A once-fringe movement claims having more babies is the only way to save civilization. NPR reporter Lisa Hagen and sociologist Karen Guzzo explain who's empowering pronatalism today.Plus, jazz critic Martin Johnson reviews a new album from Wilco guitarist Nels Cline.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the pronatalist movement and why is it gaining attention?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Have more babies or civilization dies. That's the rallying cry behind a once fringe ideology that has made its way into the mainstream. Pro-natalism has been in the news lately, with Trump policies underway to increase birth rates by giving away a $5,000 baby bonus for parents and a National Medal of Motherhood for moms who have six or more children.
Pronatalists warn of an apocalyptic future, that if birth rates in the U.S. keep falling, we might be headed towards economic collapse, even extinction. They're pushing ideas like genetic engineering, limiting access to contraceptives, and the Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory, which believes that there is a plot to replace white populations with non-white immigrants.
One of the more well-known faces of the movement is Elon Musk, who reportedly has at least 14 biological children with several different women, and has called the world's population decline the greatest threat to humanity. But critics argue that this movement isn't solely about increasing birth rates. It's about who gets to reproduce, under what terms, and at what cost.
They argue that this movement ignores the skyrocketing price of child care in our country, our broken parental leave systems, and a woman's autonomy over her own body. Well, today we're joined by two people whose work explores this movement and the motivations behind it.
Dr. Karen Guzzo is a sociologist and fertility expert serving as the director of the Carolina Population Center and a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And Lisa Hagan is a reporter for NPR who has been covering the pro-natal movement and attended last month's second annual NatalCon conference in Austin. Lisa Hagan and Karen Guzzo, welcome to Fresh Air.
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Chapter 2: What was NatalCon and who attends this pronatalist conference?
Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Well, I want to start with you, Lisa, and I want you to take us inside of this conference that you attended in Austin. First off, kind of set the scene for us. How big was it and how would you describe this overarching message you heard this year?
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.
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.
I'm just curious, what was the breakdown of men versus women at NatalCon?
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.
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.
What kinds of policies or incentives were seriously being discussed at NATO-Con? Now that there is a real understanding and almost a wind in this movement's sails by the Trump administration's priorities with pro-natalism.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: Why are U.S. birth rates declining according to experts?
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 it's 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.
Yeah, I was reading how now more women over 40 are having children up against the steep decline in teen pregnancies. But there's also an economic part to this, right, Dr. Guzzo? Like about 20 years ago, especially with the economic collapse around 2008, 2009, that we started to see a decline in having babies. And that was very much tied to the way of life, people's ability to care for children.
Yes. So one of the things I think gets lost that you brought up is that we have this remarkable decline in teen births and births to women in their early 20s. And that is a good new story in the sense that these are generally births to people who are saying now's not a great time. So they're usually unintended or unplanned pregnancies.
And we have spent years, decades and millions and hundreds of millions of dollars shaming young women, not young parents, but really young women, about having births when they're not ready, when they're too young, when they're not in a stable relationship, and when they're too poor, when they don't have a secure income. And so we told people, you have to wait until you have all these things.
You have to finish school. You have to have a good job. You have to be able to afford to live in a safe neighborhood. You have to be able to pay all your expenses. And you should have a good partner who can also do these things. We've told people to wait. And now we're surprised that they're waiting. And until they have those things.
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?
Lisa, in your reporting, you featured a popular couple that has kind of been like rock stars in this movement, the Collins. They describe themselves as techno-Puritans. Who are they and how many children do they have and kind of what's their overarching messaging?
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Chapter 4: Who are the Collinses and what role do they play in the pronatalist movement?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's really interesting where they sit politically. You mentioned that they don't necessarily consider themselves liberal, but they don't consider themselves on the far right. And they also have told you that they are pushing it back against some of those racist ideologies that historically have been a part of the pro-natalist movement. You all...
talked a little bit about how white nationalists are drawn to their podcast. And you actually talked to Malcolm Collins about this at the Freedom Economy Conference. Let's listen to what he had to say to you about racists and white nationalists who are drawn to the pro-natalist movement and how he's interacted with them.
