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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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.
Thank you for having me. This was great.
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.
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.
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.
And then that's how you end up with lower birth rates because some people will find that it is never a good time.
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.
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, 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. So they are data-driven when it's convenient and not data-driven when it doesn't fit their brand.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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