Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images
Elon Musk may not have appeared at the Natal Conference in Austin, Texas, this year, but he didn’t have to. The very concept of pronatalism owes its current prominence to him and his obsession with fertility. He wants to father a baby “legion,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, which must increase “before the apocalypse.” He controls the mothers of his children through payouts and legal threats, he has reportedly told people that he is “concerned” that developing countries will outbreed the West, and he isn’t alone.
Former venture capitalist Simone Collins did attend NatalCon, where she told an NPR reporter that she was prepared to die in childbirth. She also said she “would rather not do that,” but explained that “historically, women died in childbirth at roughly similar rates to the rates at which men died protecting their land or country.” I have no idea if that’s true, and I doubt Collins does either. It’s the sort of nonsense a person says to provoke a reporter, and Collins is good at that. She and her husband, Malcolm, have appeared in so many news stories that I have lost count of the headlines, and each article is more unsettling than the last. They, like Musk, are concerned about falling birth rates, so they have decided to have as many babies as they can. They use IVF to select the most superior embryos for implantation. They homeschool their kids. They hit their kids. They used to be atheists, but now they’ve decided they’re Techno-Puritans, a metaphysical system of their own creation. A CNN video filmed at NatalCon shows Simone in a dress and a bonnet: like an 18th-century Quaker but without the egalitarian beliefs.
Collins is a troll, certainly, though it’s difficult to tell where the performance stops and sincerity begins. She is pregnant with her fifth child and intends to have more, which is at minimum an extreme commitment to the bit. When she says she is willing to die in her pursuit of a brood, I tend to believe her, but if martyrdom is what she wants, she’s probably going to be disappointed. American women do perish in childbirth, or directly as a result of it, yet most have little in common with Collins, who is well-off and white. Like many pronatalists, Collins slides right past reality into a hubristic fantasy, obscuring a much bigger — and more pressing — story about fertility and freedom in the United States. She has the means to birth whenever and however she wants, and many women of color do not.
But NatalCon is not about freedom. In a report from last year’s event, journalist Gaby Del Valle observed “The goal, as put by Indian Bronson, the pseudonymous co-founder of the elite matchmaking service Keeper, is ‘more, better people.’” Conference organizer Kevin Dolan lost his job when antifascists linked him to racist, homophobic, and misogynist blog posts and tweets in 2021. “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever,” Charles Haywood, a far-right “shampoo magnate,” told a cheering audience last year. The 2025 conference does not appear to be notably more progressive. The Collinses spoke, as did Jordan Lasker or “Cremieux,” who routinely promotes eugenic pseudoscience. Another speaker, Charles Cornish-Dale, is better known as the Raw Egg Nationalist. He calls himself a “right-wing bodybuilder,” says that nonwhite immigration is destroying western countries, and blames feminism for a “longhouse” culture that forces men and women to coexist with each other. As of 2024, he reportedly lived with his mother.
Some pronatalists have distanced themselves from the likes of Raw Egg Nationalist, or at least they’ve tried. I’ll admit that no movement is truly monolithic, and even within the pronatalist right there are differences between the “trad” and “tech” wings, though they usually agree they must push back “on social and cultural changes” which have been “imposed on them by outside forces,” as Del Valle noted. Some writers and policy wonks have even tried to claim pronatalist ideas for liberalism or socialism, but that is a morally and intellectually bankrupt effort. I agree that it isn’t always reactionary to worry about the future of the welfare state or the persistence of the fertility gap, which suggests that Americans aren’t having as many children as they want. The solution, though, is not “pronatalism, but leftist.” It’s reproductive justice.
In 1994, the Clinton administration had developed a health-care reform package that left out as much as it covered. As Time would later report, the legislation offered “little focus on health services like pre- and postnatal care, fibroid screenings or STI tests,” which limited its vision of reproductive “choice.” In response, a group of Black women gathered in a Chicago hotel room and decided to respond. Calling themselves Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, they took out full-page ads in the Washington Post and Roll Call magazine outlining their political demands. “Reproductive freedom is a life and death issue for many Black women and deserves as much recognition as any other freedom,” they wrote. Health care reform “must be affordable” for people “without deductibles and copayments,” they went on, and it should include “diagnostic, treatment, preventative, long-term care, mental health services, prescription drugs and pre-existing conditions,” alongside a full range of reproductive-health services, like Pap smears, abortion, and infertility treatments. They wanted anti-discrimination protections, too: for women of color, queer people, seniors, the poor, and people with disabilities. “In order to accomplish this goal, Black women must be represented on national, state and local planning, review, and decision-making bodies,” they added.