To me, it's really exciting. People are like, would you rather just keep this person out of your conference, or would you rather have them come to your conference and then change how they see the world? Every single time, I'd rather them come and change how they see the world.
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Chapter 5: How does race and politics intersect with the pronatalist ideology?
They're really going after family planning writ large because they are worried about what it means when women can control their own reproduction.
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.
What do the Collins think about IVF? Did Simone Collins actually have her children through IVF? Yeah.
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.
I think what's so interesting about what you all are sharing is that there is like no one main pathway to... Dr. Guzzo, can you talk a little bit about the three segments of the pronatalist movement?
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.
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Chapter 6: What are the different factions within the pronatalist movement?
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.
Our guests today are NPR reporter Lisa Hagan and sociologist Dr. Karen Guzzo. We'll continue our conversation about the resurgence of the pro-natalist movement after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
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When we look at actual demographic data, how significant is immigration in offsetting the birth decline in the U.S. compared to boosting?
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.
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Chapter 7: How does immigration affect U.S. population trends compared to birth rates?
We would not be facing huge cuts to SNAP funding, you know, the food stamp program. And so, you know, to me, I hear these things and I'm like, $5,000 bonuses? And yet you're going to cut Head Start and you're going to raise prices on everything through tariffs? I'm like, that doesn't make sense to me.
Oh, well, that's a question I have for you, Dr. Guzzo. Like, do incentives work? I mean, $5,000 in this economy to have a baby? Yeah.
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.
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,
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.
And even these birth bonuses they're considering, they're not available to everybody. What was neat about the American Rescue Plan is that it wasn't something that was just you got money back at taxes. You got $300 a month if you had a child under age six. And you didn't necessarily have to pay income taxes. They expanded eligibility for it. So it went to everybody.
These new plans they're talking about, they're not going to give them to poor women, to the people who would really need them most. They are again trying to say, no, no, only some people should be having kids.
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Chapter 8: Who is included or excluded from the pronatalist movement and why?
So the country that probably has had the most effective fertility plans is actually probably Israel because it makes IVF really widely available. So when people delay having kids, in part because they're getting education, they're building careers, that does seem to help Israel. But most of these other programs, they're very careful about how they extend them.
So many of these countries, again, don't give the benefits to single women or unmarried women, LGBTQ families. They don't have big impacts. They help a little bit on the margins, but for the cost of them, they are not having big impacts. But the ones that matter most are the things that actually make it easier for people to combine work and family.
So one of the things that people worry about is if we offer, quote unquote, too generous of a social safety net, people won't work. There's not a lot of evidence for that. People generally want to work. When they have kids, they want to work a little bit less. They want to stay home more, which is something we all think that would be great for kids.
We know that actually having parental leave is great for kids and for bonding, and it's good for both mothers and fathers. But investing in a robust child care infrastructure is really important.
Sweden, I was reading about, has a high female workforce participation rate. rate. They also provide robust childcare and parental leave. They tend to have higher fertility than countries where women have fewer rights. What can we learn from a place like Sweden?
Yeah, so that's interesting. So Sweden has also seen a decline in fertility. And so when I was giving interviews, you know, 10, 15 years ago, I'd say, oh, I wish we could be Sweden. That would help us. And of course, they've seen these declines, too. What I will say is Sweden's fertility rate is much, much, much better than Japan or China or South Korea.
where they have social safety nets, where they have child care programs and leave programs, but they don't have gender equality in any way, shape, or form in either the labor force or in the division of labor in the home. And so gender equality might be what keeps places from tipping over. well below replacement and into that super low levels that people start to really worry about.
And so I think that's what a lot of young adults are looking at. They're like, I think that's what I want. I think I want to have a partner who will help me out. And we're in this boat together. And what tends to happen is a lot of people have that thought before they have kids. And then the constraints of the labor market make it such that it's really difficult to have in practice.
So if you can't afford childcare, one of you is going to stay home. I And then you kind of default back into traditional divisions of labor, even though that's not what people originally wanted or at least said they wanted.
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