200 years ago, women in the UK had an average of five children. Today, that average is 1.75. If that figure sounds a little odd, it is of course because many, whether through choice or circumstance, don’t have children at all. Many prominent right-wingers would have us believe that this slump in the birth rate heralds a population crash. Elon Musk, who has at least 14 children, has spoken about it in apocalyptic terms, but it’s not what it looks like. The fact is that, thanks largely to vaccination and improved hygiene, more children born today manage to avoid dying in infancy. The rate necessary to sustain a healthy population is 2.2, and worldwide the current rate is 2.7. So why are activists, obsessed with the idea that we should have more babies, increasingly trying to push their agenda?
An ageing population
One of the major arguments raised in favour of increasing the birth rate is that we have an ageing population. There are real concerns in the UK, especially as people live longer and spend a larger proportion of their lives with chronic illness, though there is more we could be doing to reduce the difficulties that creates. There is also, however, a simple solution. Plenty of people like the idea of moving to the UK and are happy with the idea of working as carers. Pressure created by climate change means that moving people around is a much more practical approach than creating more of them – but there is cultural resistance, and therein lies the rub.
Historically, pronatalist movements have been closely tied to eugenics. Those lobbying for these movements don’t just want more babies – they want particular sorts of babies. Movements aimed at controlling reproductive freedom in the US focus heavily on white women, while African American women face appalling standards of maternal care. The Nazis ran intensive propaganda campaigns, urging Aryan woman to have more babies, while killing children they considered undesirable. In Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu used contraception bans, spying, and forced examinations, to force women to have more children, which he thought would make his nation strong, while thousands of disabled children were abandoned in orphanages, so poorly resourced that most of them died.
On the far-right, pronatalism is closely bound up with conspiracy theories about white people being ‘replaced’. Today, in the UK, these often go hand in hand with paranoia about Muslims replacing Christians. Of course, to see this as a bad thing, one needs to believe that white Christians are, somehow, innately superior to other people. More mainstream right-wingers prefer not to be so overtly racist, so instead they present a different set of arguments which focus on defining womanhood – and these fit neatly with the closely related political aim of shoring up the social dominance of men.
The role of women
You don’t need to pay too much attention to news or social media to notice that some very old-fashioned ideas about differences between the sexes have recently begun to reappear in mainstream discourse. At the more alarming end of the spectrum, there’s the active promotion of rape myths and incel culture, but there are also more mainstream assertions whose toxic effect emerges cumulatively: the message that motherhood is a woman’s natural role, that nothing can make her happier, and that women who make different choices are selfish. Subtler versions include the representation of young trans men as tragically throwing away the opportunity for motherhood (never mind that some become fathers), and concern trolling about women focusing on their careers until it’s ‘too late’.
In the UK, we’re still getting the toned down version, though it has increased in intensity over time. In the US, there’s the likes of Vice President, JD Vance, complaining about “a bunch of childless cat ladies”, and senior lawyer, Will Chamberlain, claiming that Kamala Harris having no children made her unfit to be president. Vance has even suggested that men (but not women) with children should have extra votes. This latter comment was welcomed by members of the Quiverfull movement, a group of Evangelical Christians who believe that a man’s success is measured by the number of children he has, and that it is a woman’s duty to give her husband as many as possible. The US reality TV show, 19 Kids and Counting, helped to promote this idea. Until one of its stars – himself a political hopeful – was convicted of child abuse, it was treated as light and quirky. There was no mention of the fact that repeated pregnancies substantially increase the risk of dying in childbirth.
Some overt pronatalists have quite openly discussed their belief that the reason women are not having ‘enough’ children is that they have too many other options in life. Restricting their right to have careers, or to manage their own money, would resolve this ‘problem’, they argue, as would making it harder for them to divorce. Politicians in several US states are now moving to try to end no-fault divorce, and strategic changes to federal laws risk making it harder for tens of millions of women to vote. So while these ideas may seem far-fetched, there’s a real possibility that they could be brought to bear.
In the UK, we generally pride ourselves on taking a more measured approach to politics, but we should not be naive about the risk presented by the pronatalist movement, even if it doesn’t seem likely to go as far. Concerns about the birth rate have been expressed by the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage, while Miriam Cates has suggested that women are spending too much time focusing on education at the expense of reproduction. Given the speed at which right-wing ideas have recently been making their way into mainstream discourse, we should be wary and remember that equal rights can never be taken for granted.
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