Pronatalism
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“”There’s some catastrophic thinking that goes on in the tech bro space of Silicon Valley and so on, and it’s usually not very practically oriented. If you really tried to promote pronatalism, inevitably what you end up doing is promoting a retrograde sort of anti-feminism.
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—Sociologist Philip N. Cohen, who is concerned about declining fertility rates but not impressed by pronatalist solutions.[1] |
Pronatalism (or pro-natalism or natalism) is a movement which encourages people to have more children. Environmentalists would criticize this because clearly the population of the Earth cannot grow forever and it is not clear that the current population and standard of living are sustainable. Antinatalists would criticize this because life is suffering. And many decent people can't help noticing that actually existing pronatalists often want educated white people to have more children, but poor black people to have fewer. Historically, concerns about the birthrate of educated white people were tied to patriarchy (need those women busy with Kinder, Küche, Kirche, not getting jobs and renting a room of their own), nationalism (need more conscripts and coal miners), eugenics (need the 'right kind' of babies), and white supremacy (can't let darkie outnumber us).
The basic argument[edit]
Almost every rich country has a fertility rate below 2.1, so their populations will decline without immigration.[2] Many people say they want more children, act like they want more children, or behave in strange ways that seem connected to their lack of children or care responsibilities. Some of the barriers to having children, such as expensive housing, cultures of overwork, social isolation, and pessimism about the near future, seem bad. Fertility rates fell abruptly in eastern Europe during the economic depression after the collapse of the USSR, and rose in the North Atlantic in the prosperous years after World War Two.[3] Rapid population decline, such as in South Korea, would both cause practical problems (someone has to take care of the old) and destabilize the financial system (such as by causing the price of housing to fall or cutting tax revenues from young workers while increasing expenses on pensions and healthcare for the old). Most rich countries outside of Asia rely on high immigration to grow their population, but as fertility is in decline across most of the world, this cannot be continued forever. Some countries with low fertility, such as South Korea or Ukraine, share land borders with hostile countries, and rapid population decline would make it difficult to defend them.
Government policies to increase the fertility rate have rarely had much effect, whereas countries such as China and Iran have successfully reduced their fertility.[4] Once a population begins to decline, it is hard to reverse. Pronatalists have proposed a wide range of policies, from changing culture to be more family-friendly in California, to banning contraception and abortion in Communist Romania (which had disastrous consequences).
Most secular arguments for pronatalism are practical, whereas anti-natalism is more theoretical and philosophical. However, there are religious and nationalist arguments for pronatalism.
Criticism[edit]
Australian economist John Quiggin has criticized panic about aging populations, arguing that they often assume a world where people start working at 15 and stop at 64.[5] As there are fewer physically demanding jobs that require little formal education, and since older people with quality healthcare are healthier, people are taking longer to enter the workforce and delaying retirement. Desk jobs in the information economy or even driving a combine don't require young, fit bodies. Small technical changes to pension policy can prevent modest population aging from destabilizing government finances. However, such policy changes are highly unpopular among workers, with an attempt to raise France's retirement age from 62 to 64 due to concerns about an aging workforce resulting in massive protests of hundreds of thousands of people.[6]
Because many of the countries with fertility rates above 2.1 are in Africa or the Islamic world, criticisms of high immigration as a solution to low fertility often sound a lot like criticisms of letting black people and Muslims exist in rich countries. Pronatalist discussions often feature the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the idea that governments in rich temperate countries want to replace current populations with immigrants from poor hot countries. While we can't know if pronatalists would have argued for contraception 100 years ago when European populations were exploding, many argue that explosive population growth in Europe in the past is a fait accomplit that must never be reversed, but explosive population growth in Africa today is a problem.
By the end of the current century, the population of sub-Saharan Africa alone is expected to triple. The problems this creates may eventually be mitigated by important efforts to supply contraception to poor women. But telling people in developed countries who are well-placed to have children to refrain from doing so is misguided. If anything, they should reproduce more, not less.[7]
The Natal Conference described itself as pronatalist, but just happened to be heavily promoted in hereditarian circles and attended by a range of shady people fascinated by race or the idea that rich people might just have good genes and poor people might have bad genes. Even Old Media reporters noticed that Daniel Hess, presented as a "mainly uncontroversial" pronatalist, praises people like Viktor Orban and Kevin Dolan.[8][9] A book review both presents a sympathetic view of pronatalism for upper-middle-class people in the USA, and casually drops in hereditarian arguments and suggests that the book's (male) author is the kind of Catholic who disapproves of contraception but decided not to say that part out loud.[10] Some of the people intrigued by pronatalism are not polite secular intellectuals who just wish their friends would stop talking themselves out of having kids or would like better public transit so they don't have to act as the family chauffeur.
There are some benefits to an aging population, such as less physical violence and warfare.
Because humans have culture, most of the things we care about are passed on by teaching and modelling not by spawning. South Korea and Japan are very influential in world culture even though their populations are shrinking; Egypt has a growing population but little influence on world culture. Christianity is collapsing across the global north because older generations could not convince their children to remain in the church, not because Christians stopped having children. If you are worried about preserving values or identities, focusing on spreading them might be more effective than having more children.
