JD Vance is one of the first important politicians in the United States to directly take up one of the preoccupations of this newsletter — the ongoing collapse of birthrates across the developed world and the grim consequences of an aging, childless future — and it’s fair to say it isn’t going well so far. Not just his dig at “childless cat ladies” but also his past support for a system where parents cast votes on behalf of their children have been fodder for the Democratic Party’s newfound narrative about the Trump-Vance ticket: that it’s creepy, bizarre, weird.
Even when the cats are left out of it, alas, the problem of weirdness is a chronic one for pro-natalists. I have many years of experience talking to people (to you, dear readers, but also to friends and neighbors and relations) about the birth dearth, and I can promise that no matter how you frame the issue, pro-natalism often comes across as extremely strange.
This is not to concede that it is actually weird to care about the birthrate: Children are good, human beings are good, a prosperous future for the human race is good, and it’s absurd not to care about looming depopulation and all the social and economic problems that come trailing in its wake. Future generations (to the extent that they exist!) will find it much, much stranger that so many people barely noticed this issue or dismissed it than that a Republican vice-presidential candidate once floated giving children political representation through their parents.
But if you are a pro-natalist, you still have to understand the reasons an aura of weirdness hangs over the idea.
There are the historical associations with white racial panic — wildly misapplied in the case of Vance (whose wife is the daughter of Indian immigrants), but certainly you can find racist pro-natalists on the far-right fringe. There is the general American impulse to separate the realms of intimate life and individual choice from politics of any kind. (Indeed, much of what I’m saying here applies more in America than elsewhere — natalism seems less weird in other parts of the world — but American preeminence means that our habits of mind influence the entire planet.)
There is the liberal resistance to any big idea that seems to cast doubt on elements of the sexual revolution. The idea of freedom from procreation as a hard-won feminist liberty, especially, means that any talk about increasing birthrates instantly evokes “Handmaid’s Tale” anxieties about patriarchal coercion. (Recall that in Margaret Atwood’s novel a birthrate collapse is the engine of the totalitarian takeover.)
There is the similar libertarian anxiety about coercion, joined to a skepticism about the effectiveness of any kind of attempted social engineering (if people have fewer kids, that’s just their revealed preference and you can’t argue with it) and the worthiness of any kind of communal project (why should I help pay for other people’s children?). And finally there is the long-standing right-wing anxiety about encouraging reproductive irresponsibility among the poor.
These specific issues all lie in the shadow of a larger weirdness problem — the extent to which it’s just hard for people to get their minds around the idea that reproduction, something that seems so basic to human nature, something that we’ve spent decades talking about in terms of “control” and careful management lest human impulses run to Malthusian or environmentally ravaging extremes, is actually just not happening on a scale that could make economies collapse and cultures disappear.
Yes, if you read deep in history you know that societies in the past have had somewhat similar problems, that Thanatos as well as eros can threaten civilization. But it’s just not part of the modern experience, with our long centuries of growth and dynamism and soaring populations. Unless you’re obsessed with ancient Rome or J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gondor, it’s hard to imagine not-reproducing as a real problem, let alone an existential one.
Given all these imaginative impediments, the pro-natalist is forced to try to untangle a lot of different knots at once. To the liberals, one can argue that pro-natalism need not be in conflict with feminism and female agency, that much of the recent collapse in birthrates reflects women falling short of their desired fertility as opposed to deliberately deciding against having kids, and that pro-natalism can seek a more marriage- and child-friendly culture rather than a coercive birthrate-obsessed state.
To libertarians, one can point out that even the childless ultimately become dependent on the taxes paid and economic growth generated by other people’s children. To conservatives, one can stress how different the landscape of teen births and poverty looks now compared to 30 years ago, while looking for ways to design pro-natalist policy to encourage work rather than idleness and government dependency.
These kinds of arguments have been part of the public debate for a while, and if they have not succeeded in making pro-natalism fully mainstream, they have at least helped sustain a landscape where family policy is a normal part of the political debate, where anti-natalism in the culture and the policy realm meets some resistance — and where, very gradually, the institutions of expertise and opinion-making have been awakening to the perils of a population crash.
Patience can be a virtue, and the reactions to Vance’s attempt to make the birthrate into a cultural wedge issue suggest the political wisdom of a more irenic and gradualist approach.
But the world doesn’t always reward gradualism, and what’s politically wise can also be insufficient. And right now that’s how it feels: The elite waking up to the problem has happened too slowly, the modest success of the winsome approach has been overtaken by events, and the (real, but limited) impact of pro-natal efforts in policy are being overwhelmed by accelerating anti-natal trends.
I’m honestly not sure where we go from here, because this acceleration increases the radicalism of the pro-natalist ask.
When I started out writing about these issues 15 years ago, it was possible to frame pro-natalism in relatively modest terms, as a matter of shifting emphases and policy tweaks. But the deeper we get into a birth dearth, the more dramatic the alteration required to come back up: not just modest child tax credits but a complete overhaul of the welfare state, not just a slightly more pro-marriage culture but a transformation in how the sexes relate to one another and pair off, not just a dose of can-do American optimism but a recovery of existential hope, not just a politics that takes family life more seriously but one that resists gerontocracy directly by — well, for instance, by giving parents extra votes.
So the serious pro-natalist in 2024 is not just a bit weird but also increasingly a bit utopian-seeming and revolutionary. Which seems likely to create a dynamic where more normal people finally wake up to the problem, only to decide that the solutions look impossible and fall back into fatalism or denial or despair. And also a dynamic where pro-natalism itself becomes a factional cause, a rallying cry for groups that are already fecund against forces that seem arrayed against them — in other words, a culture-war issue, after all.
To be clear, it’s possible to argue for even radical changes in a nuanced and consensus-oriented style. And since nobody stands to lose more in the future than groups that don’t reproduce themselves — giving even the deepest skeptic of birthrate panic a reason to take these issues seriously — I continue to hope for a world where pro-natalism isn’t just a factional issue but a shared premise of a reviving civilization.
But I’m skeptical that the issue can escape the pull of polarization, the vortex of the Kulturkampf. And I suspect that the “weirdness” that Democrats are eagerly attacking at the moment will come to seem much more familiar in the stranger world to come.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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