Dr. Karen Guzzo
Appearances
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
They're really going after family planning writ large because they are worried about what it means when women can control their own reproduction.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Sure. So we've talked about the Collins and they sort of fit into this tech world where sort of, you know, they want to use the best technology available to have the best and brightest children and make sure their children, you know, have the best possible chances in life and sort of maximize their own fertility. And then you have sort of the more religious groups who would not
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
want to use technology who would be against IVF because life begins at conception. And so destroying embryos is destroying human life. And they're really concerned about getting people married earlier and having them have births within marriage. And so they are not interested in raising necessarily teen birth rates unless they are
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So they're really focused on the two-parent family and really it needs to be married to and preferably Christian. And then you have sort of the more racist groups who are very concerned that somehow true Americans, and I say that with sort of quote marks, you know, True Americans are going to be outbred by immigrants. And so this is a longstanding idea.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So we've, of course, heard about it in the Great Replacement Theory. But this goes back 25 years. You know, Pat Buchanan wrote a book, The Death of the West, in 2001 about immigrants. Sort of the danger of immigrant populations coming out and have come to the United States and having more children than native born, true, real Americans and that this was going to ruin our society.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So this is not a new idea. I would say they all have overlap. So you would think the Collins have been pretty clear that they don't necessarily care about race or ethnicity. Having said that, when you talk about having the best and brightest and using technology, you are really darn close to eugenics. We have done this in the United States before where we have sterilized poor women.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
We have sterilized women who were considered feeble or unfit. There are tons of really rich but sad research on Mississippi appendectomies, you know, about women of color getting sterilized against their will. And so these are some of the same ideas about who should and who shouldn't have kids. So you want to have the best and brightest kids.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Does that mean that people who are having kids the old-fashioned way are somehow second-class citizens? Is that what we're moving towards? It's very science fiction-y, but it makes many of us who are in demography and know our history very uncomfortable.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Immigration has been really important for the United States, and it has for a long time. And so it has actually kept our population growing. So our total fertility right now, which is kind of a hypothetical estimate of how many births women will have over the course of their lifetime, is below what we consider replacement. So the replacement level is 2.1, and births are around 1.6 right now.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
But we're not facing population decline right now. because we have high rates of immigration. Now, in certain areas, mostly in sort of rural areas, we are seeing populations decline because young people aren't having kids, in part because a lot of young people have left rural areas.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
But immigration, by and large, has really propped up the United States, not necessarily directly through births, but really through just bringing working-age people to the United States. And that is something that, if we are able to accommodate, will continue to be a boon to the United States population. They are really important for the labor market.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
They actually do pay taxes often, even if they don't collect Social Security later. So they're really important. And countries like Japan, which is basically closed to immigration, they're facing declining population in part because not only do they have low birth rates, but they're not allowing immigrants in either.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
There are very few people of color in the pro-natalist movement.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
There's a separate movement by black feminist scholars and activists called Reproductive Justice, which is about basically giving people the right to have children, the right not to have children, the right to have bodily autonomy as to when and under what circumstances, and the right to have children and raise them in a safe environment. And so we've often...
