form for her group, called Undercurrent. Many of the recipients were men who told her, 'Oh my goodness, my sister has been looking for something like this.' On one level, Brizius seems like a good candidate for the Natal Conference community. She's part of a network of Catholic Church and stay-at-home mum friends, with whom she discusses how to balance mothering responsibilities and outside ambitions. She listens to podcast interviews by demographers about declining birthrates. But Brizius is leery of identifying as part of the movement, because of its extremist elements, including Posobiec. 'I'd hesitate to call myself a pronatalist,' she said. 'There's a lot of baggage. The popular message people associate with it — I'm not sure I'd agree with it.' Other women who attended, many from large families and some aspiring to have them, shrugged off worries about the voices that were elevated at the conference. Some were elated about the Trump administration's focus on birthrates, even though the policies it plans to pursue in this area have seemed, so far, amorphous. Many, unlike Brizius, were focused on celebrating stay-at-home motherhood, and less on policies that helped people balance motherhood and work. 'If you want to have babies, go girl boss that,' said Hannah Centers, 41, a mother from Tennessee who home-schools her three children and said she felt judged by her neighbours when she told them she was pregnant with her third. But working the crowds at the Natal Conference were some academics — economists, demographers — concerned about the alliances that the pronatalist movement had forged in pursuit of reach and influence. Centers: 'If you want to have babies, go girl boss that.' — Photos: The New York Times Those alliances include far-right characters like the conspiracy theorist who goes by Raw Egg Nationalist, a Saturday speaker who has posted white nationalist theories on the social site X and written books for Antelope Hill Publishing, which sells translations of works by Nazis. They also include techno-optimists like Simone, 37, and Malcolm Collins, 38, the hosts of the podcast 'Based Camp,' who said they had started their own religion that held people responsible for every life they chose not to bring into the world. (Collins has had four children by IVF and C-section, is pregnant with her fifth and says she plans to continue having children until she can no longer medically do so.) Tactical 'love advice' In the next afternoon came a session that had been generating buzz, advertised in the conference schedule like a tradwife game show: 'Simone Collins & Peachy Keenan interview very eligible bachelorettes.' The room was packed mostly with men. Two women in their early 30s took their seats at the front, alongside Collins, the podcaster, and Keenan, the pseudonym of the right-wing author of 'Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War.' Keenan turned to the two female panelists with a question that most single women would have nightmares about answering into a microphone. 'You guys are catches, you've been to all these different continents, you speak multiple languages,' Keenan said. 'What do you think is the reason that you're single?' Sabba Manyara, a 31-year-old born in Zimbabwe, wearing a dark blazer and slacks, said she had moved around frequently, living on three continents over a decade without putting down roots, and had prioritised intense finance working hours over starting a family. Manyara's co-panelist said she had met men on dating apps who did not seem ready to settle down. The facilitators invited the men in the audience to offer advice, or, as Keenan put it, 'Mansplain to us!' Though it was ostensibly a session geared toward advising these young women, the subject quickly turned to male needs. 'I'd love to hear your thoughts on trying to date women who are both educated and capable,' said Ogilvie, the law student from Chicago in the audience, who had been raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Minneapolis. 'I've had a lot of bad dating interactions with progressive women.' Keenan offered herself up as inspiration, sharing that her own social views had been fairly liberal before she met her husband. 'I was a feminist, I was pro-choice, I was anti-gun,' she said. 'He helped me deprogramme myself.' She also had some tactical advice for the men in the room: Even if they were already looking for younger women on dating apps, they should turn their age ranges down further. 'If the apples in the barrel are rotten, go to a different tree,' she said. Manyara, the panelist, suggested a different approach. She advised the men in the room to try validating the ambitions of the women they dated, valuing their professional endeavours. 'A woman can be both an ambitious woman and a family woman,' Manyara said. 