Make America Fertile Again: The Strange Bedfellows of the New Baby Boom Agenda
The pronatalist movement is selling bad policies and rigid ideas about gender. There is a better way.
"I want more babies in the United States of America," Vice President J.D. Vance told the crowd at the March for Life rally in January.
American babymaking, or the lack of it, is an old hobbyhorse for Vance: Before becoming vice president, he advocated such ideas as taxing childlessness and giving children voting rights that could be exercised by their parents. With Vance's elevation to the top ranks of American politics, the cause—often referred to as pronatalism—has become a priority for the MAGA faithful and its most visible figures.
Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk, who spent the early months of 2025 as a prominent fixture in the White House, has called a collapsing birth rate "the biggest danger civilization faces" and said "it should be considered a national emergency to have kids." Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a father of nine, told his agency to prioritize transportation projects in "communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average." And President Donald Trump himself predicted in March that he would become "known as the fertilization president."
The U.S. fertility rate has been falling for centuries, with a temporary reversal during the mid-20th century baby boom and a smaller one lasting from 1980 through the late 2000s. But the decline now threatens to shrink the population. The most recent data on American births places the total fertility rate—the average number of children a U.S. woman will have in her lifetime—at about 1.6 children per woman, which is quite a bit below the 2.1 "replacement rate" fertility rate, a mark Americans hit just a generation ago. A shrinking native-born population could create any number of economic and social problems, from slower growth to entitlement funding headaches.
Under Trump, reversing low birth rates has become a policy priority. In February, the president issued an executive order seeking ways to bring down in vitro fertilization (IVF) costs. In July, he signed a law establishing new "Trump accounts" for children, with the federal government putting $1,000 apiece into savings accounts for babies born this year through 2028.
But pronatalism doesn't just mean wonky schemes designed to jump-start another baby boom. It's a broader cultural movement that covers a wide and sometimes contradictory array of views. For some, pronatalism isn't really about tax policy or fertility rate statistics—or even babies themselves. It's an outgrowth of a deeper cultural anxiety about the meaning of gender, and especially the role of women, in a world where traditional roles and norms have broken down.
Pronatalism doesn't require this sort of anxiety. It doesn't even require the kinds of big, supposedly birth-boosting policies—most of which would be expensive and unworkable—that have become go-tos for governments trying to induce their citizens to procreate. Indeed, the best, most effective pronatalist ideas don't require regressive thinking or bigger government at all. But building a better pronatalist moment does require serious thought about the potential causes and effects of a profoundly less fecund people—and an understanding that ceding the pronatalist cause to a noxious far right would be a mistake.
Fast Society
In eras of declining family sizes and falling fertility rates, anxiety about women's choices always seems to follow. That anxiety is reflected not only in politics but in news media coverage.
Consider one article typical of the genre. It speculated that women's interest in public affairs, "fast society," and their own education and advancement might be driving an inclination toward smaller families.
That same article article solicited opinions from several women about why people were having smaller families, and the range and character of the responses was telling: "the changed conditions of modern life in general," "the love of ease among men and women today," "women dread[ing] the exacting toil, care and self-denial necessary to the rearing of a family." Or perhaps it's a product of women being too political; or their "excessive indulgence" in dancing, games, and shows; or the fact that the "responsibilities of motherhood [were] being taken more seriously than in the past"; or the "increasing demands of civilization and culture, which give women less time for the rearing of children, if they look to their own necessary education and advancement."
The article appeared in The Indianapolis Star—in 1907. Yet every one of these complaints would sound right at home in a 2025 viral New York Times trend piece.
Both then and now, the "two to tango" maxim seems to go out the window in fertility discussions. Somehow, men seem to escape blame for fewer babies. And it's men who are behind some of the loudest parts of the pronatalist cause.
Anti-Feminists for More Babies
To understand the disparate strains of the pronatalist movement, think of a couple of different axes. As the Catholic University economist Catherine Pakaluk sees one of the axes, "you have the tech bros and the sort of IVF/surrogacy crowd that are, like, let's just engineer full births [and] let's make eugenics great." And on "the other end of that axis" would be traditionalists, who believe "marriage is between a man and a woman for life" and believe in welcoming as many children as naturally occur within that. These two groups are "really at odds"—something that became clear when Trump issued his order on IVF. The traditionalists—whom we might also call pro-family pronatalists—generally aren't fans of anything that could divorce procreation from family formation or lead to the destruction of embryos, which makes many of them at least wary about the sorts of assisted reproductive technologies that Silicon Valley pronatalists love.
Pakaluk's other axis relates to the world of political and economic thought. At one end are "nationalist types" that are "bordering on certain strains of fascism"—the crowd saying "we want babies and births, but only our type of babies." Their pronatalism seems to stem primarily from cultural anxiety. At the other end of this pole are people who support the "free movement of peoples" and "want more people of all types."
