Lisa Hagan
Appearances
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Catholics are also a big part of this movement. You know, you have J.D. Vance. You have other Catholic speakers who are at NatalCon. So certainly the religious interest is broad.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Yeah. They say that they've used a lot of procedures in their births. They're very pro. They are interested in leveraging any and all technology that exists sort of without limitations, really.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Well, there were about 200 attendees. This was the second ever natal con. The first one was held two years ago and it was half the size. Still a pretty small conference. And I think what's interesting. interesting about it is that there were a lot of different kinds of messages. The tone had also shifted quite a bit from the first iteration of the conference.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
I just want to also mention expanding the child tax credit is something that J.D. Vance has talked about specifically. And he had an opportunity to vote to expand and extend the child tax credit and did not. So I think something that's important to mention is that the pronatalist groups, for the most part,
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
have a tendency to be very supportive of the Trump administration and specifically what Elon Musk is doing with Doge. But, you know, these are, as Karen is talking about, these are not policies generally associated with helping families that are struggling.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So you heard everything from people saying, you know, we should have a child tax credit increase to, you know, our enemies are the enemies of humanity and that sort of language.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Oh, 95% men, absolutely. 95% men? Yeah. Yes. So another interesting thing to note there, right, is like some there were supposed to be some women speakers. They have lots of kids. So some of them, their kids got sick or child care, like whatever. Right. Things fall through. I think there are some natural ways in which it ends up being a lot of dudes who are talking about this.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
It also deeply ignores the fact that those are really personal decisions that carry real health risks for people giving birth, right? So it's a very specific focus on the product of the birth rather than the person doing the birthing.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
The other thing is this was a very, very white crowd. And I say that as someone who's been in a lot of sort of right wing spaces. They're not always this white. There weren't no people of color there, but it's just important to sort of say that about who was gathered there.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Of course, there are folks, especially on the sort of religious end of pronatal advocacy, who disagree. you know, say, you know, I don't love everything about the way that Elon Musk is building his family. But there is a sometimes explicit, sometimes underlying acknowledgement that he is the biggest beacon of this issue. He's very rich. He's very powerful.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And folks in the pronatalist movement, though they may not agree with the way that he's living his life, they would all love his support and for him to continue doing exactly what he's doing. And so that sort of tells you about the focus on purpose rather than any of the specific values or disagreements these communities may have with each other.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Oh, yeah. NatalCon was a very celebratory moment for folks. They certainly wouldn't argue and say that they've brought this conversation about, but they're so excited by the fact that things that they were talking about, you know, previous to this iteration of the Trump administration are now being discussed by people in very powerful positions in our country. Absolutely.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
The other thing that you will hear a lot, you know, there are a lot of different groups, as we've discussed within this movement, but they have a through line. And the through line is that Our current culture is messed up, either culturally or through policy or feminism has screwed things up, birth control, whatever it is.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
But what you hear a great deal less about are that there are perhaps other options for why things are messed up. And so I think what this does is it takes dissatisfaction with the very difficult world that we're all trying to survive in
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And it says, hey, the solution is more babies and sort of leaves out this whole range of other things that we might be talking about to improve people's lives and confidence to bring children into the world.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
You know, NatalCon is a bit of a, I would say, pie-in-the-sky kind of gathering. It's very open to a lot of ideas that would take a lot of political change to actually bring into being, like parental voting, for instance. You know, having parents vote on behalf of their minor children. That was suggested, I don't know... I think that would be very hard to bring about.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
You know, you hear things about like the child tax credit or getting rid of no-fault divorce. But what I would say I think is the through line always is that there's something off about culture and that culture specifically needs to change. and that mainstream culture has devalued motherhood, those kinds of arguments.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
So that's sort of one of the bigger things that you'll hear a lot about how culture needs to change. I mean, you also will hear sort of traditionalist religious arguments like people need to stop having abortions or pornography should be banned or we need to rein in technology so that young people are looking less at their phones and more focused on having babies. I mean, I think it's a lot of
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
more generalized stuff about culture needing to change.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
The first time I heard of the Collinses, and I think this was a moment that maybe anyone who's heard of them possibly saw, is there was an article that sort of named them the elite couple breeding to save mankind. which is a great headline. And, you know, they have a very specific visual appearance. Simone Collins wears very chunky, memorable glasses. She dresses in a specific way.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
Sort of, but like from Etsy, as she will tell you. They are very open about having designed their look and their appeal to draw attention. They have four children now. They have another one on the way. They plan to have as many as possible. And Simone has said that she is willing to die in childbirth to have as many kids as possible and sort of, you know, advance this movement.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
You know, my understanding with the Collinses is that everything they do is sort of calculated to have some public impact and seem pretty interesting to people. Yeah, they've optimized their image to kind of go viral online, right? To gain attention. Absolutely. That's exactly right. They have a YouTube show and podcast called Based Camp.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
They, you know, to a lot of mainstream media, they sort of try to present themselves as... maybe not on the left or liberal necessarily, but not classically conservative. And they talk a lot about wanting, you know, to preserve cultures that are open to LGBTQ folks and racial diversity and that sort of thing. On their podcasts, they sound a lot like a lot of right-wing influencer types.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
They talk about something called the urban monoculture, which Malcolm Collins has defined as, you know, being woke or just liberal culture in general. And he basically says that that's like cultural genocide. It only survives by creating popular culture. And parasitizing children from other more healthy cultural groups.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
And what the Collinses are talking about with urban monoculture is, you know, you may want to raise your children and your family in a certain way, but modern mainstream society is going to try to pull them away from you in ways that you hate. And that's what they mean by sort of parasitizing, like stealing children, essentially.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
It certainly depends on the community that you're looking at. And as you say, there is no way to say that all pronatalists are racists or interested in those kinds of politics at all. However, you know, it is a big conversation on the far, far right. Discussions and fears about birth rates show up in the manifestos of mass shooters who are talking very explicitly about births.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
being replaced, white people being replaced by other races. On the other hand, you know, at an event like NatalCon, where there are lots of mainstream journalists, You'll hear a different kind of language. Most people are a lot more careful about that sort of thing.
Fresh Air
Baby Bonuses, Trad Wives & The Pronatalist Movement
But you also hear from folks like right-wing political operative Jack Posobiec talking about, you know, the enemies of humanity and how we need to save Australia and Europe and America specifically. And so... It's always kind of couched, but the language of sort of fear around immigration trends is present a lot of the times.