'You're going to have very smart kids,' Keenan told her. Luttinen: 'The Natal Conference was a bunch of men in the room talking about how we can try to change women's behaviour and make them have more babies.' Standing outside the dating breakout room, Rebecca Luttinen, who is getting her doctorate in demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said she was dismayed by what she saw as the conference's 'alarmist' tone about birthrates. Her own focus is on helping people have as many children as they want, if they want them at all. Personally, she is unsure whether she wants to have kids. She hopes to first finish her PhD. 'I haven't been parading that around here, to be honest; not many people have asked me how I feel,' she said, smiling faintly. 'They did approach me and ask if I was interested in matchmaking.' Two weeks later, Luttinen, 27, flew to Washington for another conference discussing fertility rates. That gathering, hosted by the Population Association of America, seemed to her to have more female scholars and speakers. 'You can probably guess why there weren't as many at the Natal Conference,' she said. 'It was a bunch of men in the room talking about how we can try to change women's behaviour and make them have more babies.' — ©2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times
Axios
22-04-2025
- Health
- Axios
The push for women to have more children has a powerful ally: Trump
The White House is emerging as a powerful ally of the burgeoning movement of people who want women to have more children, but there's little emphasis on the unique level of danger that birth poses in the U.S. Why it matters: The U.S. population is aging, presenting complex economic and health care challenges that "pro-natalists" argue should be addressed through raising fertility rates. At the same time, the country is facing an ongoing maternal mortality crisis and a politically fraught debate over women's reproductive health that's had widespread ripple effects. The pro-natalist movement is splintered into factions with different views, including some with restrictive definitions of what constitutes a family. There's also infighting over exactly how women should be reproducing — with debate around IVF and genetic screening. Some of its most controversial adherents hold racist views that encouraging white people to have more babies could help maintain the race's stability. Driving the news: The White House is soliciting ideas about how to get more Americans to marry and have more babies, the New York Times recently reported. Some proposals so far include prestigious government-backed perks for people who are married or have children, cash "baby bonuses," and government funding for educating women about their menstrual cycles, per the Times. Higher birthrate advocates are confident that fertility issues will become a priority for the Trump administration. Trump "is proudly implementing policies to uplift American families," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the NYT. While speaking at a Women's History Month event last month, Trump said he'll be known as "the fertilization president." State of play: The natalist movement has recently received a wave of media attention, sparking in-depth profiles examining key members and philosophies. A separate NYT story recently profiled an event held in Austin called the Natal Conference, which brought together both Christian conservatives and Silicon Valley technologists to discuss how to get people to have more babies. Although the movement tends to skew right, it also attracts some more progressive voices — including those who criticize the inclusion of some far-right members, like white supremacists and misogynists calling for a return of traditional gender roles. Some of the movement's emerging public faces embrace procreation methods controversial among the political right. One couple profiled in February in the Washington Post has used IVF and genetic selection in procreating their — should all go well — soon-to-be-five children. And, of course, Elon Musk's prolific procreation has received attention lately, especially after the Wall Street Journal published a story on the tactics he uses to "manage" his babies and their mothers. Between the lines: Reasons behind the declining U.S. birth rate are varied, and women are having children later in life compared with a few decades ago, giving them a shorter window to have kids. But beyond concerns about costs or finding the right partner looms a stark reality: Giving birth in the U.S. is more dangerous than in other high-income countries, and that's especially true for Black women. More than 80% of U.S. maternal deaths are likely preventable, per the Commonwealth Fund, and the Trump administration's cuts to the federal bureaucracy have reportedly included maternal health programs. And a recent study found pregnancy-related death rates have actually been increasing, although rates are highly variable across states and demographics. American Indian and Alaska Native women have a pregnancy-related death rate nearly four times higher than that of white women, and Black women's rate is nearly three times higher, per the study, which was published in JAMA Network Open.
New York Times
17-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Who Are the Women of the Pronatalist Movement?
'We're going to fix the birthrate decline in this room,' said the dating app entrepreneur Amanda Bradford, facing a hotel conference room filled with men in blazers and slacks, men ready to offer up their wisdom on the mishaps of modern dating. All these apps, all these swipes, all these meet-ups and make-outs and just not enough babies. This room was ready to fix it. Or at least, given the audience demographics, to dutifully do its part. It was late March in Austin and roughly 200 people had flown in for the Natal Conference, an event devoted to discussing collapsing fertility rates. There were churchgoing conservatives and Silicon Valley technologists, parents of five and parents of nine, edgelords in leather jackets and women in Lilly Pulitzer, all sharing a common concern: how to convince Americans, namely American women, to have more babies. At the Friday evening reception, as attendees mingled over wine in the domed entrance of the Bullock Texas State History Museum, a 31-year-old woman remarked with a twinge of concern that there did not appear to be all that many people wearing yellow wristbands, meaning the singles. Another guest said the room seemed heavily male. 'We were going to have more women,' said the economist Bryan Caplan, a father of four. 'But they all got pregnant.' (He meant this literally; the conference organizers said four female speakers had dropped out, citing either pregnancy or caring for a sick child.) Ben Ogilvie, a 25-year-old law student from Chicago, who came single and eager to meet someone, said he was not surprised by the male skew: 'A lot of pronatalist women are themselves having children,' he said. 'They're out there doing the work.' With America's fertility rate at a historic low — 1,616 births per 1,000 women, far under the rate needed to maintain the population size — a 'pronatalist' community has emerged, calling for bigger families and policies that encourage childbearing. This movement has skewed heavily right, made up of cultural conservatives who see conventional family units as the bedrock of society, as well as of technologists concerned that humanity is not replacing itself. Amanda Bradford, left, with Malcolm Collins, 38, and his wife, Simone, 37. The Collinses host a podcast called 'Based Camp' and are high-profile members of the pronatalist movement. Credit... Simone Collins Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Pro-Baby Coalition of the Far Right
Children were everywhere at the second annual Natal Conference in Austin, Texas, last month, where people devoted to the cause of population growth gathered to swap ideas. A toddler girl twirled on her toes and took a tumble to the floor beneath the grand rotunda of the Bullock Texas State History Museum; nearby, a gaggle of grade-school children encircled a table to play cards. Knee-high siblings wove through clusters of adult conversation made effortless by an open bar. Parents were not monitoring their kids especially closely. Plastic tubs of Hot Wheels cars and puzzle-piece play mats were there to facilitate the seldom-seen phenomenon of children entertaining themselves. It mostly worked: Having more children around is somehow usually easier than having a few. Such was the wisdom of the conference, an odd get-together of far-right online personalities, traditionalist Christians, and envoys from Silicon Valley. The overarching thesis of the conference—that having children is good and ought to be supported by society—struck me as pretty unobjectionable; if you believe the human race should have a future, you're pronatalist with respect to somebody. And the pronatalists' more immediate concerns about aging populations seem similarly well founded: As birth rates continue to drop globally, the relatively smaller number of young people will struggle to care for the elderly, a worrying prospect regardless of one's political orientation. What was disturbing, therefore, was the degree to which discourse around these fairly innocuous propositions is now dominated by an emerging coalition of the rather far right, whose pronatalist ideas are sometimes intermixed with white supremacy, misogyny, and eugenics. The speakers' roster included a range of figures, some more extreme than others. There were far-right culture warriors whose interest in pronatalism seemed incidental, including Carl Benjamin, also known as Sargon_of_Akkad, a relic of Gamergate who's become an ardent opponent of feminism, and the headliner Jack Posobiec, a Donald Trump super fan who spends a good deal of time issuing trollish proclamations about, for instance, overthrowing democracy, and certainly appears to sympathize with extreme forms of far-right politics. But there were also ordinary and mainly uncontroversial presenters, such as Lyman Stone, a senior fellow and the director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, and Daniel Hess, a researcher with a background in tech. [Read: Why the left should embrace pro-natalism] The more radical attendees proposed a variety of odd and unsettling ideas about falling birth rates and how to boost them, some of which seemed rather deliberately formulated for provocation—such as a suggestion by Charles Cornish-Dale, a puckish English reactionary with a large online following who goes by the name of Raw Egg Nationalist, that war may be a useful driver of population growth, and Benjamin's assertion that society ought to be reorganized to prioritize families, arguing that 'if you don't marry and have children, then your opinion is irrelevant.' (A flyer advertising the presentation of the pseudonymous speaker Yuri Bezmonov featured Trump in a McDonald's apron leaning out of a drive-through window with the inscription TRUMP: THE ART OF THE TROLL.) And there was much consideration of the decline of the West in particular (though birth rates are dropping globally), a tendency closely associated with nationalism and theories of racial superiority. 