The most odious contingent of anxious pronatalists is preoccupied with the idea that white Americans are being "outbred" by members of other races or, sometimes, giving it a more nativist than racist spin, that immigrants to the United States are outbreeding what some have dubbed "heritage Americans."
But anxious pronatalism also takes another form, the primary manifestation of which seems to be men who show up in social media comments and shout at women about how their eggs are shriveling up if they don't skip college and start having babies in their early 20s. For this cohort, pronatalist views are part of a larger anti-feminist worldview.
Despite their adoption of "trad" rhetoric, anti-feminist pronatalists—who dwell somewhere in the murky intersection of manosphere messaging and own-the-libs memes—aren't really in the same league as pro-family pronatalists like Patrick T. Brown of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. While pro-family pronatalists tend to inhabit traditional conservative corners, they are less likely than the online "trad" contingent to engage in what Brown calls a "reductionist view of the relationship between the sexes" and more likely to promote child tax credits than rant about the evils of working women. Brown says he believes it's "better for society when more people have kids than currently are choosing to," but "I don't think it's about trying to get women to leave the workforce or anything like that."
Pro-family pronatalists have more institutional power, but anxious pronatalists command more attention online.
Reactionary pronatalism is rising at a moment when gender norms are becoming ever more fluid, marriage rates are down, LGBTQ identification is up, and blue-collar jobs for men seem more scarce. Fewer people of all ages are socializing in person; young people are having less sex and growing more politically polarized; manosphere influencers are hawking testosterone supplements by stirring up fears about sperm counts. Women's sexualization is simultaneously more prevalent than ever, as in online porn, and more taboo, as in #MeToo. There's a real sense among many young people that the rules around relationships and sex and gender norms are changing in ways both contradictory and confusing.
Some men have always been left out of traditional markers of adulthood. But now these men can gather online and commiserate, potentially radicalizing each other, while also watching women who—at least on social media—are living the good life, despite or even because of their sexual "degeneracy" or career-minded refusal to "settle down." The result is a perfect storm of resentments and fear of missing out that can breed both yearning and misogyny.
A lot of these men appear to view declining birth rates as the missing link. Lower fertility, in this view, is the perfect example of modern women's selfishness and insufficiency and the perfect cudgel with which to send them back to a world where they're less likely to be competing with men for jobs—and less likely to have high expectations for the men they date. For this crowd, pronatalism isn't about making more babies per se; it's a way of putting women in their place.
That pronatalism becomes a proxy for preexisting gender-role concerns and anxious masculinity is evident in the way it gets linked to casual cruelty about childlessness and an insistence that nobody likes a smart, ambitious, or educated woman—that men would much rather "marry a Waffle House waitress" than a businesswoman, as one popular X post goes. Never mind that every bit of social science data we have suggests that "assortative mating"—the marriage of people with similar education levels and economic status—is the dominant pairing paradigm for higher-status men.
Under Trump, elements of this tendency have been elevated to the White House. Before being elected vice president, J.D. Vance famously mocked "childless cat ladies."
The proxy element is also evident in the way "pronatalists" in this cohort seem to revile older moms almost, if not more, than they do childless women. While Silicon Valley pronatalists see extending fertility as a potential way to expand birth rates, anxious pronatalists view women having kids young as part of the whole project, a way to ensure less competition from women in the workforce and make women more dependent on men.
"Coming up when I did, most women did still really want to get married and have kids…and it was the men who would not commit, who would not propose," says Hannah Cox, president and co-founder of the media platform BASEDPolitics. "Things get so focused on women, vs. ever discussing men's role in any of this, and that's why I just can't believe that this isn't, on its face, an attack on women's rights." She worries that the right has created "a victimhood narrative—a sort of echo chamber where men are being told 'this isn't your fault…because feminism took these things from you.'"
Pakaluk notes that within marriages, we don't know whether it's men's preferences, women's preferences, or both that are driving decisions to have fewer children. But she has talked to many married women who want another kid while their husband does not.
"There is a monster narrative that everybody's looking for, someone to blame," she adds. "I think what's worrisome here is the quick movement from a social aggregate, which is the total fertility rate, to the conclusion that someone's done a crime or a harm, and therefore we need to blame somebody, which of course is going to be women."
Tech Bro Natalists
Declining fertility need not result in this sort of anti-feminist anxiety. It could also lead to hopes about a future of tech-enabled fertility.
The group Pakaluk called "tech bro" pronatalists—also known as Silicon Valley pronatalists—may be the most palatable to the libertarian-minded, with their embrace of higher birth rates through a combination of innovation and capitalism. Silicon Valley pronatalists tend to be the most future-oriented of the bunch, and they are open to advancing babymaking by almost any technological means possible.
