Pronatal, anti-children

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

Far-right leaders who claim to model themselves after America’s Founding Fathers are now taking on the role of the nation’s absent fathers by attempting to engineer a baby boom with no plans to secure the health, safety and welfare of the resulting children. The so-called pronatalist movement is an onslaught of cultural regression that seeks to strip women of their bodily autonomy and commodify children in service of the economy.

A chart showing the number of live births and general fertility rate in the United States from 2000-2024. Courtesy of the National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System, natality data file.

Pronatalists like Elon Musk have been spreading an apocalyptic worldview for years, arguing that the declining birth rate in the U.S. is signaling the death of humanity at large. Proponents of the theory believe that there are not enough children to replace the aging workforce or support the elderly — meaning once the older generations have died off, the void left behind will swallow up the economy and take society with it.

At least that’s the drum they’re beating. Never mind that, according to The New York Times, birth rates are holding steady in places like Sub-Saharan Africa. Musk and his would-be eugenecists only care about the white babies.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. fertility rate increased 1% from 2020 to 2021 and from 2023 to 2024. Otherwise, the U.S. has seen a 2-3% annual decrease since 2014. This decline has not adversely affected the economy because the gaps in the workforce have, up until the current Trump administration, been filled by incoming immigrants, according to an NPR interview with sociologist and Director of the Carolina Population Center Dr. Karen Guzzo.

NPR links the decrease in U.S. birth rates to the reduction in teenage pregnancy, as well as younger generations’ decision to put off having children until they have a home and steady income. Most will never attain that goal in Trump’s America of tariffs and budget cuts. Political instability and the current climate crisis further discourage potential parents.

A chart showing the birth rate for teenagers by age of the mother. Courtesy of the National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System, natality data file.

“We have spent years, decades and millions — hundreds of millions — of dollars shaming young women — not young parents, but really, young women — about having births when they’re not ready, when they’re too young, when they’re not in a stable relationship, when they’re too poor [or] when they don’t have a secure income,” said Guzzo, adding, “so, we’ve told people to wait, and now we’re surprised that they’re waiting.”

A report by LendingTree estimated that it costs around $389,000 to raise a child to the age of 18. Coupled with the increasing inaccessibility of child care, education and programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, most young people believe that it would be irresponsible to bring children into this world.

For the pronatalists, however, economic decline is a result of the low birth rate, not the other way around. Proponents generally blame liberal politics and feminism — specifically the support of bodily autonomy, women in the workforce and access to contraceptives — for the death of the nuclear family, which they view as “traditional” despite the prevalence of multi-generational households sharing childrearing responsibility throughout the past millennia.

Many, including leaders like businessman and far-right blogger Charles Haywood, believe that these ideas have devalued the concepts of family and motherhood, creating an unnatural, effeminate cultural hierarchy.

Haywood, like many in the movement, is a raging white supremacist and sexist who has said that, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history,” and that women “should be socially stigmatized if they have careers,” during his appearance at the 2023 pronatalist convention “NatCon.”

These pronatalist “trads” are largely Evangelical or Catholic and seek to incentivise traditional Christian gender roles and large families, all the while slipping in antisemitic, racist ideas that border on — or just are — tenets of eugenics.

Their belief that life begins at conception puts them at odds with the techno-pronatalists, who also follow in the footsteps of the Nazis eugenicists but, unlike the traditionalists, are determined to use any and all technology to craft their perfect babies — even if that means destroying embryos through in vitro fertilization. 

The techno-pronatalists are less interested in increasing the number of families and stay-at-home moms and are more interested in producing a bumper crop of healthy babes by incorporating AI and genetic engineering into their baby mills. 

For both extremes, creating perfect, white offspring is the goal. After that, they can starve or contract preventable diseases, so long as they contribute to the economy in the meantime.

In order to encourage this desired mass-insemination, the Trump administration’s pronatalist allies have been concocting ways to incentivize people to have babies and fulfill Trump’s promise to be the “fertilization president.” According to Mother Jones, Vice President JD Vance has proposed a weighted voting system that would essentially give parents the ability to vote on behalf of their minor children.

Other pronatalists have suggested giving out Motherhood Medals — an honorific popularized by the likes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin — and $5,000 cash bonuses per baby. Still more have come full circle and suggested classes that teach high schoolers about sex and menstrual cycles; you know, like those sex ed classes conservatives have been protesting for decades. Clearly, it’s sinful to teach women about how their bodies work unless it makes them better babymakers.

The same leaders who suggest shelling out measly allowances and possibly funding studies on endometriosis and other issues that have plagued women for time immemorial are the same leaders who have relentlessly attacked Head Start, SNAP, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Medicaid, all of which allow families to take care of the children the government wants them to have.

Once the baby is born, apparently it doesn’t matter if they’re healthy, happy or fed.

The pronatalist movement is neither pro-family nor pro-children; they’ve simply discovered a new crop to farm. They want to dominate women until they’re reduced to little more than fields growing the next generation of workers to toil on a dying planet.

Pronatalism is just another bid for control by a greedy minority, and when they’ve earned their profit, they will leave the surplus children to suffer in the foster care systems, starve in impoverished homes and stare at the blank walls of crumbling public schools — conditions that they created for their own benefit.