Disentangling Pronatalism From Misogyny and Racism

At a recent event sponsored by the University of Colorado Denver, titled “Demographers Respond to Rising Pronatalism,” speakers on the panel maintained that pronatalist policies do not work and lead to human rights abuses. The core of their argument was that people’s reproductive lives should not be targeted by public policy; their position was buttressed by many examples of population policies being guided by misogyny and racism.

The panelists did not simply observe that population policy been endorsed by misogynists and racists along with others, but contended that any time reproductive lives are a matter of public concern, women are abused and eugenics has a platform. They maintained that if a country wants to boost its birthrate to make old-age support easier, women’s bodies are being instrumentalized for state purposes.

IFS senior fellow Lyman Stone asked the panel whether state polices supporting women in achieving their own reproductive goals (like paid parental leave) inevitably instrumentalized women’s bodies for the state. This was a challenging question for the three panelists because Black feminist thought articulates a right to prevent unwanted pregnancies and children, to have wanted pregnancies and children, and to be able to parent children in safe and healthy communities. Lyman was asking a panel claiming to defend women’s rights whether they really wanted to disallow policy that enables women to have the number of children they desire.

The panel accepted the legitimacy of polices like paid parental leave because these policies increase happiness and productivity, but insisted abuses would ensue if any goals to influence the size or structure of the population motivated such policies. In other words, they seemed to believe that if those who want to empower women’s fertility also believe that having more children will be good for the economy, they should be banned from the policy table. They were more than willing to oppose policies facilitating parenthood that also included a birth rate motivation or target.

After carefully listening to this discourse, I concluded that pronatalists need to purposefully distance ourselves from misogynists and racists. If we don’t, our purer motives will go unheard, and healthy policy might be discarded with bathwater polluted by supporters of pronatalist policy with horrid motives. 

First, an advocate for good family policy who fully believes that the benefits experienced by families redound to the economy may find accusations of misogyny and racism irrelevant. It might make as much sense to them as believing every Trump voter agrees with the Proud Boys. Instead of writing off guilt-by-association as unimportant, however, pronatalists should give our unsavory bedfellows nasty labels like “misogynist” and “racist,” to make it harder for opponents to suspect we secretly harbor the same attitudes. As it stands, it is too easy for listeners to believe that they do. Many feminists reject the notion that pro-life advocates actually care about children because pro-lifers are more likely to deny systemic racism and oppose gender equality. If we speak out against racial resentment and condemn sexism, our pronatalist voices will get far more respect than they currently do. 

Second, if pronatalists deny racism, they fuel suspicion. Today, some of the voices who support pronatalism are racist—like a number of noteworthy pronatalist anonymous accounts on X. Those of us who support pronatalist policy because we believe babies are good are more likely to be heard and believed if we call out racism instead of denying its existence. 

Those of us who support pronatalist policy because we believe babies are good are more likely to be heard and believed if we call out racism instead of denying its existence. 

Another thing pronatalists need to do if we want our values to be heard instead of being discarded with tainted bathwater is call out pernicious reasoning among other pronatalists. For example, states have explicitly claimed a right to ban abortion pills, in part, because of their interest in increasing their populations and thus federal representation. From such evidence, it is fair to conclude that women’s bodies are being instrumentalized for state goals. Someone who believes a higher birth rate makes old age support easier would do well to use a nasty label like “misogynistic” to describe such motives. 

In the same vein, we can do a better job of rescuing good programs and policies from their tainted pasts. When the hosts of the podcast Quantitude were extolling the statistical contributions of a known eugenicist, they repeatedly noted that he was a horrible person who nonetheless contributed to science. This repetition guarded against the possibility that what they were calling good would be written off by association with the bad. At the Denver event, a panelist pointed out that marital counseling began out of a desire to get intact white families to have more babies. We should respond by highlighting that despite that history, principles developed within this field are now being used to support couples separated by incarceration. And we should make use of repetition by also pointing out that today, marriage counseling serves diverse families. Caution: if we apply this fourth approach without the other three, we can easily sound like we believe racism is a thing of the past; that’s a good way to appear as though we don’t take racism seriously.

Clearly, I accept the seriousness of the concerns raised by the Denver panel without accepting their conclusion that pronatalist motives should never be part of policy. Panelist Leigh Sendarowicz said, 

there is no universe in which any efforts to modify population size do not also seek to optimize population composition, and there's no universe in which these efforts are not stratified by race, by gender, by coloniality, and by other axes of oppression. 

But her argument was incomplete because she cast policies to change the age composition of the population as being stratified by some axis of oppression without identifying the axis (or telling us how it has operated). “Population composition” often refers to the racial and ethnic mix, but see how easy it is for a goal like a more productive age structure to be lumped together with a goal like a whiter population? Being quiet about racists and misogynists who support pronatalist policies discredits our voices; being alert to how easily we can be misinterpreted and taking steps to prevent that elevates our voices.

Laurie DeRose is a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of America, and Director of Research for the World Family Map Project.

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies.