September 2025
In a strange alliance, right wing traditionalists, tech professionals, and an abominable billionaire are pushing a pronatalist agenda on Americans, while cutting the very programs that help parents and children. They warn of an impending population collapse followed by human extinction, and insist that it’s women’s duty to avert this false crisis.
Their declarations are unfounded, and they completely ignore the actual population collapse that’s happening right now: the sixth mass extinction of species.
Cover image: A black crested gibbon at the Wuliang Mountain National Nature Reserve in China’s Yunnan Province. Black crested gibbons are critically endangered, numbering 1,500 in the wild, according to the IUCN Red List. The population is decreasing, primarily due to hunting and habitat loss. This photo is from 2013, as more recent photos could not be found, underscoring how elusive these lesser apes have become. Black crested gibbons are the world’s rarest primate species. Tang Yun/Xinhua/Alamy Live News
There already is a mass extinction event occurring today — driven in no small part by human-induced climate change and other human pressures — in which many species are facing catastrophic declines, and it would be far less likely to be happening with a lower human population. Samuel Miller McDonald
There is no reason to be concerned about people having smaller families in the US, but that doesn’t stop this administration from making peculiar pronatalist policy proposals. See a sampling in the infographic below, designed by Mali Welch.
Custom cartoon by Joel Pett
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