It’s a commonplace that motherhood is “the toughest job in the world,” and in future years it may come with a signing bonus of $5,000. That’s just one proposal that the Trump administration is presently considering to induce people to have more kids. This general shift in favor of pronatalism has been welcomed even by many people who are generally skeptical of the New Right. At last, the right is taking the “birth dearth” seriously and considering what policy reforms might make America more pro-family! Andrew Smarick recently made that argument in these pages, and he may be right. But I am not sure he is right. 

Family policy is certainly in vogue on the right, and presently enjoying a kind of curiosity bounce in leftist or centrist publications. Some of those pieces are tentatively favorable, while others indulge in some Handmaid Hysteria, presenting right-wing pronatalists as racists and misogynists secretly looking to enslave women and ensure Aryan dominance. It’s a little tricky sometimes to cut through the noise.

Demographic collapse is a real problem. It may really be one of the most significant variables that determines which presently existing societies will survive and thrive over the next century or two, and which will sink into obscurity. (If that’s true, there’s some good news: America is in much better shape than China. Perhaps Tyler Cowen is right.) Even so, I am of two minds about pronatalism’s present moment in the sun. Will it open fruitful new pathways or send us charging down dark alleyways? When it comes to babies, casual experimentation can be perilous. 

Welcome, Brave New World

Smarick is surely correct that the New Right has enjoyed success in “mainstreaming” pronatalism on the American right. Reading his piece, I smiled a little, enjoying a flashback to a time roughly a decade ago when I tried to publish a piece in a major right-wing publication defending the then-active Reform Conservative movement. Tea Party conservatism was still in the saddle at that point. With brusque condescension, a confident young editor advised me to spend some quality time with the Wall Street Journal to help rectify my glaring economic illiteracy. In those days, it was easy to write off pronatalism as some dopey mom fixation.

The New Right changed that. But we may now find ourselves in an unhappy situation. The same developments that made pronatalism discussable may also have undercut our ability to reach prudent conclusions. The New Right, as Smarick also acknowledges, tends to be very quick on the button when it comes to the exercise of state power. Especially in the realm of family life, this can be a bad (and perhaps egregiously bad) thing.

To err is human. To really foul things up, you need a government program. I have two major concerns about big-state pronatalism, but also a few ideas about the direction a prudent pronatalist society should go.

I want to be clear here that I absolutely believe that mainstream conservative pronatalism is driven mainly by a lively enthusiasm for babies, families, and rejuvenated communities. Somewhere in the bowels of the Internet, one could surely find pro-natalists with a bigoted, racialist agenda, but in general, the visible pronatalists are the ones who believe strongly that families and kids bring more meaning into people’s lives. Yes, they’re monsters.

There are two major issues that complicate the picture, however. The first has to do with advancing technology. The second relates to state subsidies. 

Technology has been advancing rapidly in the area of human reproduction. Things that a generation ago were still in the realm of lurid laboratory experiments are now touted by many as “rights.” Political pressure is mounting to throw substantial public money into subsidizing artificial reproduction, even as further breakthroughs loom on the horizon. No matter how one views IVF, surrogacy, genetic screening of embryos, artificial wombs, or a range of possible transhumanist innovations, it would be ludicrous not to acknowledge the moral and social gravity of these developments. No one should be indifferent to the question of where babies come from.

What do the pronatalists think of this brave new world of reproductive possibility? Really, there’s just a lot of disagreement. This is a movement that brings together many different kinds of people. Many are religious conservatives, who tend to frown on technological and transhumanist innovations as violations of natural law. (I’ll call these “natural law pronatalists.”) Others are less concerned about natural law but clearly sincere in their liberal commitments. (I’ll just call these “liberal pronatalists.”) Some are frankly odd. Their moral and political convictions are harder to parse. I’m not entirely sure what to make of the pronatalism of Elon Musk, for instance, or of Simone and Michael Collins’ “intentionally constructed, technically atheist” descendant-worshipping faith, but it’s very obviously not constrained by natural law or any other established ethical tradition. I’ll call these the “techno-pronatalists,” because they tend to be actively enthusiastic about the embrace of new reproductive technologies. 