'The racism and misogyny of pro-natalist circles often gets overblown in skeptical media outlets,' Patrick Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who works on pro-family policy, recently wrote in an article for The Dispatch discussing the conference. 'But that doesn't mean those strains are completely absent from the lineup in Austin or the broader pro-natalism movement.' More than a whiff of eugenics was also apparent. The press-hungry couple Malcolm and Simone Collins, a pair of former venture capitalists living in Silicon Valley, were on the speakers' roster, bringing their peculiar approach to childbearing and parenting to the conference floor. The Collinses have chosen to procreate using IVF technology that allows for the selection of genetically superior embryos, a decidedly techno-futurist approach. Their parenting style, meanwhile, is more retrograde; Malcolm Collins once struck his child's face in the presence of a journalist. (The couple told the reporter that their use of corporal punishment was inspired by their observation of a tiger swiping its cub in the wild.) Certain elements of their self-presentation are, again, seemingly intended to troll—Simone wears some kind of puritanical getup complete with a bonnet, and the duo proudly displays multiple guns on the walls of their house full of kids. If some of those aims seem to contradict the goals of religious traditionalists also interested in the revival of big families, it's because the two sets of ideas—the 'trad' and the 'tech'—belong to separate factions that have formed an alliance on several fronts, pronatalism included. The tech crowd is made up of people like the Collinses—Silicon Valley types who envision a radically different future made possible by innovations in technology. The trads, meanwhile, hearken to the religious beliefs and practices of the past, and are skeptical of many aspects of modern life. The tech people are interested in pioneering new reproductive technologies; the trads—at least the Catholic ones—object in principle to IVF and dream of a society with a tolerance for simple human difference, the kind of world in which a person with Down syndrome, for example, would be welcomed with open arms. The techies aren't necessarily committed to having traditional families (see, for example, Elon Musk, the somewhat absent father of at least 14 children); the trads view the institution of family as the key to resolving the birth-rate crisis. These differences were on display at the conference: One speaker, the geneticist Razib Khan, suggested that the techies literally depart for space, perhaps to a Muskian Mars colony, and let the trads inherit the Earth. However its components ultimately relate to one another, this new coalition is part of a broader political realignment taking shape along axes defined by Trump. It isn't any secret that most of the energy and dynamism in contemporary politics now belongs to the right; the Natal Conference alone was teeming with policy ideas and theories of society, while liberals remain scattered in a defensive crouch, with elected Democrats tripping over themselves to disavow a toxic party brand. The right's profusion of resources, followers, and thought is perhaps partially why it's dominating the discourse around an issue that isn't inherently conservative. But maybe the greater reason is that liberals seem almost uniformly unwilling to address the subject of population decline whatsoever—a stance that warrants reconsideration. 'Liberals are reluctant to wade into these matters—talking about families may imply a critique of other people's choices,' Alice Evans, a senior lecturer in international development at King's College London, recently told me. Some may believe (mistakenly, in my opinion) that conceding that having children is good and ought to be encouraged requires conceding that not having children is bad and ought to be punished, a kind of discrimination. And others may be repelled by the growing association between the subject of birth rates and the political right, forming a kind of feedback loop in which liberals avoid the topic, because it seems like a right-wing fixation, and thereby strengthen the existing association further. Whatever the source of liberal inattention, yielding to the far right the notion that humanity ought to persist on this Earth strikes me as absurd. One doesn't have to maintain, as I do, that humankind is excellent—the paragon of animals—in order to affirm the importance of bringing children into the world; much more rational, empirical reasons place political importance on strategies that enable families to welcome children. A society in which the elderly greatly outnumber the young will encounter a multitude of hurdles to flourishing: 'As populations age, a shrinking workforce will support more elderly dependents,' Evans said. 'Older people usually work at lower rates, while being less innovative and less entrepreneurial. The entire economy becomes a bit sluggish. Costs will also rise—to pay for elderly health care and pensions.' Countries experiencing precipitous birth-rate declines, such as South Korea, are already undergoing ominous changes. 'A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly,' the author Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote of South Korea in a New Yorker feature earlier this year. 