Elon Musk has allegedly fathered his 13th child with a fourth woman, the conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair. Judging by St. Clair’s public remarks on Musk’s platform, X, theirs was not necessarily a love connection: In asking that Musk acknowledge his paternity, St. Clair did not issue an emotional appeal but rather, through her spokesperson, a request that Musk “finish” an unspecified “agreement” with her. Historians may one day reflect on the open concubinage at the end of America’s experiment with liberal democracy, and what it revealed about the disruption characteristic of our era: the compromise of the right’s typical defense of traditional families by the Nietzscheans of Silicon Valley, in favor of having children for quantity’s sake.
This is an unfortunate development for the general cause of pronatalism—the principle that having children is good and should be promoted by society—as it has now acquired the reputation of an elite trend intended to advance conservative social projects. Following the logic of negative polarization, progressives now seem inclined to reject the mantle of baby-friendliness; if the right wants it, the thinking goes, it must be bad. But pronatalism is not inherently right-wing. Birth rates really are falling: America’s declined 2 percent from 2022 to 2023 alone, and only six countries are expected to have birth rates above the replacement rate in 2100. The policies associated with pronatalism, moreover, naturally belong to the left, and there is a progressive case for making the country more welcoming to families in hopes of achieving a range of benefits, including a bump in the birth rate.
Still, it’s the reactionary form of pronatalism that’s ascendant now, driven by interest from right-wing tech figures including Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel, with the support of politicians including Vice President J. D. Vance. In a new book, the president of the Heritage Foundation dedicates a chapter to pronatalism; he weighs in against contraception, reproductive technologies such as IVF, and dog parks, which, he says, are a sign of an insidiously anti-family culture. There are gender-revanchist undercurrents in the conservative brand of pronatalism, too—Musk’s version has more than a whiff of polygamy about it, and tradwife culture is enmeshed with hopes for larger broods.
Last year, a wave of media attention to this growing right-wing push for babies arrayed progressives against the tech world’s particular vision of a richly populous future, with left-wing thinkers stipulating that high-profile conservatives are simply wrong about falling birth rates. “To be clear,” Sophie Alexander and Dana Hull wrote last summer in Bloomberg, “the world’s population is not declining … The overwhelming majority of experts trust the data from the United Nations, which projects that the global figure will keep rising to a peak of more than 10 billion people by the year 2100.” The implication of those data is that conservatives are specifically concerned about birth rates in white Western countries. Progressives have also argued that the pronatalists are motivated by racial anxiety, eugenics, and the wish to reestablish traditional gender roles. Silicon Valley pronatalists’ “genetic largesse is presumably down to a mix of narcissism, altruism and dreams of immortality without the messy business of actually parenting a child,” Elaine Moore wrote of the movement last October for the Financial Times. “Some may also believe their genes are more valuable than most and that exceptionalism can (and must!) be passed down,” she added.
Although the pronatalists of the right have yet to assemble a specific policy program for achieving their ends, there are inklings of things to come. Earlier this week, the president signed an executive order promising to expand access to IVF to help families facing fertility problems conceive children, a definitionally pronatalist move. Vance, meanwhile, is on the record as supporting a $5,000 child tax credit, a policy he described as “pro-family.”
As Vance’s position on the child tax credit hints, the types of policies that promote people’s willingness and ability to have children tend to come in the form of family benefits, which is to say, programs that channel money and resources to parents and children. This is understood by conservatives such as the economist Lyman Stone, who wrote in 2020 that “pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies. Anybody saying otherwise is mischaracterizing the research.” But fiscal conservatives recently fought against child-tax-credit expansions on the grounds that too much generosity is wasteful and discourages work. To the degree that the right makes any serious effort to field policies that might actually improve conditions for having children, they will face serious pushback from within their own coalition. As noted above, even IVF is controversial among some conservatives.
Genuinely pronatalist policies may therefore have more traction with the left, should progressives see fit to seize them—which they should, for all the usual left reasons: to promote equality (the rich can already afford to reproduce at will), eliminate poverty, and extend to each person born the best conditions for flourishing. And if concerns about population decline are sometimes overstated, the effects of an aging society are genuinely troubling from a prosocial point of view, and they can’t be waved away by relying on immigration. Granted, in the short term, wealthier countries with lower fertility rates can take in people from poorer countries to stave off the problems of population decline. As long as those immigrants are younger than the average age of a country’s current residents, they help balance the lopsided demography. But eventually, newcomers tend to assimilate into the local culture and have fewer children. Wanting a future for yourself and others is a good thing, and we all have a stake in seeing that we leave a well-shaped world to our inheritors.
Although pronatalism may seem reactionary, fertility in the developed world is associated not with old-fashioned gender norms but rather with cultures that promote the domestic contributions and involvement of men. It’s women, then, who stand to gain the most from benefits that could support more and bigger families. Survey data suggest that there is a widening gulf between how many children women are having throughout the United States and Europe and how many they say they would like to have. While birth rates are declining, the desire for children is not. A recent Gallup poll confirmed that many Americans are dreaming of larger families: 45 percent of those surveyed said the ideal family size consists of three or more children, the highest rate since 1971.
The idea that people ought to be supported in welcoming however many children they want is both pronatalist and, to the degree that it helps women manifest the lives they imagine for themselves, arguably feminist. This is perhaps why leftist politicians such as Senator Bernie Sanders have already backed some pronatalist policies, including universal child care and pre-K, as well as guaranteed paid family leave.
Putting aside the cultural accretions and political entanglements of pronatalism, its foundational question is crucial: Should humankind continue? If the answer is yes, then we’re already dealing in the realm of pronatalism, where the good of childbearing is taken for granted—and differences in approaches would likely come down to policy particulars. But if the answer is no, then all of politics is moot anyhow. The cause of humanity’s future is too important to cede to a political right with questionable intentions, or to be ignored.
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