Reproductive choice did not exist for Black women if they could not exercise it — and they had never been entirely free to do so. From the atrocities of chattel slavery to the eugenics era and beyond, they formed their families on a battlefield. A definition of reproductive rights that hinged on liberal notions of choice and the right to privacy did not and could not grasp the full scope of their lives or their needs. “Roe v. Wade and subsequent cases guaranteed women’s freedom from government interference in their private reproductive decisions,” the scholar Dorothy Roberts wrote in 1997’s Killing the Black Body. “But what about women too poor to pay for private health care?” She added that “the prevailing view” of the Constitution “protects only an individual’s ‘negative’ right to be free from unjustified intrusion, rather than the ‘positive’ right to actually lead a free life.” In this interpretation, the Constitution “does not obligate the government to ensure the social conditions and resources necessary for individual liberty or to protect the individual from degradation inflicted by social forces other than the state.”
Roberts proposed “a broader understanding of reproductive freedom,” which did not “reject abortion rights in favor of a right to procreate,” but rather saw “the right to terminate a pregnancy as one part of a broader right to autonomy over one’s body and one’s reproductive decisionmaking.” Do you have reproductive freedom if you can birth a child, but not house them? If there’s raw sewage in your yard and no one in power will do anything about it, are you free? Are your kids free? What is freedom to you if the police can kill your child in the street and walk away? The concept of reproductive justice is “not merely a substitute for the terms ‘pro-choice,’ ‘reproductive rights,’ or even ‘sexual rights,’” but a “paradigm shift,” as the advocate Loretta J. Ross explained years later. Reproductive justice says that no one is an automaton with a womb. We are complex human beings who live in the world and are subject to its constraints. Oppression is not an empty “woke” concept but a source of pressure that make it difficult for women to exercise free reproductive choices.
In the post-Dobbs social order, reproductive justice as a concept and a political project have only become more vital. The pronatalist revival threatens it by definition. The distinction between reproductive justice and pronatalism is not academic; someone has to do the reproducing, and she needs justice. If we displace her because our emphasis is on fertility or “the family” instead, all that’s left is coercion.
I understand why right-wing pronatalists don’t talk about reproductive justice. They’re invested in race and gender hierarchy, not liberation, and that’s true whether they’re tradcaths or Techno-Puritans. This isn’t a novel development, either. People were panicking over birth rates in the 1980s, when my Evangelical parents got married, had me, and decided to homeschool. My parents are not Quiverfull Christians, who oppose the use of birth control and believe that God wants them to produce many arrows for His glory, but we were in proximity to them, and our narrow little world did prioritize babymaking over women. There are real distinctions between the average Quiverfull parent and Musk, who seems to think he alone is God, and has produced most of his children through IVF with women he does not intend to marry. In other important respects they are aligned: They believe the apocalypse is near and that their children will be a cleansing fire. I don’t see much practical difference between Simone Collins and the average Quiverfull mother at all. It’s weird that she named a kid Industry, but I’ve heard stranger at church. The goal is mostly the same, and that’s racial and cultural domination.
The left pursues different aims. So I read Elizabeth Bruenig’s dispatch from NatalCon with interest. “The overarching thesis of the conference—that having children is good and ought to be supported by society—struck me as pretty unobjectionable; if you believe the human race should have a future, you’re pronatalist with respect to somebody,” she wrote for The Atlantic. Falling birth rates lead to aging populations, which should worry everyone, she added, and said she found it “disturbing” that the conversation around these “fairly innocuous propositions” has become “dominated” by ideas that “are sometimes intermixed with white supremacy, misogyny, and eugenics.” It is disturbing. It’s also not that surprising. The idea that population decline is an urgent or all-consuming crisis has a fairly long history on the far-right, partly because it’s such a reductive way of looking at the world and its challenges. There is no problem that white ladies can’t solve by outbreeding their competitors.