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
who demonized poor women and women of color for having children under the wrong circumstances. And yet, these are people who have made vibrant communities, and that's all they're asking for. But instead, we've sort of policed them.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So, you know, there's a lot of research on the violence towards families that is part of the foster care system, that we punish women for being poor and disrupt families. And so, We talk about being pro-family in the United States, but we are so anti-family to so many people and to so many groups.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And that's I think what's missing from the pro-natalist movement is actually attention to being pro-family. We have one of the weakest social safety nets of any industrialized country. And right now we're looking at chopping major parts of it, which sort of baffles me. If we really wanted to be pro-family, we would not be cutting programs like Head Start.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
We would not be facing huge cuts to SNAP funding, you know, the food stamp program. And so, you know, to me, I hear these things and I'm like, $5,000 bonuses? And yet you're going to cut Head Start and you're going to raise prices on everything through tariffs? I'm like, that doesn't make sense to me.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
They don't work. I mean, there's so much research on this that really shows that countries have tried this. And so they have this little tiny bump. They might change the timing. You might decide to go ahead and have that first kid, or you might decide to have your second kid a little bit sooner.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
But by and large, they do not have any appreciable impact on birth rates overall or the number of births people have over their own lifetimes. They don't work because it costs on average something like $300,000 to raise a kid from birth to age 18. $5,000 isn't going to cut it. We had the expanded child tax credit of the American Rescue Plan in 2021.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
That halved child poverty, and we did not vote to expand it or continue it. And so the idea that we would be revisiting this in a different way on a much more limited basis is really concerning.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And even these birth bonuses they're considering, they're not available to everybody. What was neat about the American Rescue Plan is that it wasn't something that was just you got money back at taxes. You got $300 a month if you had a child under age six. And you didn't necessarily have to pay income taxes. They expanded eligibility for it. So it went to everybody.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
These new plans they're talking about, they're not going to give them to poor women, to the people who would really need them most. They are again trying to say, no, no, only some people should be having kids.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So the country that probably has had the most effective fertility plans is actually probably Israel because it makes IVF really widely available. So when people delay having kids, in part because they're getting education, they're building careers, that does seem to help Israel. But most of these other programs, they're very careful about how they extend them.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So many of these countries, again, don't give the benefits to single women or unmarried women, LGBTQ families. They don't have big impacts. They help a little bit on the margins, but for the cost of them, they are not having big impacts. But the ones that matter most are the things that actually make it easier for people to combine work and family.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So one of the things that people worry about is if we offer, quote unquote, too generous of a social safety net, people won't work. There's not a lot of evidence for that. People generally want to work. When they have kids, they want to work a little bit less. They want to stay home more, which is something we all think that would be great for kids.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
We know that actually having parental leave is great for kids and for bonding, and it's good for both mothers and fathers. But investing in a robust child care infrastructure is really important.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Yeah, so that's interesting. So Sweden has also seen a decline in fertility. And so when I was giving interviews, you know, 10, 15 years ago, I'd say, oh, I wish we could be Sweden. That would help us. And of course, they've seen these declines, too. What I will say is Sweden's fertility rate is much, much, much better than Japan or China or South Korea.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
where they have social safety nets, where they have child care programs and leave programs, but they don't have gender equality in any way, shape, or form in either the labor force or in the division of labor in the home. And so gender equality might be what keeps places from tipping over. well below replacement and into that super low levels that people start to really worry about.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And so I think that's what a lot of young adults are looking at. They're like, I think that's what I want. I think I want to have a partner who will help me out. And we're in this boat together. And what tends to happen is a lot of people have that thought before they have kids. And then the constraints of the labor market make it such that it's really difficult to have in practice.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So if you can't afford childcare, one of you is going to stay home. I And then you kind of default back into traditional divisions of labor, even though that's not what people originally wanted or at least said they wanted.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Yeah, it's a really big problem in the United States. And it's one that other countries, including countries that do have low birth rates, other countries have dealt with. In the United States, we have very much individualized, you know, if you're going to have a baby, you better figure out how you're going to pay for it and whether you can afford child care.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So, you know, budgetary rules, they recommend that child care should cost no more than 7% of your income. There is not a single state where that is possible. At the minimum, it's like 10 percent and it goes up to like 20 percent. And there are studies on child care deserts that compare the price of infant care to the price of a four-year college degree.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And so I think it's something like 38 states and D.C. where the average annual cost for infant care is more than the cost of tuition for a public university. I mean, that's the kind of stuff people are faced with. So what happens is just what you're saying is people leave the labor market. And when I say people, I mean mothers.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
