Last week The Washington Post editorial board made the mainstream case for a cause célèbre of the far right: pronatalism. The paper isn’t the only media outlet platforming arguments for increasing America’s birth rate. In recent weeks, The New York Times published one, and The New Yorker covered a pronatalist book in an article accompanied by a glossy photo of kid-forward domestic bliss. Last month, The Atlantic ran a piece on young people eschewing child-rearing. It’s hard to see this cluster of pieces and not wonder what’s going on.
The Rise of a New Pronatalist Movement
Following the influx of immigrants in the second half of the nineteenth century, American pronatalists interested in scientific racism and reproductive regulation promoted nostalgia for a rural, white family ideal. But right-wing pronatalism is newly resurgent, with high-profile adherents such as Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson pushing catastrophic thinking about depopulation and conspiracies such as the “great replacement theory.”
Reporting back from a pronatalist conference last spring for Politico, Gaby DelValle highlighted that the current coalition of pronatalists has factions with various motivations. She noted nevertheless that, at the event, sober economic concerns about declining birth rates worked as cover for social and political worries, especially threats to white male supremacy in a “woke” America:
Many of the speakers and attendees see natalism as a way of reversing these changes. As the speakers chart their roadmaps for raising birth rates, it becomes evident that for the most dedicated of them, the mission is to build an army of like-minded people, starting with their own children, who will reject a whole host of changes wrought by liberal democracy and who, perhaps one day, will amount to a population large enough to effect more lasting change.
Growing their own seems the only answer for a xenophobic movement unable or unwilling to compete in the marketplace of ideas.
Legacy Media Weigh In
Legacy media has covered MAGA’s embrace of great replacement theory, particularly in the wake of Charlottesville. And last spring, a Guardian profile of influencers Malcolm and Simone Collins produced a spate of coverage of the couple and the pronatalist movement. But some outlets have moved on from presenting pronatalists as clickbait curiosities.
Now it seems, in lieu of examining the extreme personalities, conspiracies, and ideologies of the pronatalist movement—or the rising global authoritarianism in which it is thriving—legacy media have taken to “making the liberal case” for Americans to produce more babies.
The WaPo editorial, titled “Why Americans are having fewer kids — and why it could be a problem”, opened with results of a recent Pew survey showing only a minority of Americans believe children are essential to a rewarding life. WaPo doesn’t spend a great deal of time analyzing why this is so, but Pew’s younger respondents (18-49) who said they were “unlikely to have children” had many reasons. Number one was “just don’t want to.”
WaPo didn’t seem to like these answers. “Just don’t want to” was sufficiently vague to allow the editorial board to come up with its own theories. This leads to blaming helicopter parents for making parenting too much work and blaming childfree adults for having too much fun: “If more of your neighbors and peers are single or childless (and seem to be enjoying their lives), then this will likely temper your own enthusiasm about having kids.”
Philosopher Anastasia Berg of The New York Times’s “Why Have Kids? A Liberal Case for Natalism” also sees peer pressure at play, suggesting that politically-correct liberals are making oppositional-defiant decisions about marriage and child-bearing:
But I found that the question of children has become the kind of thing that people are more and more uncomfortable thinking about personally and discussing socially.
This situation is exacerbated by a political climate in which having children becomes increasingly coded as conservative and reactionary.
Berg intimates that young Americans’ stated concerns about climate change or the state of the world may be posturing or excuses. In other words, they’re rebels without a cause. Really, some of this commentary can read like perennial Kids These Days fare. The young-uns have their priorities all wrong! They are:
“ignoring” the decision to have kids, putting it off until it’s too late (Berg)
perfectionists waiting for an ideal romantic partner (Berg)
seeking satisfaction and fulfillment in the wrong places (Berg)
not considering the future of humanity (Berg, WaPo)
thinking only about their own interests (WaPo)
These lines of thinking converge in an age-old accusation faced by people—especially women—who’ve decided not to have children: we’re selfish. Not having children is proof in itself that we want to live our lives for ourselves, not others.
The 44% of young people who say they want to “focus on other things” are presumed to be focusing on the wrong things: career success, material stuff, frivolous pleasures. That many are devoting their lives to the community and expressing hope for the future through work in child care, education, health care, the environment, the law, civil rights, diplomacy, science, public works, journalism, the arts and humanities, economic development, or religion garners no mention.
WaPo’s board supports its argument with a quote from philosopher Jennifer A. Frey: “‘Marriage and parenthood are leaps of faith that require individuals to go from thinking and choosing for “me” to thinking and choosing for “we.”’”
Unfortunately, it’s not a big leap from this assertion to VP candidate JD Vance’s claim that people without children should be denied political power because they “don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.
Mainstreaming Pronatalism
On this point and others, these legacy media arguments for more children can echo messages of far-right pronatalists, including that childlessness is immoral.
Christine Emba in her Atlantic piece “The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids” takes an empathetic angle, though she too extrapolates from the fears young people voice about having children in a world of environmental disasters, economic inequality, violence and political strife:
But in listening closely to people’s stories, I’ve detected a broader thread of uncertainty—about the value of life and a reason for being. Many in the current generation of young adults don’t seem totally convinced of their own purpose or the purpose of humanity at large, let alone that of a child.
In several pieces, young people are depicted as unhappy and pessimistic, struggling to find meaning in life. Not having children is presented as a byproduct of generational nihilism, a nihilism I certainly don’t recognize after 20-plus years teaching high school students and seeing them head off with purpose into the world—and overwhelmingly flourish.
