A Family-Friendly Pronatalism

Earlier this month, IFS announced a new project: the Pronatalism Initiative. This initiative is based in a simple idea: we believe that falling birth rates are a big social problem. Low fertility threatens to create a society of widespread family disappointment, feed into a culture of despair, make already polarized politics even more divisive, jeopardize America’s international strategic position, slow down economic growth, render intergenerational transfers infeasible, and curtail the pace of innovation and entrepreneurship. Perhaps worst of all, falling fertility is not a product of falling family desires, but of a yawning abyss of dreams-not-realized lingering between actual birth rates and the family sizes people want.

But almost as soon as we announced the Pronatalism Initiative, the American Compass published an article entitled “pronatalism isn’t pro-family.” The title perplexed us at first: here at the Institute for Family Studies, we are definitely pro-family; indeed, our roots are grounded in supporting marriage and parenting, and pronatalism is part of that focus. But of course, the article wasn’t about IFS or the Pronatalism Initiative; it was about Simone and Malcolm Collins, the tech entrepreneur-cum-pronatal-influencer couple. Since the Collins have received hefty donations to their foundation and promoted themselves as leading pronatalist influencers, it is unfortunately necessary to explain what we mean by pronatalism here at IFS and how it differs from the Collins’ view.

What is Pronatalism?

Pronatalism literally means “in favor of births.” Many people dislike the term “pronatal” for various reasons, including negative political associations. That’s fine—we don’t expect everybody to self-identify as a pronatalist, but we do hope that there can be political progress made towards a broadly shared goal of helping people have more children and thereby get closer to their desired family size. A society where more Americans have families closer to what they say they want (about 2.2 or 2.3 children per woman) would, we believe, be a much better society for everybody (including childless people). 

A lot of different viewpoints fall under this extremely broad, simple definition. But these views can be grouped into three different and general categories. 

Freedom-focused Pronatalists. The first is what scholar Trent Mcnamara has called “liberal pronatalism,” or what we call “freedom-focused pronatalism.” Freedom-focused pronatalists (like our Pronatalism Initiative) want more children because it’s important to human flourishing for fertility to be close to desired levels. Big deviations (higher or lower!) from desired fertility represent basic failures of human freedom, agency, and autonomy. Because the defining principle here is human freedom, our approach also constrains the policy options available to us: by necessity, we oppose policies that manipulate birth rates in ways that constrain human freedoms or diminish human dignity.

Economic/Structural Pronatalists. Other people may want more babies for technocratic reasons: higher GDP, more innovation, more conscripts for an army, balancing Social Security. This group can broadly be called economic or structural pronatalists. Truth be told, most people in this category don’t call themselves pronatalists. They’re worried about population structure changes, maybe think fertility should be part of the solution, but wouldn’t identify with the term “pronatal.” This group has a lot of flavors within it: some might be willing to constrain human freedom to improve demographic fundamentals, others might not.

Communitarian Pronatalists. The final group of pronatalists can be called communitarian pronatalists. As I’ll outline below, this is where the Collins’ version of pronatalism clearly lands. Communitarian pronatalists want more babies because it’s important that some group be perpetuated. In the majority of cases, communitarian pronatalism is wholesome and decent: parents who have a baby to give their parents a grandchild, or to carry on the family legacy, are espousing a version of communitarian pronatalism. So are religious people who see in their children a promise of the future for their community. Likewise, Ultra-Orthodox Jews encouraging high fertility partly to repopulate after the Holocaust are a clear example of communitarian pronatalism, and while not everybody might want to have Hasidic family norms, these varieties of pronatalism range from inspiring at best to at the very worse, inoffensive.

There is, however, a seedier side to communitarian pronatalism, when the “community” in question is an imagined community such as a racial or national group rather than an actual human-scale community like a family or congregation. The vast majority of communitarian pronatalists have some actual real-world community they want to see perpetuated, but some use the language of communitarianism to concoct the notion of racial communities. Most famously, the Nazis promoted extremely aggressive pronatal policies for the races they saw as desirable, while exterminating those seen as undesirable. In China today, the communist government actively promotes higher fertility for the Han Chinese majority, even as it forcibly sterilizes religious and ethnic minorities and kidnaps their children. Thus, communitarian pronatalism covers an enormous range of political territory, from simple love of family to the bonds of faith and creed, to—in some of the worst cases—racial supremacism and genocide. It is this last strand of communitarian pronatalism that has given pronatalism, writ large, a bad name to many demographers.

At the Pronatalism Initiative, our main perspective is that of freedom-focused pronatalism. We think the main problem of low birth rates is that people are not enjoying “freedom to have family” to the full, and the solution is to unshackle them from whatever unreasonable obstacles may be holding them back. Of course, we recognize that economic pronatalism is important as well, and that, for most individuals, communitarian pronatalism is personally motivating (the family is, at its core, the most basic and central “community” in society). But when it comes to defining our policy vision and engagement with the public, our focus is on the freedom to have a family, not the beneficent effects of fertility on the economy or any given community.

Declining fertility is not a product of falling family desires, but of a yawning abyss of dreams-not-realized lingering between actual birth rates and the family sizes people want.

Is Pronatalism Pro-family?