The tech-forward pronatalist contingent wholeheartedly embraces IVF not just as a way to ensure that folks with fertility issues can have babies but as a way for people—infertile or not—to have the healthiest children by selecting for the best embryos.
The fertility tech space has become big business in Silicon Valley. Orchid, founded in 2021 by former Peter Thiel fellow Noor Siddiqui, uses whole genome sequencing of pre-implantation embryos to test for hundreds of risk factors and diseases. In an August interview with The New York Times' Ross Douthat, Siddiqui called it a "medical innovation in pregnancy" that promotes "parental choice, parental freedom and parental autonomy" and likened it to the introduction of the epidural or the switch from widespread home births to hospital births. (Critics, meanwhile, have likened it to eugenics or even murder.)
Silicon Valley pronatalists also see extending fertility as an important goal. They want to improve current technologies, like egg freezing, and to usher in such sci-fi notions as maturing eggs outside the body before implantation (something that has resulted in at least one human baby so far, under the direction of the company Gameto) and developing eggs cells from pluripotent stem cells (in-vitro gametogenesis), which could allow older women to have kids.
These are "technologies that could extend women's fertility in the same way that the pill and abortion help them control it," the genomics researcher Ruxandra Teslo wrote at Works in Progress in March. And "providing these women with an extended window to compensate for their delayed entry into parenthood may lead to an increase in total births."
There is evidence that tech has boosted birth rates before. The best explanation for America's mid-century baby boom "starts with science and technology," Derek Thompson, co-author of Abundance, wrote in a July Substack post. The maternal death rate fell and "the modern home experienced a mini industrial revolution," making parenting safer and easier. "As new machines, better medicine, cheap homes, and rising incomes made parenthood easier, what started as a technological revolution evolved into a cultural movement." Change the medical and technological conditions, and the culture will follow. And eventually, in a democracy, so will the politics.
Beyond Gender Anxiety
The most straightforward policy problem presented by declining birth rates is that they create funding troubles for already stretched entitlement programs. Social Security and Medicare were built on the assumption of a growing population, with each retiree's benefits supported by multiple younger workers.
Cox thinks this is less of a problem than it's been made out to be. "If the birth rate declines, it's actually fine in a free market economy," she says. She makes this case in No One Wants To Be the Mommy, a forthcoming book that's "part memoir and part political and social analysis" and aims to "debunk the mounting hysteria around the birth rate decline, and expose those who are pushing it for their true motivations."
"It's especially not a problem if you support immigration and free movement," Cox says. After all, importing people can boost the U.S. population and help keep our economy afloat just as much as ramping up production of homegrown Americans can.
If the U.S. population does keep dwindling, "it's the government and politicians who would have to start actually reforming Social Security and these programs and entitlements that they don't want to touch," Cox points out.
But it's also possible to adopt a pronatalist worldview that doesn't buy into either anxious gender essentialism or the idea that the chief value of more babies is to help keep the state solvent.
Remember Pakaluk's fourth group: the folks who support the "free movement of peoples" and "want more people of all types." These are the opposite of the nationalists. "It maps very nicely onto a kind of deep question about whether people are always good, whether more people are good for a country and economy," she says.
Looking at these different groups, "it's hardly fair to call [pronatalism] a movement," Pakaluk says, "because these things are not reconcilable….And the more people talk about the question of natality, the more they will discover that the question about births rather reveals deep, fixed differences between people as to the goodness of human life, the context in which human life should be affirmed or not affirmed."
Pronatalism "has become kind of polarized in this left-right way," says Jessica Flanigan, a philosopher at the University of Richmond who is writing a book called The Ethics of Expecting. Yet as she notes, there's nothing intrinsically right-wing about having a big family.
Flanigan is firmly on the free-movement side of the axis. Letting in immigrants is "good for them and it's good for us. Everybody wins. We should have as many immigrants as we can take," she says. And pronatalism is based around the same idea. "The people you create, they're like immigrants from another realm, in a way. They're going to be productive, invent new cool stuff. They're going to contribute in all of the ways that immigrants could contribute."
"Having more people around will contribute, on net, to economic development," says Flanigan, echoing the tech-forward worldview. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen's "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" lays out a version of Silicon Valley pronatalism where free markets combine with human and technological intelligence to create not just more people but more human flourishing generally. "We believe technological progress…leads to material abundance for everyone," he writes. And "the ultimate payoff from technological abundance can be a massive expansion in what Julian Simon called 'the ultimate resource'—people." With more people, you get "more abundance."
Part of the natalist movement's trouble is that it can't decide how to talk about itself. Flanigan is a mother of four who describes herself as both a libertarian and a pronatalist. But Pakaluk—who has eight children herself, wrote a book called Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, and was a speaker at this year's NatalCon conference—doesn't like the pronatalist label. And her reasoning hits at the tensions on the second axis.