It's almost always mothers because they do often make less money than their partners. And it's also the case that they do need to recover. Because we don't have paid family leave in the United States, about one in four women return to work within two weeks of giving birth. That is way too early. That is absolutely shameful.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And only about a fifth of people have access to paid leave in the United States. And so, you know, we don't make this a very family-friendly country. We shame high-earning women and well-educated women for working too much and not staying home with their kids. And then we shame poor women for wanting to stay home with their kids because their income doesn't offset the price of childcare.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
You can't win. And that's really, I think, a big problem.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Yeah. So Elon Musk is interesting in the sense that there are a lot of people in the tech world who are good at math and think that makes them good at demography because it's a math-related field. But they don't really understand some of the theories, some of the ways we do modeling and think about this.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So at one point, Musk was projecting something, and he had projected us all the way down to zero. And I was like, well, no, that's not – Right. But he has this huge influence. And so people are listening to him. So it is important to take him seriously. But some of the stuff he just says, to be honest, is pretty bonkers.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
He has this whole thing about C-sections that women should have C-sections because that allows their baby's brains to be bigger than a vaginal birth. And that is just so utterly bonkers. I mean, babies' heads, their skulls are not fully fused for an evolutionary reason to go through the birth canal without, you know, crushing their brains.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And so the idea that we're listening to this guy, I mean, it chills me.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So one of the things that's interesting is that this all has this idea that reproduction is the future and it's the key to everything. And all we have to do is control women. So for me, it's always really hard to separate the arguments about populations from the fact that this is about what women should or should not do and who gets to decide what women do.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And so when I think about low birth rates right now and what does that mean for the economy, well – It does mean potentially fewer workers. But then we also have things like technological advance. We're having a whole separate conversation about the meaning of automation and robotics and AI. So maybe we don't need as many workers.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And the research really shows that young men, they don't want to have kids right now either. If we wanted to raise birth rates right now, young people are saying, yeah, I want to have kids. I just can't right now for these reasons. We could try listening to those reasons or we can say, you know, we're going to give you a medal if you have six children.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Sure. So one of the things I think is really interesting about this movement is that there's not been a huge increase in the share of people who say they don't want to have children. Instead, what's really happening is people are still generally saying they want to have kids and they want to have two, maybe three. But they're saying not now.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
They are taking parenthood and decisions to have kids really seriously. And so it's They look right now at the future, at their own lives, at the world around them, and they're like, now's not a good time, so maybe later. And they keep making that decision to push it off and push it off because now's not a good time for them.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And then that's how you end up with lower birth rates because some people will find that it is never a good time.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Yes. So one of the things I think gets lost that you brought up is that we have this remarkable decline in teen births and births to women in their early 20s. And that is a good new story in the sense that these are generally births to people who are saying now's not a great time. So they're usually unintended or unplanned pregnancies.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And we have spent years, decades and millions and hundreds of millions of dollars shaming young women, not young parents, but really young women, about having births when they're not ready, when they're too young, when they're not in a stable relationship, and when they're too poor, when they don't have a secure income. And so we told people, you have to wait until you have all these things.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
You have to finish school. You have to have a good job. You have to be able to afford to live in a safe neighborhood. You have to be able to pay all your expenses. And you should have a good partner who can also do these things. We've told people to wait. And now we're surprised that they're waiting. And until they have those things.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And so it's sort of frustrating because we have not built a society where people can sort of readily have those things. And it's really picked up since the Great Recession and then exacerbated again by the pandemic. People are looking around and they're like, yeah, I can't pay all my bills. How can I possibly have a kid? Not that I don't want to. It's just how can I do that?
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Well, I think what's interesting about them is that they have evolved in how they appear in the media. They are now a very specific brand, and they are cultivating that brand. And one of the things they talk about in their brand is their view of everything is data-driven. Everything they're doing is very calculated and designed to be really efficient.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And that's how they figure out what kids and how to have kids and spacing and all sorts of things and parenting. Except there was a profile of them a few years ago where Malcolm sort of swatted his child in front of the reporter. And the reporter was sort of aghast at it. And he said that his wife saw it on like a nature documentary.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
that this is what a lioness was doing to her cubs, and they thought that was good. Tigers. It was tigers. Yes, there you go. So I'm thinking to myself, wow, data-driven. I'm like, well, as a family sociologist and demographer, I can tell you there's a whole lot of research on corporal punishment and child outcomes and well-being. So that data was, I think, inconvenient.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So they are data-driven when it's convenient and not data-driven when it doesn't fit their brand. Right.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
I really think it's a term we bandy around a lot in the United States, which is Christian nationalism. So it's evangelical Christians who have a very specific view of what family looks like and that it's not just religion, but it's specifically sort of Christian evangelist. And they are worried about the sanctity of life.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So they're going after IVF, but they're also even going after certain types of contraception, thinking that they cause abortion. They would like to get those outlawed. They would like to, again, move against different types of mifepristone coverage or access to mifepristone, which is one of the medication abortion pills.