Lisa Hagen
Appearances
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
So I think something that's important to mention is that the pronatalist groups, for the most part, have a tendency to be very supportive of the Trump administration and specifically what Elon Musk is doing with Doge. But these are not policies generally associated with helping families that are struggling.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
Oh, 95% men, absolutely. 95% men? 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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
You know, Natal Con 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 in to 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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
You know, you hear things about like the child tax credit or getting rid of no fault divorce. But 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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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, you know, 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.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
I mean, I think it's a lot of more generalized stuff about culture needing to change.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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 they have a very specific visual appearance. Simone Collins wears very chunky, memorable glasses. She dresses in a specific way.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
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
Best Of: Inside The Pronatalist Movement / Making Sense Of Trauma
Yeah, they say that they've used a lot of procedures in their births. They're very pro. They're interested in leveraging any and all technology that exists sort of without limitations, really.