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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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. We know that actually having
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
And so the idea that we're listening to this guy, I mean, it chills me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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. And so when I think about
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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. And the research really shows that young men, they don't want to have kids right now either.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
They are taking parenthood and decisions to have kids really seriously. And so I 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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
And he said that his wife saw it on like a nature documentary, 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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
So that data was, I think, inconvenient. So they are data-driven when it's convenient and not data-driven when it doesn't fit their brand.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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 Marital teen birth rates.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
Does that mean that people who are having kids the old-fashioned way are somehow a 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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
Well, one of the things that's actually driving low fertility rates in the United States is something that's a good news story, which is that there are fewer teen and unintended births. And so births to people who are in their teens and early 20s typically are births to people that are unintended, so that people themselves would say, this is not really the right time for me.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
And so we spent a lot of time and a lot of money in the United States trying to discourage people from having first, when they were not really ready. So when they were too young, and I sort of, too young in quotes, too young, or they weren't stably employed or didn't have a good income or a stable relationship. And so we've made a lot of progress in that realm.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
But then the flip side of it is people are supposed to wait until they have these things. You know, they're supposed to have enough money and a stable relationship and a good house. And you're right that it's really hard to be able to afford those things. The number one concern over people as to whether they should have kids and how many to have and when to have them is can I afford it?
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
are different potential concerns. I mean, the biggest one really is that the population starts to age on the aggregate when you have fewer young people born, and then it ends up being skewed towards older adults. And older adults need more care, both physical care, but also they take financial resources.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
And so in many countries, and not just in the United States, the question is, how do we care for the older adults when the population is aging? And so in the United States, we have a social security system that's built on current workers paying in to support people who are currently drawing from Social Security. And so that's a big concern is how do we actually care for the elderly?
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
Then there are also labor market concerns. So who's going to be working to pay into Social Security, but also to fuel the economy? And we need workers because we also need people to have incomes to become consumers. And so we do worry about the potential ramifications of low birth rates, although there's other solutions besides potentially low birth rates to fix some of these problems.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
Well, one of the biggest ones would actually be a change in how we structure Social Security. So the way Social Security works is that there's a cap on income. And so you pay up until, I think it's roughly around $175,000 for single people on your payroll taxes. So up until that, you pay Social Security. Any money you earn above that for a single earner is not taxed for Social Security.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
And we could raise that cap, or we could eliminate entirely, and that would be a way to increase the monies available we have to fund Social Security. That seems to me more plausible than trying to have this massive behavioral change that would require people to have more births.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
We could also change the income who is able to draw from Social Security, so we could limit it to people who have lower incomes. We could change the Social Security age at retirement. There are things we could do that would adjust our need for Social Security.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
In terms of the labor market, one of the biggest and most obvious solutions, and to be frank, one we've relied on in the United States for a long time, is immigration. Immigrants play a large role in our labor market. They work in a lot of different fields. They are major contributors.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
In fact, even undocumented immigrants often pay Social Security taxes, so they're not even drawing out in the system, but they're contributing to it.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
Yes. So trad wives are really having a moment over the past few years. It's really taken off due to social media, where young, conventionally attractive women, often white, thin and attractive and middle class, are making a life for themselves or presenting a life in which they are staying home with their children. They are sort of in charge solely of home.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
They are working perhaps to have home farms. They are feeding their kids organic food. They are sewing clothes. They are really sort of embracing domesticity. And that's really what the Tradwife moment is about, having clear gender roles where women are in charge of the home and men are in charge of the money and they're the provider and they go out into the world.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
And so it does dovetail a lot with this pronatalist movement because most tradwives sort of espouse or align with sort of what we might consider as more conservative ideals.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
And so one of the things that's interesting about the pronatalist movement is there's a lot of critique about feminists and working mothers and working women, and that women are spending too much time getting educational, increasing their educational attainment, spending too much time in the labor force.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
that they're becoming too picky about the potential partners for whom they would marry and have children with. And so part of the trad wife moment seems to be pushing very specific gender roles and that once women are home, of course, then they would want to have more children and that would increase the birth rate.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
There's some current concerns about this, though, is that when people are women are embracing this lifestyle, there's nothing wrong with this lifestyle per se, but it does increase their dependency on their partners, their economic dependency. And so if relationships are not don't work out, this really leaves women financially in trouble. It's especially the case.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
And sometimes we see this notion of stay at home girlfriends where there isn't even sort of a legal tie between partners. And that makes it especially precarious for women to engage in.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
So there's the Elon Musk tech bro sort of approach to pronatalism. So Elon Musk has said that low fertility is sort of the biggest single threat human civilization is facing. And he seems to be on a personal mission to populate the earth. And this is about using technology to potentially have the best and brightest children