As recently as the 1960s, pop culture was full of fears of population growth and overpopulation. Demographic trends reversed and the Green Revolution prevented mass deaths from starvation. The current fears about population decline could be invalidated by events in the same way.
As implemented by governments[edit]
Pronatalist policies were common in agrarian empires. The kings of ancient Persia paid bonuses to female workers who had children,[11] and the Roman emperor Augustus passed legislation to encourage marriage.[12] In recent times, many national governments try to increase the birthrate, such as democratic France and Sweden.[13] These policies often have limited or uncertain impact.[14]
Authoritarian and fascist regimes are often eager to promote fertility.[15] Three aspects of these regimes may explain this:
- the politics of eternity aspect of tyranny described by historian Timothy Snyder that looks to the past as the ideal and projects the past into the future, meaning that for many in the society today's misery will always be tomorrow's misery.[16]
- the tendency of authoritarian regimes for nationalist expansion, in particular irredentism and wars of aggression based on real or imagined maximalist territories of the dominant ethnic group within the state; such wars minimally require cannon fodder[17][18] and if successful require a replacement population for the envisioned ethnic cleansing
- misogyny and patriarchy. Women who are busy with babies are not competing with men in the workforce or the town square.
Such pronatalist policies can result in a short-term increase in birth rates, but can cause a long-term decline in fertility,[15] and lead to a great deal of suffering among mothers[19] and children.[20] Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu dumped the excess children into underfunded orphanages. Raising children is expensive and its easier to force women to have children then force them to be attentive parents or provide their children with good schools and medical care.
Not all authoritarian governments promote fertility. For decades, China and the Islamic Republic of Iran tried to reduce fertility despite their harsh domestic policies.[21]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ↑ Cohen, Philip N. (2024-11-27). "Elon Musk's father is quite racist, too, and pronatalism is an authoritarian boy toy (I told Sky News)". Family Inequality. Retrieved 2025-09-29.
- ↑ Our World in Data: Fertility Rate
- ↑ "Data Page: Fertility rate, total." Our World in Data (2025). Data adapted from United Nations. Because this dataset begins in 1950, it does not show the first years of the baby boom in countries little damaged by the war.
- ↑ Cohen, Philip N. (2024-10-20). "Pronatalism's tough math". Family Inequality. Retrieved 2025-09-29.
- ↑ Quiggin, John (2023-08-23), The intergenerational report tries to scare us about ageing. It’s an old fear, and wrong, The Conversation, doi:10.64628/aa.yfje59eta
- ↑ May Day: World’s workers rally, France sees pension anger, Alex Turnbull, Angela Charlton and Hyung-Jin Kim, AP News 1 May 2023
- ↑ "If You’re Reading This Essay, You Should Probably Have (More) Children" by [redacted] & Brian Boutwell (2 Feb 2017) [redacted] (archived from 21 Jul 2025 00:34:42 UTC).
- ↑ Sarah Jones, "The World Doesn’t Need More Elon Musk Babies," New York Magazine, April 17, 2025 https://archive.ph/p67qI
- ↑ Emma Goldberg, "Who Are the Women of the Pronatalist Movement?" New York Times (April 17, 2025). Archived.
- ↑ Jane Psmith and John Psmith, "JOINT REVIEW: Family Unfriendly, by Timothy P. Carney," The Psmiths Substack, October 14, 2024 Another post by the authors offhandedly mentions lawfare and the deep state, two terms popular on far-right social media in the US.
- ↑ Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander, translated by Peter T. Daniels (2002) page 435
- ↑ Richard I. Frank, "Augustus' Legislation on Marriage and Children", California Studies in Classical Antiquity, Vol. 8 (1975), pp. 41-52
- ↑ Steven Philip Kramer, Sweden Pushed Gender Equality to Boost Birth Rates, Womens eNews, April 26, 2014
- ↑ Elizabeth Bauer, "Is Sweden Our Fertility-Boosting Role Model?" - Forbes, August 9, 2019
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 Pronatalist policies' backlash in authoritarian regimes by Robert Stelter & Thomas Baudin (2024) Working papers 2024/09, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Basel.
- ↑ On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder (2017) Tim Duggan Books. ISBN 0804190119.
- ↑ Putin’s Cannon Fodder: An Anthem for Russia’s Doomed Youth by Leon Aron (October 07, 2024) The Spectator via American Enterprise Institute.
- ↑ Russia is paying schoolgirls to have babies. Why is pronatalism on the rise around the world? by Jennifer Mathers (July 5, 2025 12.38am NZST) The Conversation. doi:10.64628/AB.ycpmy5q5h.
- ↑ A “Striking” Trend: After Texas Banned Abortion, More Women Nearly Bled to Death During Miscarriage by Kavitha Surana et al. (July 1, 2025, 5 a.m. EDT) ProPublica.
- ↑ Deep Medicaid Spending Cuts Put Health Care Coverage at Risk for One of Five Enrolled Children by Sara Rosenbaum et al. (May 5, 2025) The Commonwealth Fund.
- ↑ Asadisarvestani K, Sobotka T. "A pronatalist turn in population policies in Iran and its likely adverse impacts on reproductive rights, health and inequality: a critical narrative review." Sex Reprod Health Matters. 2023 Dec;31(1):2257075. doi: 10.1080/26410397.2023.2257075