Nevertheless, Bruenig blames liberals, who “seem almost uniformly unwilling to address the subject of population decline whatsoever—a stance that warrants reconsideration,” she wrote. Are they really? Who knows; it’s not like she offers any concrete examples. In her quest to find sensibility at NatalCon, she refers to researchers Lyman Stone and Daniel Hess as “ordinary” and “mainly uncontroversial” speakers. I question that designation for Stone, who is virulently anti-abortion, and especially for Hess. I read the “Fertility Stack” that Hess co-authored with the British demographer Paul Morland. They begin by thanking Musk “for giving voice to the low birthrate crisis on a global scale, validating that we aren’t crazy for seeing the shocking trends we are on, and amplifying our voices.” They also thank Malcolm and Simone Collins, and Viktor Orban, the authoritarian leader of Hungary, along with Kevin Dolan and Razib Khan. (Bruenig called Khan “a geneticist” but did not mention his old contributions to the Unz Review, a far-right website founded by a Holocaust denier.) Hess’s ideas, which include the promotion of early marriage and “modern matchmaking,” appear a bit more sinister in context. If this is “uncontroversial,” the word has lost all meaning.
Ah, well, nevertheless: The left could do pronatalism on its own! “Just give families money,” she wrote. And yes, we should do that — but this prescription is only leftist when it is linked to reproductive justice, including the unfettered right to an abortion, and that idea never appears in the piece at all. To give Bruenig some breathing room: She’s not the only leftist or liberal to lay claim to pronatalist ideas or a broader defense of “the family.” Families are the obvious solution to mass loneliness and “the impending Social Security cliff,” Dustin Guastella, a left-wing writer and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623, recently argued. Worried about what that might mean for women, especially after Dobbs? Oh, don’t be. “Sixty years of feminism have made families measurably more equal and less tyrannical,” Guastella insisted. Elsewhere on the political spectrum, liberals have said that their fellows can and should support pronatalism without sacrificing “reproductive rights.” In an older piece for Liberal Currents, policy analyst Elijah Gullet did discuss eugenics in addition to Dobbs and the maternal mortality rates of Black and brown women, but pregnant women need more than licensing reform for non-hospital birthing centers. If liberal pronatalists aren’t talking about universal health care, or even Bruenig’s solution, which is to give families money, they aren’t working toward reproductive justice either.
The human race is going to have a future. The question is what kind, and nobody really has the answer. There are only ideas and theories, and some are worthier than others. I was born into a pronatalist subculture, and I have heard all my life that “having children is good,” as Bruenig put it. Until I reached 20 or so, it did not occur to me that having children might be optional, too. I thought I owed babies to the church and, by extension, to society. When I left Evangelical Christianity in search of my freedom, I learned that choice was a relative concept everywhere. I was poor, and I couldn’t drive, and I had birth control only because my local Planned Parenthood offered it on a sliding scale and mailed it to me. Now I’m married and middle-class but childless, and I’m less free now than I was at my birth. A woman’s reproductive life is reduced, often, to a single outcome — baby or no baby — but it’s much more complicated than that. I have made a thousand decisions, and none of them add up to freedom.
Reproductive justice introduced me to history I didn’t learn at Bible college, and it helped me make sense of my own life, too. So when I read that “having children is good,” it doesn’t strike me as unobjectionable. In the absence of further development, it is as simplistic as anything that has come out of the abortion-rights movement. Would it have been good for me to get pregnant when my boyfriend abused me in college? A college that would have expelled me for getting an abortion? No amount of money could have transformed a pregnancy like that into something “good.” Having children is a process, and it’s neither good nor bad but neutral. You can’t divorce babymaking from its context; at some point you have to contend with a woman and her rights. You want people to make families? Well, families don’t birth children. Women do that. It’s work that you’re asking them to perform, at some risk to their well-being. You think families will solve our loneliness problem? Say that to a trans kid in a Southern Baptist household. Or to a mother of five who loves her children and wishes her husband would leave her alone at night. Right-wing pronatalists aren’t going to protect them, and neither, I think, will their liberal and left counterparts.
I ask, then, what it means to support women who long for children and those who don’t. And I see no other way to help us all except through reproductive justice. It explains why the fertility gap is real and why abortion bans are killing women. It is material, and of course it is; it was devised by women who know well what it means to live without free choice. It is not jargon but an open door. Women deserve more than rancid sentimentality at best and forced birth at worst, no matter how far our fertility rates fall. If we don’t figure this out, we’re headed to a bleak place, and that is a preventable fate. Lately I’ve been mulling a theological idea I encountered in college: Some Christians believe the kingdom of God is both now and not yet. We can find joy and meaning in our lives, but the world has not become as beautiful as it someday will be. There’s something to this, even if you, like me, do not believe in the second coming of Christ. Having children can be wonderful. When my friends want babies and have them, I am happy. I want a society where having children is good, always good — but we aren’t there, and pronatalism won’t bring us any closer to it. For that we need justice.
Related
