Why Musk and Vance want you to have more babies
Pro-natalism is having a moment. The Trump administration has announced plans to apportion state funding according to birth rates, and administration officials have endorsed tax penalties and even voting rights restrictions for the childless.
While pressures to have children have defined and restricted women’s lives for millennia, and are on the rise across the political spectrum and across the globe, what is alarming about this moment in America is the sheer volume of pronatalist policy and rhetoric issuing forth from the likes of powerful men such as Elon Musk, Vice President JD Vance and President Trump. The unabashedly coercive intent is to reduce women to merely their reproductive potential.
The availability of abortion and contraceptives has been declining for decades, but Trump’s “global gag rule” — which blocks foreign aid funding for groups that “actively promote abortion as a method of family planning” — adds another layer of menace to people’s lives already jeopardized by the international community’s abandonment of family planning since the mid-1990s. Previous iterations of the rule, imposed by every Republican administration since 1984, have had the effect of increasing abortions by 40 percent. This policy is more about punishing women than about protecting unborn lives.
But the drive to produce more babies is a definite subtext. We know this because GOP political leaders occasionally, in their efforts to impose ever more draconian restrictions on the autonomy of women and girls, say the quiet part out loud. A federal lawsuit recently filed by Kansas, Missouri and Idaho argues that expanded access to the abortifacient drug mifepristone was “depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers” — thus diminishing population growth, and therefore political apportionment and funds, for the states in question.
Such a transparent admission that abortion bans and other pronatalist policies are really about forcing women into service to increase our population for economic and political ends, no matter the costs to their well-being, is rare. But the essence of pronatalism is the premise that the decision to have children is not just a personal one to be made upon thoughtful reflection and intimate discussion with family and friends, but a tool for external goals, usually those of men in positions of power. The decision is also, according to pronatalists, the duty of women and girls, whose purpose is reproduction.
But women across the world are not on board with this directive. As Musk, Vance and their ilk are fond of noting, global birth rates are indeed in rapid decline. This is the natural and inevitable outcome of women having education, employment opportunities and reproductive choice. With few exceptions, in every country where women can choose to have few or no children, that is exactly what they are doing. Birth rates remain high only in nations where the rights and well-being of women and girls are severely curtailed or outright obliterated by antiquated institutions like child marriage — a scourge that persists even in America, with the backing of many Republican leaders.
There is little evidence that women are about to change their minds or their fertility, no matter what we throw at them. More than three decades after Japan launched an ambitious pronatalist program of subsidized childcare, paternity leave and direct cash payments for childbearing, its birth rate stands at 1.2 children per woman. In Finland, long known for its generous government-subsidized parental leave, childcare, education and health care, recent efforts to sweeten the deal with extended parental leave have failed to budge the nation’s low fertility rate. China’s birth rate has barely changed even as it sends officials to women’s doorsteps to urge their fulfillment of the nation’s three-child policy.
What these efforts have in common is their proponents’ allegiance to the idea that endless population and economic growth are possible or desirable on a planet with finite resources. Yet recent decades of rapid growth — which have also seen the expansion of environmental ills such as climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution — should call this gospel into question.
The truth is that continued growth has just a few beneficiaries, and the socioeconomic status of Musk, Vance and others doing most of the pronatalist proselytizing should tip us off as to who actually profits from population growth and the steady stream of cheap labor it ensures. Hint: it’s not working people, and it is certainly not the women forced to bear children amid darkening environmental and economic realities or the children born into them.
In an era when looming planetary crisis threatens our continued existence — in large part the result of population growth, much of it concentrated in a growing global middle class — we should be celebrating women’s choice to have fewer children, and ensuring that every woman across the globe has the ability to make that decision.
Kirsten Stade is a conservation biologist and the communications manager of the nonprofit Population Balance.
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