If
only the pronatalist turn in American politics were confined to one
bespectacled, self-promoting husband and wife team starring in countless profiles over the last handful of years. “Meet
the ‘elite’ couples breeding to save mankind,” is how the The Telegraph introduced Simone and Malcolm Collins in
2023. “America’s premier pronatalists,” as The Guardian dubbed them, “want to make America
procreate again” per the Washington Post. What Simone
and Malcolm Collins call their “pronatalist” program is consistent and
undisguised: They extoll the virtues of big families engineered through
compulsory motherhood, restrained through patriarchal gender roles, and with
children isolated from any outside influence that might challenge the family’s
worldview.
In
recent decades, people who obsess about birth rates in the Western world have tended
to do so from the fringes, rubbing elbows with conspiracy theorists panicked about
“the great replacement” of white people—until they find
their way to weirdo billionaires willing to repackage eugenics as a remedy. Now, however, the
Collinses believe they have allies in the White
House, even trying to sell pronatalism as public policy: As The New York Times recently
reported, the Trump administration is
apparently entertaining proposals ranging from government-funded education
about menstrual cycles to so-called “baby bonuses” of $5,000 for each child an
American woman bears. (It seems safe to assume they mean only cisgender women
who are not immigrants.) The Collinses themselves have been drafting executive orders, including one to
award a “National Medal of Motherhood” to mothers who have given birth to six
or more children.
Meanwhile,
the Trump administration is cutting if not outright eliminating women’s health
research. They are freezing federal funds for family planning, meaning
pregnant people will lose critical care. Trump claims to support IVF and jokes
that he’s the “fertilization president” one week, and the next he eliminates the team at the CDC working on
IVF. Trump celebrates the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade as
a personal victory, and after Dobbs, maternal mortality spiked. He’s breaking up families,
jailing mothers and fathers and leaving their children alone to defend themselves before
immigration judges—without their parents, without lawyers. The men he surrounds
himself with openly lean into eugenic thinking: lackeys like Elon Musk, who believes “A collapsing birth rate is the
biggest danger civilization faces by far,” and HHS director Robert F. Kennedy,
Jr, who complains that teens aren’t fertile enough and that “autism
destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource,
which is our children.”
There
is a continuity from the pseudo-valorization of motherhood to policing people
through reproductive coercion. “One of
the fastest ways to trap a woman in precarity is to push her into pregnancy,”
Jessica Calarco, University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist and author of Holding
It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net, told me this week. After
our conversation, it felt like these “pronatalist” policies are really more
like DOGE, but for reproductive labor—taking a chainsaw to what few supports exist for supporting people’s pregnancies and families, making people’s lives
more chaotic and unstable, and calling it making America “great” again.” As
ever, we have to ask: great for who, and at whose expense?
With
pronatalism, Calarco told me, “the goal is not to make raising children easier
for everyone—really, it’s about providing a reward for families who do
childrearing the ‘right’ way.” What that often looks like among the
pronatalists is “breadwinner/homemaker families,” Calarco explained, men being
the breadwinners, women being the homemakers, and women rearing the children,
typically large numbers of children, perhaps homeschooling them. Hence policies
that reward women for having many children, and “education” to steer them away
from contraception and family planning and into monitoring their fertility.
While
the proposals coming from the pronatalists are a bit thin, you can see this
worldview reflected in the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, also known as Project 2025, which
stipulates that government policies should “restore the family as the
centerpiece of American life.” To do this, they advocate expanding
government, telling policymakers “to elevate family authority, formation, and
cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through
the tax code, to restore the American family.” If “restoring the family”
requires making government bigger, then so be it. To the extent that government
offers people any resources, they will be contingent on one vision of the
family. Project 2025 may deem these “pro-family” policies; in truth, they are
pro-patriarchy. If they give women more resources, contingent on having more
children, is that offering women choices, or exerting power over their choices?
When the goal is about dictating which families get
support, Calarco said, “it helps to explain why we’re not seeing investments in
things like paid family leave, or universal childcare.” At bottom, “it’s not
about making childbirth or parenting more accessible, but about just a reward
system for those who do it their way.”
What
the pronatalists regard as “their way” may seem quite extreme—this motherhood
medal could be lifted from Nazi Germany—but at the same time, it’s aligned with
the American history of reproductive control. Calarco described “better
baby” contests that arose at the turn of the twentieth century,
coinciding with anti-immigrant panic about “race suicide” among whites. Such
contests, she said, were “enormously popular at state fairs and other types of
events and communities across the United States,” and they helped set standards
for what made for “better” babies—”what we might think of as a sort of Aryan
baby in the sense of blonde hair, blue eyed, conservative Protestant, typically
a child being raised by a very conservative, oftentimes religious family”—as
well as what made for ideal mothers.
The
chainsaw maneuvers—cutting family planning funding, or Head Start, and other
programs people rely on to keep their families afloat—are there to help make
something like getting a “baby bonus” attractive. As Calarco told me, by shrinking and
eliminating women’s other options, they are creating the conditions under which
women will be more dependent on men. The combination of precarity and
dependance can “set women up for abuse, for violence, for manipulation, for
being forced into additional pregnancies that they didn’t plan for or don’t
want,” Calarco added. “The goal is to really quite literally trap women in
marriage,”
Pronatalism
is a bit of a mess: It’s both an extreme ideology of reproductive control, and
an ethos that comports with what were once mainstream ideas about reproduction
and racism. And here it is again, elevated along with so many other fringe
ideologies that have moved to the center, with open white nationalists getting a hearing from Trump, and with
conspiracy theory promoters, such as Jack Posobiec, now afforded access to the White House. The
Collinses’ schtick draws on all these strains:, Malcolm told Politico that American schools are
“dedicated to cultural genocide.” Simone acknowledged to Mother Jones that her Puritan tradwife attire is meant in
part as “trolling,” but also not. Now, someone who shares the pronatalist worldview finds himself one heartbeat from the presidency: Vance campaigned on his opposition “childless cat ladies.”
If
we have arrived here, it’s because the core project of pronatalism has been
quite successfully laundered into more neutral-sounding policy proposals. And
that, in turn, is because the pronotalist platform is not so outside the
patriarchal norm. It’s similar to the empty idealization of motherhood that has
long been used to sugarcoat a lack of actual material support for mothers. Pronatalism
only seems new or disruptive when we forget that fact.
The post The Trump Administration Isn’t Pro-Family. It’s Pro-Patriarchy. appeared first on New Republic.