Unsurprisingly, it is this last set of people that has recently had me paging through my copy of Matthew Connelly’s Fatal Misconception, a gripping book about the appalling atrocities committed in the twentieth century in the name of population control. I mention this book with some trepidation, recognizing that it is in some ways monstrously unfair to draw parallels with today’s pronatalist movement. Both natural law and liberal pronatalists would certainly be horrified by the human rights abuses described in this book: systematic campaigns of forced abortion, mass sterilization, and bureaucrats openly strategizing about who they consider worthy to breed. I do not for a moment believe they would sign off on such measures. And perhaps techno-pronatalists wouldn’t either. I just don’t know. But I do know this. When rapidly advancing technology combines with unrestrained social zeal and state power, things can go wrong. Sometimes very badly wrong. 

It doesn’t seem at all likely that Americans will be won over en masse to the Collins’ odd philosophical outlook, but one interesting point that emerges from Connelly’s history is the way that the architects of twentieth-century Malthusian horrors were in many ways quite diverse. They were united in their concern about “uncontrolled” human breeding, but beyond that, they had a range of goals and commitments. Perhaps it would be most accurate to say that there were different “controlled breeding” camps that sprang up independently and then converged into a recognizable movement. Malthusians worried about too-rapid population growth, scarce resources, and “lifeboat scenarios.” Birth controllers like Margaret Sanger wanted to liberate women from the onerous demands of domineering husbands and relentless serial pregnancies. Eugenicists worried about the consequences for the human race if birth rates fell among the right kinds of people (educated, prosperous, white), while the wrong kind continued to breed with reckless abandon. The relative influence of each camp varied over time, depending on how they intersected with prevailing social trends. But they ended up becoming de facto allies, and together they shaped the policies of states, institutions, and transnational organizations in deep and ultimately horrifying ways. Thomas Malthus himself (a sober Christian economist who regarded even artificial birth control as unethical) would have been appalled at these applications of his theories, but once the Malthusian train had gathered momentum, it was hard to stop.

Natural law pronatalists, to their credit, have often been up-front about their opposition to IVF, surrogacy, and various transhumanist innovations. But there are many reasons to think that the techno-pronatalists have greater political influence at the moment. It’s reasonable to reflect at this juncture on what can happen when technology and social zeal fuse together in an unbounded social experiment. Natural law is the best protection against that kind of outcome. The second best is a general reluctance to use state power and resources to magnify whatever mistakes the human race is about to make.

Chasing the Stork

The “birth dearth” problem can be viewed from many angles, but one helpful framework presents it as a kind of free-rider problem. Raising children is an immensely costly and laborious task. In agricultural societies, that investment paid dividends relatively quickly as children helped out on the farm or in the family business. But rarefied labor markets largely neutralized that advantage, and modern societies then proceeded to make the problem much worse by implementing expensive entitlement programs, which redistribute the earnings of today’s workers to the poor, sick, and (especially) elderly. 

Children today require a much greater investment from their parents than in days of yore, because fruitful participation in a free society requires extensive education and formation. Babies have always been needy and unproductive, but kids in their tweens and teens used to be a real asset to the family farm or business, supplying low-cost, productive labor. Today’s teens may load the dishwasher now and again, but it’s understood that their education and general development need to be a parent’s priority, and while that attitude may sometimes reflect an excessive willingness to indulge the young, it goes much deeper than that. In a liberal society with a rarefied labor market, young people need an extended period of development to prepare for adult life. Parents today pour great energy into this because we know that our kids will soon need to go out and establish themselves in an immensely complex world that even we struggle to understand. We cannot simply advise them to marry their sweethearts and do “the done thing” (farming or mining or whatever sustains the economy in our particular region), because there is no “done thing” anymore. The ability to chart a course and put down roots on a unique patch of soil is itself, in the West today, the primary proof of adulthood. That’s difficult. The reality, then, is that raising successful liberal citizens is a hugely difficult and expensive task, but after completing it, parents pass into the care of the state on the same terms as elderly adults who did not raise new, productive citizens. Parental efforts are taken for granted, which helps to explain why fewer people are willing to step up to that plate.