'About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary.' For rapidly aging countries, immigration may function as a short-term stopgap measure, but sourcing young people from other countries shifts the burden of aging populations on to immigrants' countries of origin. What to do about falling birth rates depends on what's driving them down, and figuring out what those forces may be was a pervasive theme of the conference. Speakers and attendees presented a number of potential reasons, identifying fallout from the sexual revolution, harmful chemicals in food and water supplies, and the proliferation of porn, gambling, weed, and technology. One can imagine a number of extreme and quixotic responses to that constellation of possible causes—a Unabomber-esque rejection of modern technology, for instance, or an acceleration of technological approaches to reproduction. This year, Trump issued an order that would expand access to IVF, dubbing himself the 'fertilization president' at a Women's History Month event last March. Other strategies proposed at the conference included deregulating day cares or banning urban-growth limits in order to build huge quantities of single-family housing, along the same lines as my Atlantic colleague Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein's buzzy new book, Abundance. [Derek Thompson: The political fight of the century] But perhaps the more obvious approach is essentially a leftist one: Just give families money. Many young people considering childbirth today are discouraged by the high costs of raising kids, including exorbitant child-care fees and income loss associated with time off work to take care of children. Sitting at a conference table sharing cups of Cheez-Its and gummy bears from the kids' buffet table, my mother (whom I had brought to the conference because she was curious about the subject, and because it provided a convenient excuse to visit our home state) leaned over to admit that she would've had 'a whole houseful of kids, if we could've afforded it.' I had never before known that I might have been one of many as opposed to only two, but if people dealing with the much lower child-care and education costs of the 1980s and '90s were financially dissuaded from raising the number of children they wanted, it would follow that the same problem has worsened for today's would-be parents. This perhaps partially explains why America's fertility gap, or the difference between the number of children the average woman has and the number of children she says she would prefer, is the highest it has been in 40 years. And so it makes sense that people hoping to help couples bring children into the world should support setting the marginal cost of having a child at zero, which some involved in the pronatalist movement have already discerned. Stone, the policy expert who spoke at the conference, has written that 'pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies. Anybody saying otherwise is mischaracterizing the research. But it takes a lot of money.' Policies aimed at closing the fertility gap include making birth free, sending new parents 'baby boxes' with all of the essentials for welcoming a newborn, offering free child care and pre-K, covering all of children's health-care expenses, and paying families a monthly cash allowance to offset other kid-related costs, all of which could have the pronatal effect of closing the fertility gap. These kinds of proposals are typically made by the left, but the right has lately begun to rethink its typical approach to welfare programs—or at least members of the right say they have. J. D. Vance, for example, has in the past supported a $5,000 child tax credit, thousands more than the current CTC, and has said that the government should 'make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids, to bring them into the world and to welcome them as the blessings that we know they are.' And why not? The right now has control of the federal government, and the attention of an entire nation. It's free to institute pro-family policies at any time, something several conference speakers noted. What those efforts may look like largely depends on which faction in the pronatalist coalition claims victory over the others, and that is anyone's guess. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
11-04-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Pro-Baby Coalition of the Far Right
Children were everywhere at the second annual Natal Conference in Austin, Texas, last month, where people devoted to the cause of population growth gathered to swap ideas. A toddler girl twirled on her toes and took a tumble to the floor beneath the grand rotunda of the Bullock Texas State History Museum; nearby, a gaggle of grade-school children encircled a table to play cards. Knee-high siblings wove through clusters of adult conversation made effortless by an open bar. Parents were not monitoring their kids especially closely. Workers had brought in plastic tubs of Hot Wheels cars and puzzle-piece play mats earlier to facilitate the seldom-seen phenomenon of children entertaining themselves. It mostly worked: Having more children around is somehow usually easier than having a few. Such was the wisdom of the conference, an odd get-together of far-right online personalities, traditionalist Christians, and envoys from Silicon Valley. The overarching thesis of the conference—that having children is good and ought to be supported by society—struck me as pretty unobjectionable; if you believe the human race should have a future, you're pronatalist with respect to somebody. And the pronatalists' more immediate concerns about aging populations seem similarly well founded: As birth rates continue to drop globally, the relatively smaller number of young people will struggle to care for the elderly, a worrying prospect regardless of one's political orientation. What was disturbing, therefore, was the degree to which discourse around these fairly innocuous propositions