Dr. Karen Guzzo
speaker
132 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Karen Guzzo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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