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
So this is using IVF or other forms of assisted reproductive technologies to try to maximize not only having children, but the success of those children. So trying to find children who would be tall and athletic and intelligent. And there's a lot of concern over how far over into eugenics that gets to be.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
If we're selecting people based on sort of these more nebulous characteristics, what does that mean for people who might be viewed less favorably? or have conditions or characteristics that are less favorable. And the United States has a really long history of eugenicism in terms of who should be reproducing.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
And then you have the more religious conservatives who are definitely against IVF and other forms of assistive reproductive technologies. And they are really focused on not only increasing birth rates, but increasing marriage so that most births should happen within marriage.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
They would prefer people get married young and spend more time in sort of this traditional family type, particularly one in which the father or husband is the main breadwinner and the wife is in charge of the domestic sphere. And they would have married young and have many children and start doing so pretty early.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
And then you have the third group of folks who are much more concerned about the racial makeup of the United States. So we've had a long history in the United States of wanting the right people to reproduce. So this does tie in with sort of those tech pro people.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
But this is much more explicit about not wanting immigrants to reproduce or people from what this group might consider inferior races or inferior religions. And so this dates back decades in the United States, but it's really been a part of our kind of informal lexicon for a while.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
So we see strains of this in what is the great replacement theory, which is that the wrong people are coming into the United States to quote unquote sort of outbreed true Americans. So there's some overlap in all these groups, but it's an uncomfortable alliance, I think.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
He has unfortunately quite a bit of influence. He has a huge microphone in terms of his Twitter presence and social media presence. He's in the White House. He has the ear of very important people. So he is bringing this conversation to the forefront. He is a smart man, but he's not a demographer. And so sometimes he gets some of the basic demography or demographic principles and theories wrong.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
And one of the things that in particular is concerning is that people who are aligning themselves with Elon Musk will project out, you know, 100 years, 200 years, 300 years. And that is not typically something demographers will do because we know that things change really quickly.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
And there could be great technological advances or other changes that would impact our ability to make population projections far out. But he is this huge microphone, and he clearly is very interested in increasing birth rates. But some of the things that he believes are a little off kilter, I would say.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
So, for instance, he has said that births should happen through C-sections rather than sort of a natural delivery under the impression that a natural delivery somehow squeezes the brain. So that babies born via C-section have bigger brains and are therefore smarter. I mean, that's not actually remotely medically accurate, but he has this loud microphone and people are listening to him.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
So pronatalism is really about raising birth rates at the country level, at the macro level. It's interested in and worried about, are birth rates too low? Do they need to be higher? And there's a lot of debate over what it means for fertility rates to be too low and what might be the best ways to address it. That's really focused on getting the whole country to have more births.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
It probably won't make a big difference. I will say that I am all for giving families money. Families could always use extra money. That first year is really tough in particular after a baby is born because women often have to step back a little bit from work. And there are all these new expenses, including hospital bills and diapers and all those things. So that money would be great.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
It would really help a lot of people. Is it likely to budge things in an appreciable, huge sense? Probably not. It might help some people on the margins who are like, all right, I was thinking about having another kid. Maybe now's a good time since I'm going to get this bonus. But it's not going to nudge people who were like, I'm not having kids and now I'm going to get this $5,000.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
So it really might help people who are just not sure about the timing and they wanted to wait a little longer until they had maybe paid off the last set of hospital bills. But it's not going to make a huge difference.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
I mean, what I find a little concerning is that or perhaps even disingenuous is that we had a really great program through the American Rescue Plan that gave families extra money every month and it reduced child poverty. It didn't reduce employment very much, and it really helped people a lot. And we got rid of that plan. And it was widely available to people.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
And so the idea that we would not, you know, help people that we knew to be effective, but instead have this sort of scheme for this $5,000 one-time baby bonus, unfortunately to me is a little disingenuous.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
Well, one of the biggest concerns is that it really does privilege a certain type of family. So the $5,000 baby bonus, for instance, some of the policy specifics I've seen are about we should only give these to married couples or we should only give these to people who make about a certain amount of income. We don't want to incentivize poor women to have children.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
And so this idea that not everyone should be eligible, that only certain families are the right kind of families, I mean, that's really concerning. A lot of this concern, too, also lies in gender roles. Many people find women's independence threatening.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
And so any movement that is about pushing women out of the labor force, the idea that they should stay home and raise their children and that they should sort of default to these very old fashioned rules, a lot of people are going to find that really uncomfortable. Most women do want to have kids, but they want to have them with a good partner.
The Excerpt
Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
They want to have the option to have a safe delivery, safe pregnancy, you know, in some cases that's under threat. And so that's really some of the concern. And then again, there's this idea that there's a sort of this racial and class-based tinge to who should get to reproduce. So that is really concerning as well.
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Has the pronatalism movement gone mainstream?
Fundamentally, I think the pronatalist movement is not addressing what people really say they need, which is they need good childcare and they want affordable leave programs.
The Excerpt
Supreme Court continues to block deportations under wartime law
Well, one of the biggest concerns is that it really does privilege a certain type of family. So the $5,000 baby bonus, for instance, some of the policy specifics I've seen are about we should only give these to married couples.