Checkpoint: Conservatives Want You To Have More Kids
Norma Mortenson
The declining birthrate is the single biggest threat to the future of human civilization. It is, at least, according to Elon Musk. Vice President JD Vance also wants “more babies in the United States of America” and fears the below replacement-level birthrate in the U.S., which recently hit a record low of 1.57 births per woman. 2.1 births per woman is considered the necessary rate for population maintenance. Musk and Vance are two of the most famous faces of pronatalism, and the movement’s support is growing. Fear mongering around the declining birthrate is everywhere, and Elon Musk ranks it above the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, and nuclear war on the list of things we should be worried about. Fertility rates aren’t just falling in the U.S., either. The global fertility rate is currently around 2.3 births per woman, while the global average in 1950 was nearly 5 children per woman. The rate is projected to keep falling, down to fewer than 2.1 births per woman by 2050.
Over the past 25 years, fertility rates have declined in every region of the world and across every income demographic. The alarm bells are sounding, with many countries fearing an eventual collapse of social and political systems under the weight of aging populations. One major concern is that, as fewer people are born and the average age in a country rises, there won’t be enough young workers to provide care services or to pay the taxes needed to fund eldercare benefits. Another concern is that science and technology innovation will stagnate if fewer people are entering those fields. People in the U.S. are already worried about the futures of Social Security and Medicare as wage inequality grows and as the programs’ primary trust funds are projected to dwindle, but, if the worker-to-retiree ratio continues to shrink, future funding to those social programs will be further jeopardized.
To assuage growing population decline fears, several countries have implemented measures to incentivize families to have more children. In 2010, then-Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán instituted tax breaks, interest-free loans, mortgage subsidies, and grants to buy a bigger car or renovate your home for young couples who promised to have children. After these measures were implemented, the birth rate in Hungary briefly rose, but by 2025, it was back down near where it started. In 2024, China, following the overturning of the decades long One Child Policy, experienced its third consecutive year of overall population decline. To revitalize the birthrate, the Chinese government has instituted mandates for hospitals to provide epidural anesthesia to pregnant patients and expanded access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) assisted reproductive technology. Last year, the Trump Administration began considering a number of measures to encourage women to have more children, including $5,000 cash “baby bonuses” to every American mother after giving birth, restructuring sex ed curricula to educate women to better understand when they are ovulating and able to conceive, and awarding women who have had six or more children with a “Presidential Medal of Motherhood.” Japan, Sweden, Germany, and Bulgaria have also implemented policy changes and subsidies to incentivize citizens to have more children and bring the birth rate back up to replacement level.
The political figures described above are some of the most prominent faces of the pronatalist movement, and they’re not just talking the talk. Elon Musk, for example, has fathered 14 children. While politicians and public figures like Musk, Trump, Vance, and Orbán purport to be worried about population decline in their countries, they want the numbers to be bolstered by new children born to citizens, rather than by immigration. Not everyone concerned about the declining birthrate is worried about its economic impact, and there are conservatives who see declining birth and marriage rates as a cultural crisis. They advocate for more committed marriages and large families, rather than implementing measures to make immigration to the country more appealing. When Orbán was re-elected in 2010, he promised to tackle population decline, saying that "in the West, the answer to this is immigration. You bring in as many as you're missing. Hungarians think differently. We don't need numbers, we need Hungarian children." Donald Trump weighed in on the issue in 2023 at the Conservative Political Action Conference, saying that he wanted a new “baby boom.” In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, JD Vance disparaged women who choose not to have children, and said that the Democratic Party is led by a bunch of “childless cat ladies.” In another interview, he warned conservatives of an immigrant "invasion" and accused Democrats of demographic engineering. These statements are indicative of the Great Replacement Theory-esque rhetoric that’s become commonplace among conservatives. They say they fear declining birth rates, but if the real concern were about keeping a population at replacement level for economic wellbeing, there wouldn’t be such concern about immigration. Believers of the Great Replacement Theory say that there's a plot to diminish the influence of white people by allowing prolific immigration of nonwhite people into societies that have historically been dominated by white people. At least some of the conservatives sounding alarm about the declining fertility rates are really only concerned about white fertility rates.
Another layer of complication to the declining birthrate issue is if the declining birth rate is interpreted as a genuine, non-racist concern, how to address it without disenfranchising women. As a rule, as women asymptotically approach equity and parity with their male counterparts in a society, the birth rate goes down. It used to be the case that, as economic prosperity increased, so did the birth rate. Now, there is a negative correlation. As women gain the agency to opt out of traditional familial roles, they increasingly pursue education and careers instead of childrearing. Birth rates also decline as women gain access to contraception and abortion. When women have autonomy and the option to pursue a life outside motherhood, the prospect of staying at home to mind four, five, six children becomes less appealing. Many women opt only to have one or two children, and many opt to have none at all, and this is a good thing. Across the board, as agency goes up, the number of children women have goes down. So, as the conservatives who say they want more babies born watch and celebrate as reproductive freedoms are revoked as in the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, it is clear that, not only do they want birth rates to rise, but they also want a return to predatory systems that rob women of bodily autonomy and force them into raising more children than they want.
Conservative pronatalists would have us believe that the declining birthrates are a cause for major concern, that they worry for the futures of their countries as birth rates drop, and that they want to see more babies born to happy families. In the same breath they rant against immigration and and vote against measures increasing reproductive freedoms and expanding IVF and adoption opportunities to queer people. While it is true that global birthrates are in decline and that aging populations pose a real fiscal challenge, the alarmist population collapse narrative fuels prejudiced ideologies and encourages restrictions on reproductive freedom in the name of demographic growth.
