Conservative pronatalists’ push for more births is all kinds of wrong

The Trump administration claims it is “pro-family,” but its actions only hurt families. The true motivation of the conservative movement pushing for higher birthrates is to deepen the systemic inequalities that benefit the white, male broligarchy.

Musk’s “population collapse” fearmongering

Despite no shortage of real crises he could be concerned about, Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and Trump’s right-hand-man, is obsessed with declining birthrates. The presumed father of 14 (it’s hard to keep up, with various women regularly announcing births of his children and a growing number of custody battles) has been fearmongering about low fertility for years.

Among his many ludicrous claims, Musk has stated that small family sizes present the biggest threat to civilization (much greater even than global warming), and has used his platform to spread misinformation intended to discourage women from using contraception. His new position as the head of the made-up DOGE, the “Department of Government Efficiency” (acquired with a $288 million campaign donation), means his weird “baby bust” obsession is now seeping into the US presidential administration, with some worrying potential consequences.

Conservative pronatalism and the Trump administration

Conservative pronatalism is a growing movement, which at its core maintains that efforts to decrease gender inequality have gone too far and that women should return to traditional domestic roles and raise many children. This belief is fueled by the desire to reinforce white males’ position at the top of the food chain, and to squash DEI and progressive values. The first-ever “Natal Conference,” organized by an outspoken eugenicist and featuring a collection of far-right influencers and conspiracy theorists, took place in Austin, Texas, in 2023. “NatalCon” is set to return in 2025.

Even before Musk’s involvement, Trump urged his supporters to have more babies, declaring at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), “I want a baby boom,” creepily adding, “You men are so lucky out there.”

Like other far-right pronatalists, Trump is hostile to immigration (immigrants’ offspring aren’t the ones he wants more of), and openly supports IVF (most recently declared via executive order), demonstrating that his hostility towards abortion rights is about wanting to control women’s bodies rather than concern over embryos’ “right to life.” Not that Trump actually has any intention of helping people access IVF – his executive order is largely symbolic, and doesn’t propose any concrete actions to decrease the cost of assisted reproductive technologies.

Vice President JD Vance is also very much onboard the forced-birth train, admitting earlier this year at the so-called “March for Life” in Washington, DC, that he opposes abortion because he wants “more babies in the United States of America.”

In a similar vein, shortly after former reality TV personality and father-of-nine Sean Duffy’s confirmation as Transportation Secretary, he circulated a bizarre order instructing his department to “give preference to communities with marriage and birthrates higher than the national average” when awarding grants.

Last December, the Heritage Foundation (the Trump-allied group behind far-right playbook Project 2025) published a plan to increase the US birthrate which involves defunding higher education to make it harder for women to attend college. This is because the number of children a woman has in her lifetime is generally inversely correlated with the number of years she spends in education.

Conservative pronatalists disregard people’s fertility desires and circumstances

These attitudes are obviously deeply concerning and disregard people’s rights, choices and circumstances. A recent Population Connection survey on Americans’ family size desires and outcomes revealed that the majority of Americans have an established preference for a smaller family size of two or fewer children. Out of more than 1,400 adults polled, the biggest proportion (47 percent) have their desired number of children (many of those who have fewer children than they desire are still in the early years of their reproductive lives).

Nevertheless, people did report feeling limited in their family size choices. When asked which factors had a major impact on their ability or decision to have children, the top factors for adults under 50 were concern over the state of the world (35 percent said this had a major impact) and not being able to afford [more] kids (34 percent said this had a major impact).

Other top limiting factors among younger Americans were mental health (27 percent said this had a major impact), while a quarter said they were worried about how laws that restrict abortion and reproductive health care could affect them or their partner during pregnancy. Just over a fifth said lack of support for parents in our country, as well as conflicting work demands, played a major role in their childbearing decisions and abilities.

The broligarchy is making it harder for people to have kids

These findings reinforce the fact that the Trump administration’s approach to low birthrates is all wrong. Rather than making life easier for parents and would-be parents and working to alleviate young people’s concerns, Trump’s broligarchy is actively exacerbating them, by withdrawing federal funding from key programs and attacking healthcare, reproductive rights, and environmental protections. Meanwhile, the tax cuts Trump promised on the campaign trail are increasingly looking like they’ll only benefit the richest.

Let’s also not forget that Musk-style panic over a supposed baby shortage is absurd considering our global population is still growing rapidly — the UN Population Division doesn’t project a peak until the 2080s, at over 10 billion. When our survey respondents were shown a selection of statements, the one that received the lowest amount of agreement claimed that falling fertility rates are one of the biggest challenges facing our world.

There is nothing “pro-family” about the Trump administration’s attempts to increase the birthrate. Let’s call it what it is: a movement to create a new “Handmaid’s Tale” reality.