"If the question is if I think human children are always good for society, for families, then I guess I'm a pronatalist," she says. Yet most people talking about pronatalism tend to mean it as a prescription for public policy. And she's "profoundly against" the idea "that the fertility rate in a country is something that should ever be a government target."
Decades of family-promotion initiatives in various countries show "there's a state incapacity both to encourage births" or promote stable family formation, she says. Storks don't take orders from the state.
Empty Cradle Propaganda
Despite the reactionary, statist strains of the movement, a pronatalism built on both family values and freedom, tradition and technology may yet be possible. There are feminist thinkers who are actually concerned with falling fertility—or, at least, are open to the idea that this is something we shouldn't ignore.
"When people see phenomena unfolding in plain view being denied…their reaction is not to turn away from the phenomena," as Anastasia Berg, author of What Are Children For?, noted in April. "Rather, it is to turn away from the deniers and toward those whose starting point is acknowledgment, regardless of their motivations or political ends. What this might look like in the case of denialism about birth rates is not hard to imagine."
As depopulation becomes undeniable, empty cradles will serve as propaganda for illiberal and foolish policies, from big-spending boondoggles to a national abortion ban, from immigration restrictions to subtly sexist changes to existing laws.
Cox thinks "it's only a very fringe percentage that is actually interested in legally curbing women's rights." But she worries that the lonely and disconnected young men are being sold "theories that are built around hate," and that there's a danger this might migrate offline. She points out that we've already seen some GOP-backed bills to end no-fault divorce.
Pakaluk worries that some on the right are starting to act about birth rates the way some people on the left do about climate change. When you portray something as an immediate existential problem and imbue it with a "truly apocalyptic character," it justifies doing anything and spending any amount of money. And then "there's no cost benefit [analysis] anymore."
"Everywhere I go, when I speak about this issue, somebody at some point raises, 'Should we stop women from going to college? Should we discourage them, disincentivize them?'" she says.
While this kind of idea isn't mainstream among conservatives, it is "creeping in," she says. "I'm alarmed at hearing, more and more, this kind of argument that we should just turn back the clock."
She's also noticed people starting to blame markets for fewer babies. People will say that "corporations are collaborating with the government to incentivize women to go to work." But when you "look at the microdata and what women have been up to," it becomes clear that there's no capitalist conspiracy. Women want to go to college, and women want to be employed.
If free marketeers, classical liberals, libertarian feminists, and so on cede the issue to the far right, we miss out on the opportunity to shape it in a way that supports liberty, pluralism, progress, autonomy, and sanity.
A libertarian or feminist pronatalism might sound like an oxymoron. But there are actually a lot of government barriers to bigger, happier families and a better parenting culture that proponents of such ideas could champion.
In his 2024 book Family Unfriendly, journalist Timothy Carney proposed several deregulatory pronatalist policies, including changes to zoning laws and rethinking car seat rules. "Free Range Kids" proponent Lenore Skenazy is constantly reporting on ways the state interferes with family flourishing. Brown, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, would like to see changes aimed at scaling back the number of years it takes to enter law and medicine, which could help make these prestigious professions less incompatible with earlier family formation—something Sex and the State writer Cathy Reisenwitz has also championed on explicitly feminist grounds. "Helping women skip the bullshit so we can advance in our careers before our wombs dry up is so obviously a good idea and a win-win-win for economic growth, feminism, and fertility that it's just baffling that it gets so little airtime," Reisenwitz wrote in April.
Many pronatalist ideas needn't involve the government at all. A big part of Carney's book concerns cultural norms around parenting that both make parents miserable and may incentivize smaller families. There's some evidence that flexible or remote work can boost births among educated women. Expanding fertility awareness among young people, addressing the root causes of infertility, and investing in measures that extend fertility—that is, taking pages from both the pro-family and Silicon Valley pronatalist playbooks—could help ensure that people who want children are able to have them.
Flanigan thinks "all of the reasons that you should be a kind of pro-choice feminist are also reasons to really support pronatalism as well, because that's the flip side of pro-choice."
Pakaluk "could totally see a sort of squishy or soft, small-P pronatalism under the heading of libertarianism," perhaps concerned with information gaps and public awareness. Responses to her book have convinced her that "maybe there's some low-hanging fruit here just in terms of sharing stories." In any event, she's optimistic.
A pronatalism that avoids apocalypticism, despotism, and denigrating women's autonomy won't be easy. But if you ditch the racists and the anxious masculinity cohort, the other factions have some good material to work with. A little technological change. A little cultural shift. History has shown that it isn't the worst recipe.
"Societies course-correct all the time," says Pakaluk. Falling fertility rates are a "sobering problem," but "humanity self-regulates and we will figure this out. I'm just not into the doomsday scenario."