In The New Yorker, Emma Green interviews Catherine Pakaluk, whose book Hannah’s Children relies on interviews with women glad to have had lots of children—from 5 to 15 of them. Pakaluk makes a cultural and moral argument that women should have children and start young in order to produce and raise many:
But Pakaluk goes for it, making the case that having kids is good, not just for individuals but for society. She argues that the true damage of the birth dearth is not economic disaster but a distortion of our culture and politics. She, and many of her subjects, see a country hobbled by relentless individualism: people turning inward, pursuing their own happiness and success instead of investing in others. “Maybe what ails us is not our freedom per se, but something we mistake for freedom—being detached from family obligations, which are actually the demands that save us from egoism and despair,” she writes.
At times there is little light between Pakaluk’s claims and those of the WaPo, Times, and Atlantic writers, as here, when she throws in a pitch for personal happiness. Pakaluk’s despair is Berg’s pessimism is Emba’s lack of confidence that life has purpose. Pakaluk is direct about the need she sees for women to tamper career ambitions, even if they continue to work, but this is just a step from mainstream claims that people are misguided in seeking fulfillment in work.
There is also little light between Pakaluk’s argument and that of far-right pronatalists, though she presents it more reasonably: that a certain type of family is needed to save society. It’s a more genteel way of expressing JD Vance’s missive that “childless cat ladies…are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.“
Pakaluk argues that the way to achieve higher birth rates is through religion. Though an economist, she rejects government-based solutions to make raising children more affordable, despite research showing a raft of young people (36% in the Pew survey) say they can’t afford it. Similarly, the legacy media pieces I’ve discussed sideline financial incentives as a solution.
WaPo appears skeptical of the 36% who say they can’t afford children; after all, they explain, “After being behind for a while, millennials have largely caught up and are even eclipsing previous generations on various income and wealth metrics.” On this basis, the “growing number of women [who] say they don’t want children because of the economic costs” are swiftly dismissed.
(The editorial board avoids both the economic solution and the economic problem with declining birth rates. Their first answer to why low rates need addressing: “Lower birthrates mean fewer young people, which means a shrinking workforce and more difficult economic growth.” Understanding, though, that telling young Americans to lie back and think of the GDP is unseemly, the editors quickly move on to their other reasons.)
Several of the pieces provide evidence that incentives such as generous family leave and child care policies haven’t reversed fertility declines in South Korea, France, Scandinavia and elsewhere. While this evidence is compelling, it doesn’t serve American children and families to dismiss the value of a strong social safety net (though it does serve conservative political and business interests.).
If happiness is the goal, we should seek to emulate the policies of more peaceful, happier nations, the happiest of which provide those safety nets, even if they don’t produce more babies. Finland repeatedly ranks as the happiest, despite having one of the lowest birth rates. Finns with children send them off each day to safe, excellent schools.
Making Choices that Provide Permission
Justifying austerity is not the only harm that can come from mainstream outlets echoing right-wing pronatalists. One is the permission structure created for the empowerment of the anti-immigrant strains of that movement. It’s notable that immigration is not presented as even a partial solution to declining birth rates in these recent pieces.
In a rant on Xitter this week, Elon Musk advanced the “great replacement theory” even more fully than he has done in the past, claiming Democrats were plotting to naturalize masses of immigrants in order to produce more Democratic voters. Musk was explicit with his nearly 200 million followers: voters need to elect Donald Trump or face the end of the nation as they know it.
Musk added this fuel to the fire of political and racial violence as weeks from the election, candidates Trump and Vance triple-down as a primary campaign strategy on smearing migrants as cannibals, pet-eaters, animals, rapists, and killers run amok in American towns and cities. With this graphic rhetoric, Trump emulates dangerous authoritarians he admires such as Victor Orban, who has used hatred for immigrants as part of his project of dismantling democracy in Hungary. Trump’s promises of “bloody” mass deportations and camps recall the deadliest fascist leaders of the last century.
And then there’s the effect on the debate on Americans’ reproductive freedoms as we approach an election which could determine their fate. I was dumbstruck by this quote from the WaPo editorial board:
Today, having children is a choice rather than an expectation, and more women are deciding that the trade-offs are too great in light of competing life goals. If you can’t have it all, which many women feel they can’t, then a choice must be made, and having children comes to be seen increasingly as a zero-sum consideration.
Today, having children is not a choice for women and girls in the 20 states that have passed restrictive or very restrictive abortion legislation since the Supreme Court, flush with Trump appointees, overturned Roe v. Wade. As Project 2025 and recent Congressional votes lay bare, a second Trump Administration could mean a national abortion ban, additional anti-reproductive freedom Supreme Court justices, and contraception and IVF bans.
Writing about women’s reproductive choices in 2024 without acknowledging that these choices are being stripped from them is—and I hate to use this overused word—gaslighting.
A responsible case for raising the marriage and birth rate can be made, but not without placing it in the context of a nation in which the far right is pushing for various means at the federal and state level to control women and LGBTQ+ Americans. Beyond the passage of extreme abortion laws, the agenda includes efforts to ban contraception, fertility treatments, no-fault divorce, and gay marriage while supporting child marriage.
What is a choice? Publishing pieces suggesting women aren’t happy, fulfilled, or productive unless they marry young and have children—weeks from an election that will decide the next president, the next Congress, and the next Supreme Court is a choice. Echoing—even sanewashing— themes of far-right pronatalism when women’s bodily autonomy is being restricted is a choice. It is a choice to mainstream some of these ideas in this moment, when, just like anti-immigrant hate, targeting the rights of women is part of the authoritarian playbook.