is now dominated by an emerging coalition of the rather far right, whose pronatalist ideas are sometimes intermixed with white supremacy, misogyny, and eugenics. The speakers' roster included a range of figures, some more extreme than others. There were far-right culture warriors whose interest in pronatalism seemed incidental, including Carl Benjamin, also known as Sargon_of_Akkad, a relic of Gamergate who's become an ardent opponent of feminism, and the headliner Jack Posobiec, a Donald Trump super fan who spends a good deal of time issuing trollish proclamations about, for instance, overthrowing democracy, and certainly appears to sympathize with extreme forms of far-right politics. But there were also ordinary and mainly uncontroversial presenters, such as Lyman Stone, a senior fellow and the director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, and Daniel Hess, a researcher with a background in tech. The more radical attendees proposed a variety of odd and unsettling ideas about falling birth rates and how to boost them, some of which seemed rather deliberately formulated for provocation—such as a suggestion by Charles Cornish-Dale, a puckish English reactionary with a large online following who goes by the name of Raw Egg Nationalist, that war may be a useful driver of population growth, and Benjamin's assertion that society ought to be reorganized to prioritize families, arguing that 'if you don't marry and have children, then your opinion is irrelevant.' (A flyer advertising the presentation of the pseudonymous speaker Yuri Bezmonov featured Trump in a McDonald's apron leaning out of a drive-through window with the inscription TRUMP: THE ART OF THE TROLL.) And there was much consideration of the decline of the West in particular (though birth rates are dropping globally), a tendency closely associated with nationalism and theories of racial superiority. 'The racism and misogyny of pro-natalist circles often gets overblown in skeptical media outlets,' Patrick Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who works on pro-family policy, recently wrote in an article for The Dispatch discussing the conference. 'But that doesn't mean those strains are completely absent from the lineup in Austin or the broader pro-natalism movement.' More than a whiff of eugenics was also apparent. The press-hungry couple Malcolm and Simone Collins, a pair of former venture capitalists living in Silicon Valley, were on the speakers' roster, bringing their peculiar approach to childbearing and parenting to the conference floor. The Collinses have chosen to procreate using IVF technology that allows for the selection of genetically superior embryos, a decidedly techno-futurist approach. Their parenting style, meanwhile, is more retrograde; Malcolm Collins once struck his child's face in the presence of a journalist. (The couple told the reporter that their use of corporal punishment was inspired by their observation of a tiger swiping its cub in the wild.) Certain elements of their self-presentation are, again, seemingly intended to troll—Simone wears some kind of puritanical getup complete with a bonnet, and the duo proudly displays multiple guns on the walls of their house full of kids. If some of those aims seem to contradict the goals of religious traditionalists also interested in the revival of big families, it's because the two sets of ideas—the 'trad' and the 'tech'—belong to separate factions that have formed an alliance on several fronts, pronatalism included. The tech crowd is made up of people like the Collinses—Silicon Valley types who envision a radically different future made possible by innovations in technology. The trads, meanwhile, hearken to the religious beliefs and practices of the past, and are skeptical of many aspects of modern life. The tech people are interested in pioneering new reproductive technologies; the trads—at least the Catholic ones—object in principle to IVF and dream of a society with a tolerance for simple human difference, the kind of world in which a person with Down syndrome, for example, would be welcomed with open arms. The techies aren't necessarily committed to having traditional families (see, for example, Elon Musk, the somewhat absent father of at least 14 children); the trads view the institution of family as the key to resolving the birth-rate crisis. These differences were on display at the conference: One speaker, the geneticist Razib Khan, suggested that the techies literally depart for space, perhaps to a Muskian Mars colony, and let the trads inherit the Earth. However its components ultimately relate to one another, this new coalition is part of a broader political realignment taking shape along axes defined by Trump. It isn't any secret that most of the energy and dynamism in contemporary politics now belongs to the right; the Natal Conference alone was teeming with policy ideas and theories of society, while liberals remain scattered in a defensive crouch, with elected Democrats tripping over themselves to disavow a toxic party brand. The right's profusion of resources, followers, and thought is perhaps partially why it's dominating the discourse around an issue that isn't inherently conservative. But maybe the greater reason is that liberals seem almost uniformly unwilling to address the subject of population decline whatsoever—a stance that warrants reconsideration. 'Liberals are reluctant to wade into these matters—talking about families may imply a critique of other people's choices,' Alice Evans, a senior lecturer in international development at King's College London, recently told me. Some may believe (mistakenly, in my opinion) that conceding that having children is good and ought to be encouraged requires conceding that not having children is bad and ought to be punished, a kind of discrimination. And others may be repelled by the growing association between the subject of birth rates and the political right, forming a kind of feedback loop in which liberals avoid the topic, because it seems like a right-wing fixation, and thereby strengthen the existing association further. Whatever the source of liberal inattention, yielding to the far right the notion that humanity ought to persist on this Earth strikes me as absurd. One doesn't have to maintain, as I do, that humankind is excellent—the paragon of animals—in order to affirm the importance of bringing children into the world; much more rational, empirical reasons place political importance on strategies that enable families to welcome children. A society in which the elderly greatly outnumber the young will encounter a multitude of hurdles to flourishing: 'As populations age, a shrinking workforce will support more elderly dependents,' Evans said. 'Older people usually work at lower rates, while being less innovative and less entrepreneurial. The entire economy becomes a bit sluggish. Costs will also rise—to pay for elderly health care and pensions.' Countries experiencing precipitous birth-rate declines, such as South Korea, are already undergoing ominous changes. 'A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly,' the author Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote of South Korea in a New Yorker feature earlier this year. 'About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary.' For rapidly aging countries, immigration may function as a short-term stopgap measure, but sourcing young people from other countries shifts the burden of aging populations on to immigrants' countries of origin. What to do about falling birth rates depends on what's driving them down, and figuring out what those forces may be was a pervasive theme of the conference. Speakers and attendees presented a number of potential reasons, identifying fallout from the sexual revolution, harmful chemicals in food and water supplies, and the proliferation of porn, gambling, weed, and technology. One can imagine a number of extreme and quixotic responses to that constellation of possible causes—a Unabomber-esque rejection of modern technology, for instance, or an acceleration of technological approaches to reproduction. This year, Trump issued an order that would expand access to IVF, dubbing himself the 'fertilization president' at a Women's History Month event last March. Other strategies proposed at the conference included deregulating day cares or banning urban-growth limits in order to build huge quantities of single-family housing, along the same lines as my Atlantic colleague Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein's buzzy new book, Abundance. Derek Thompson: The political fight of the century But perhaps the more obvious approach is essentially a leftist one: Just give families money. Many young people considering childbirth today are discouraged by the high costs of raising kids, including exorbitant child-care fees and income loss associated with time off work to take care of children. Sitting at a conference table sharing cups of Cheez-Its and gummy bears from the kids' buffet table, my mother (whom I had brought to the conference because she was curious about the subject, and because it provided a convenient excuse to visit our home state) leaned over to admit that she would've had 'a whole houseful of kids, if we could've afforded it.' I had never before known that I might have been one of many as opposed to only two, but if people dealing with the much lower child-care and education costs of the 1980s and '90s were financially dissuaded from raising the number of children they wanted, it would follow that the same problem has worsened for today's would-be parents. This perhaps partially explains why America's fertility gap, or the difference between the number of children the average woman has and the number of children she says she would prefer, is the highest it has been in 40 years. And so it makes sense that people hoping to help couples bring children into the world should support setting the marginal cost of having a child at zero, which some involved in the pronatalist movement have already discerned. Stone, the policy expert who spoke at the conference, has written that 'pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies. Anybody saying otherwise is mischaracterizing the research. But it takes a lot of money.' Policies aimed at closing the fertility gap include making birth free, sending new parents 'baby boxes' with all of the essentials for welcoming a newborn, offering free child care and pre-K, covering all of children's health-care expenses, and paying families a monthly cash allowance to offset other kid-related costs, all of which could have the pronatal effect of closing the fertility gap. These kinds of proposals are typically made by the left, but the right has lately begun to rethink its typical approach to welfare programs—or at least members of the right say they have. J. D. Vance, for example, has in the past supported a $5,000 child tax credit, thousands more than the current CTC, and has said that the government should 'make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids, to bring them into the world and to welcome them as the blessings that we know they are.' And why not? The right now has control of the federal government, and the attention of an entire nation. It's free to institute pro-family policies at any time, something several conference speakers noted. What those efforts may look like largely depends on which faction in the pronatalist coalition claims victory over the others, and that is anyone's guess.