In fact, the paternalistic state has expanded its reach to the point where we now view the state as a kind of “primary caregiver” to nearly all people in serious need, except children. We have made public provision in various ways for the old, the poor, the chronically ill, the unemployed or unemployable, and people with various disabilities. But babies, who are perhaps the neediest of all people, are still viewed first and foremost as their parents’ responsibility. Parent-child relationships have become a weird outlier, the one significantly onerous natural human tie that we still treat as presumptively binding in both law and culture. Not surprisingly, people are often reluctant to take on that obligation, and those who do may find themselves in a strangely liminal place. I know a lot about this, having once been the mother of four children under the age of six. It can be hard for non-parents, or even parents of more “normal” families (in terms of the number and spacing of children) to grasp what it’s like to be a circus-freak spectacle everywhere one goes. Black looks from all the store clerks. A small gasp each time the elevator doors opened. People actually calling companions to come over and gawk at “this lady with a zillion babies” as we walked down the street. I wasn’t an Octomom; I simply got married and followed out the natural consequences of that choice. But a once-normal life course has now become incomprehensible to many people, a kind of counter-cultural rebellion in itself.

This is clearly a problem. But if we conceive of it as a kind of multi-faceted free-rider problem, we will see two strategies, broadly speaking, that might help to address it. We can accept it as a reality that human relationships will become increasingly mediated, as natural obligations devolve to the state. In that spirit, we can work to realign parent-child relationships with those same trends, demanding a more aggressive state role in family life. Alternatively, we could view the shift away from organic human bonds as a negative development, and look for ways to recover more organic networks of human bonds.

Strictly speaking, these are not mutually exclusive. For instance, the state could spend more on children and less on the elderly. On one level, that makes obvious sense. But there’s a reason why spending less on the elderly is so difficult. Elderly people have come to rely on the state to meet their needs. They feel entitled to care. Realistically, the options for encouraging births on a federal level will mostly involve the creation of new entitlements, which is to say, further increasing our federal commitments by showering money on families.

Even leaving aside the magnitude of America’s existing debt, and the precarity of our present financial situation, there are reasons to worry that this is a bad idea. Decades of welfare-state experimentation have demonstrated time and again that dumping money on people isn’t usually an effective way to help them thrive. Entitlements create dependency traps, discourage adaptation and initiative, and erode “safety nets” of a more organic variety. Pronatalists tend to feel that families are deserving of greater support, and that caretakers should be more fittingly honored. I warmly agree with that, but I don’t think we’re likely to achieve it through handouts and government-distributed prizes. State-sponsored programs are likelier to turn all mothers into “welfare queens” in the eyes of their fellow citizens, further diminishing appreciation for the immense self-sacrifice that parenthood involves. The last thing we should want is to see childbearing reduced to a kind of bottom-rung option for people with poor employment prospects. (At the risk of sounding paranoid, I must note that that would also be the path most likely to reignite eugenics-oriented conversations in earnest.) 

Recovering natural human bonds is a tall order. Conservatives have been pressing that cause for decades, with disappointing results. On the other hand, pronatalists are playing a long game. And there are things that can potentially be done to facilitate family formation without turning parents into wards of the state. The key is to stop thinking of families first and foremost as needy people requiring help, or even as noble people deserving of honor. We should think of them first as productive people in need of a hospitable climate congenial to their worthy aims. As it happens, conservatives have already ventured some way down this road. It was called Reform Conservatism, and I personally still think that that playbook contains some good ideas.

In principle, pronatalism could be the sort of cause that brings conservatives of different stripes together in fruitful conversation. Demographic collapse raises some very practical, policy-related concerns (a shrinking workforce, a loss of dynamism, horizons dotted with ghost towns), but it also reflects deeper moral and spiritual problems that traditionalists can speak to with eloquence. Why are people losing interest in perpetuating their family tree and their civilization? Why aren’t we willing to do hard things anymore? Most important of all, generating a productive response to the birth dearth could force conservatives to recognize the foolishness of pitting pro-business and pro-family policies against one another. Commerce and domestic life each have their own rhythm, but they also need one another and should be mutually supportive.

Can the New Right inspire that kind of conversation? It would require certain qualities that they have not reliably displayed: humility about what policy can accomplish, a willingness to talk to free-market conservatives, an agreement that long-term goals should be prioritized over short-term victories and political theater. 

The stakes are high, though, and the moment is a dynamic one. So I will live in hope.