LogFAQs > #986173934

its a movement JD Vance is part of

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/11/what-is-pronatalism-right-wing-republican

The movement unites family values conservatives and tech bro rightwingers. Will this incoherent coalition hold?

In his first address to the United States after becoming vice-president, JD Vance stood on stage and proclaimed: I want more babies in the United States of America. Weeks later, Donald Trump signed an executive order pledging support for in vitro fertilization, recognizing the importance of family formation and that our nations public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children.

In late January, aDepartment of Transportation memo directed the agency to prioritize projects that give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average. And last week, it was reported thatElon Musk, the unelected head of the government-demolishing department of governmental efficiency and a man who has said that the collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far, hadbecome a father of 14.

Republicans have long heralded the importance of family values. But in these developments, many see mountingsigns of a controversial ideology at work: pronatalism.

Americas premier pronatalists on having tons of kids to save the world: There are going to be countries of old people starving to death

Pronatalism is so contentious that people often struggle to agree on a definition. Pronatalism could be defined as the belief that having children is good. It could also be defined as the belief that having children is important to the greater good and that people should have babies on behalf of the state, because declining birth rates are a threat to its future. Perhaps most importantly, pronatalism could be defined as the belief that government policy should incentivize people to give birth.
While people on the left might agree with some pronatalist priorities, pronatalism in the US istodayascendant on the right. It has become a key ideological plank in the bridge between tech bro rightwingers like Musk and more traditional, religious conservatives, like the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson who once said in a House hearing that abortions were harming the economy by eliminating would-be workers.
But there are plenty of widening cracks in that bridge and, by extension, Trumps incoherent coalition.

Restructuring society
While the Collinses are avatars for the emerging pronatalist tech right, Lyman Stone is one of the highest-profile pronatalists from a more traditionally conservative background.
Pronatalism has to be disciplined by a commitment to human liberty and human flourishing and this is coming out of work on reproductive justice, basically. People have a right to have the families they want to have, and for some people, that means no family, said Stone, a demographer who in 2024 established the Pronatalism Initiative at the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies. The focus of pronatalism, in my view, generally is not and certainly should not be on family gigantism, and instead should be on helping young people overcome the barriers and obstacles to romantic and family success in their life.

In practice, Stone said, pronatalists should help people get married earlier in life so that they can start having children younger. That could mean, he said, everything from improving mental health services to creating better childcare programs. Stones frequent collaborator, Brad Wilcox a University of Virginia sociology professor and author of the book Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization pointed to several policies that he thinks would help strengthen family formation, such as expanding the child tax credit and converting federal land into affordable housing.
Pronatalism is not just a fiscal program. Its a program of restructuring society in a way that treats family goals as worthy, worth supporting and socially important, Stone said.

Asked if he supports abortion rights, Stone clarified: No, I would draw the line at destruction of human life.
Many of these policy proposals could comfortably fit into a left-leaning political platform in fact, they may be more at home on such a platform than within todays Republican party. Although Vance said on the campaign trail that he would like to expand the child tax credit, a move that could cost trillions of dollars in federal spending, Republicans have instead committed to slashing the government budget by at least $1.5tn.
Instead, elected Republicans have tended to invoke pronatalist rhetoric in support of their top culture-war causes.

They have repeatedly condemned gender-affirming healthcare for allegedly sterilizing people; in 2022, as Idaho weighed whether to ban kids from accessing the care, one Republican state legislator said: We are not talking about the life of the child, but we are talking about the potential to give life to another generation. When a Republican lawmaker from Michigan introduced a resolution to condemn same-sex marriage, he told reporters: This is a biological necessity to preserve and grow our human race. And last year, in a lawsuit to cut access to a common abortion pill, the Republican attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri argued that access to the pill had lowered birth rates for teen mothers, leading to a falling state populations, diminishment of political representation and loss of federal funds.

In practice, pronatalism especially when paired with anti-abortion policy often overlooks the disproportionate effect that having more babies has on women, according to Elizabeth Gregory, director of womens gender and sexuality studies at the University of Houston. Childbearing can reshape a womans entire future.

This idea that the child is the only person in the dyad loses a real understanding of how embedded and dependent children are on their mothers, Gregory said. Fertility affects many, many parts of culture and talking about it cant be reduced to just a few soundbites.