Duncan Braid at the American Compass recently argued that pronatalism turns children into a “numbers game.” He was specifically focused on the kind of Silicon Valley-inspired pronatalism espoused by Simone and Malcolm Collins. The Collins’ pronatalism is characterized by several features. First, it is secular. Second, it is tech-positive: their kids make early and heavy use of screens and technology, their children were eugenically selected as embryos, and they anticipate using surrogacy in the future. Third, it is communitarian: the Collins have repeatedly emphasized that their desire is for the diverse communities and peoples of the world to be able to perpetuate themselves and maintain that human diversity; an old version of their website lists “extinction of entire societies” and “genocide through inaction” as key problems of low fertility. At least in their public commentary, neither the question of family freedom nor economic impacts seems to be their main concern. Fertility preferences make little or no appearance in their public commentary. Braid quite correctly diagnosed the Collins’ pronatal vision as being communitarian when he compared their project to the intentional communities of the Amish.

Of course, the Collins’ are not Amish. The fact that the Collins’ vision for pronatalism includes widespread adoption of eugenic embryo selection as well as surrogacy has led some observers to see their vision of pronatalism as racist, and is obviously alienating to many religious people who form the bulk of actual living “lifestyle pronatalists” (i.e. people who want big families). On that note, the Collins also appear to have a significant misunderstanding about who pronatalists are, as they say that the typical pronatalist is “young, nerdy, contrarian, autist,” even though research shows that autism is linked to dramatically lower birth rates.

Braid argued that the Collins’ version of pronatalism was not pro-family essentially because in being communitarian, it walls itself off from the wider world. This may be a bit unfair: the Collins do lobby for some family-relevant policies (though apparently mostly for IVF and surrogacy), and Simone is running for Pennsylvania’s legislature on an overtly pronatal platform. 

But while the brush may have been too broad, there is a grain of truth in Braid’s critique: the Collins are not allies in most pronatal policy efforts. In their Guardian profile, Malcolm gave an extended argument that financial supports for family are not worth it, saying that fertility is almost always lower for richer families, and that financial benefits to families don’t raise fertility rates. As it happens, both these arguments are totally false: fertility doesn’t have a persistent negative correlation with income (and in many contexts has a positive correlation!), and decades of causally-informed social science shows that birth rates do rise when policy gets more generous. What matters is that the Collins are signaling their political position: pronatalism without political transformation. Their view is that society can’t be saved, but that some pronatal communities within society can carve out a space for themselves to survive and carry on civilization in the future. For this plan, child allowances or baby bonuses are not very important.

Thus, in an important sense, Braid’s critique of the couple was correct in many areas, but wrong in one big one: they aren’t just “playing a numbers game.” In fact, they’re writing off most people, in terms of whether they will contribute to the genetic stock of future humans. The Collins’ approach is pronatal, but only for the select communities that find a way to create intense pronatal norms (they simultaneously argue that “having a child is not for everyone” and choosing to be childless “benefits society,” while also promoting a “five-child pledge” in their own community), and, even then, they are not strongly in favor of broad societal reforms that might empower those communities. It’s a vision of pronatalism that renders a major recovery in birth rates inaccessible to most people.

Fundamentally, there is no path to successful pronatalism that doesn’t run through greater public and political commitment to married parenting, and that extends the benefits of married parenthood to more of society.

Our Goal at the Pronatalism Initiative

At the Pronatalism Initiative, our vision is simple: everybody should be able to have the family they want to have. And on that, we have obvious common ground with the pro-family perspective American Compass routinely espouses. Both of us earnestly desire to see more Americans achieving their goals (and Braid’s article even mentioned shortfall vs. preferences as an issue).

An enormous body of credible research suggests that birth rates could be higher and would be higher if a range of policies were adjusted to be more family friendly. Our belief that we can and should enact policy to undergird a pronatal mass culture separates the work we want to do at the Pronatalism Initiative from the Collins’ work. Indeed, our goal is to provide more intensively focused research on family and fertility to support the very kinds of political projects Braid describes as pro-family, rather than pronatal.

If this policy program is successful, increases in birth rates would come from many different communities in various proportions, but in general, most pronatal policies tend to help younger people more. Because most communities within America would benefit, the pronatal policies we espouse won’t have a big impact on the relative sizes of different communities in the long run, except insofar as various communities have different proportions of young people.

Our vision of pronatalism is inseparable from our vision for family life. In general, children thrive best with two married parents biologically related to the child. Of course, we want to make sure children in other circumstances have opportunities and resources to thrive as well and do not face undue discrimination. But fundamentally, there is no path to successful pronatalism that doesn’t run through greater public and political commitment to married parenting, and that extends the benefits of married parenthood to more of society.

Finally, we do have some objection to treating public figures like the Collins as “pronatalists” when they do not appear to be allies in most fights to make society more pronatal. People who lay claim to the name “pronatalist” yet do not actually favor pronatal policies may in some extremely broad sense favor more births, but they are not part of any recognizable political movement. We share many of Braid’s critiques of the Collins’ approach to declining fertility, but there’s no reason to throw the pronatalism baby out with the bathwater, and repurposing “pro-family” to mean pronatal invites unhelpful ambiguity. On that front, “pronatalist” as a designator is meaningful only insofar as it refers to people who do not oppose actual pronatal policies with a demonstrated track record of success (like baby bonuses, or child allowances, for example). People who support policies that yield more babies are pronatalists; people who don’t support such policies are not. In other words, I am left wondering: will Tesla ever release a minivan?

Lyman Stone is a senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He is also the chief information officer of the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence.