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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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?
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. Right.
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.
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.
They're really going after family planning writ large because they are worried about what it means when women can control their own reproduction.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are very few people of color in the pro-natalist movement.
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