The Pro-Baby Coalition of the Far Right

Children were everywhere at the second annual Natal Conference in Austin, Texas, last month, where people devoted to the cause of population growth gathered to swap ideas. A toddler girl twirled on her toes and took a tumble to the floor beneath the grand rotunda of the Bullock Texas State History Museum; nearby, a gaggle of grade-school children encircled a table to play cards. Knee-high siblings wove through clusters of adult conversation made effortless by an open bar. Parents were not monitoring their kids especially closely. Workers had brought in plastic tubs of Hot Wheels cars and puzzle-piece play mats earlier to facilitate the seldom-seen phenomenon of children entertaining themselves. It mostly worked: Having more children around is somehow usually easier than having a few. Such was the wisdom of the conference, an odd get-together of far-right online personalities, traditionalist Christians, and envoys from Silicon Valley.

The overarching thesis of the conference—that having children is good and ought to be supported by society—struck me as pretty unobjectionable; if you believe the human race should have a future, you’re pronatalist with respect to somebody. And the pronatalists’ more immediate concerns about aging populations seem similarly well founded: As birth rates continue to drop globally, the relatively smaller number of young people will struggle to care for the elderly, a worrying prospect regardless of one’s political orientation. What was disturbing, therefore, was the degree to which discourse around these fairly innocuous propositions is now dominated by an emerging coalition of the rather far right, whose pronatalist ideas are sometimes intermixed with white supremacy, misogyny, and eugenics.

Continues...