‘Progressive Pronatalism’ Is an Oxymoron: How Arguments Buying Into the Low-Fertility Panic Fail Women

It’s ironic that the U.S. federal budget was signed on the cusp of World Population Day, which is meant to raise awareness of population growth and reproductive rights. The budget reflects Trump administration priorities, including its aggressive pronatalism agenda, which attempts to cajole or coerce women into having more babies—catnip for the GOP conservative base. As a result, Trump’s symbolic $1,000 “baby bonus” got to remain in the budget bill, while other social spending like Medicaid and food assistance got cut.

But it’s not just conservatives anymore. Now, many progressives are also panicking over an alleged fertility “crisis,” and some feminists even make the case for spending billions to boost birth rates and promote motherhood. Writers at North American media outlets considered culturally liberal are increasingly joining the pronatalist chorus, which has historically been the province of the anti-choice political right.

We cannot put women’s reproductive choices on the table as currency to be exchanged for government kickbacks.

This surge in “progressive pronatalism” isn’t happening organically or by accident. It’s the confused result of a propaganda campaign by pronatalist groups like the progressive-sounding Population Wellbeing Initiative (PWI) at the University of Texas at Austin. Their founder, Dean Spears, just published a second, foreboding article in The New York Times about the dangers of “depopulation.”

It fails to mention that PWI was founded with a $10 million grant by Elon Musk, or that Spears is an adherent of long-termism and effective altruism, a controversial, elitist philosophy one leading critic described as “eugenics on steroids.”

Whereas right-wing pronatalists blame feminism for declining birth rates and seek to knock women back to a time when their roles were defined as wives and mothers, pronatalists on the left pride themselves on liberal-sounding “solutions” to the supposed low-fertility problem. 

This new agenda points to a longstanding failure on the part of progressives to mount a robust critique of pronatalism. But their growing alignment with the movement is a disturbing new low. Even if contemporary pronatalism and depopulation alarmism are couched in terms designed to sound agreeable to the left, that doesn’t change the fact that they are linked to a host of alarming ideologies: far-right extremism, autocratic regimes, the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, eugenics, racism and sexism.

Progressives and feminists should be trumpeting declining birth rates and aging demographics as positive trends reflecting greater reproductive choice and increased longevity; and not a moment too soon. The global population is still growing, projected to add some 2 billion people this century to reach well over 10 billion. We have already severely overshot planetary capacity to provide the resources humans demand and absorb the environmental damages we wreak. Unless we change our trajectory, humanity and the planet face a dire future.

Given that, are progressives and feminists really willing to treat reproductive autonomy as expendable and bargain it away for government subsidies and services? Can they accept a transactional role for women where they exchange their “reproductive labor” for government largesse, normalizing the notion that this is their duty, that women somehow owe society babies?

Any progressivism or feminism worthy of the name is about expanding rights and choices. If we truly believe in those fundamental pillars, we cannot put women’s reproductive choices on the table as currency to be exchanged for government kickbacks. In a free society, the right to choose whether, when and how many children to have should simply be supported through just and accessible policies—regardless of whether one is single, partnered, a parent or child-free.

Although the left’s flirtation with pronatalism is new, pronatalism itself is as old as the hills, and reverting to it now is deeply reactionary. In my recent interview with Angela Saini, author of The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, she emphasized that patriarchal, pronatalist norms have been passed down throughout history. They became institutionalized as city-states and empires arose about 5,000 years ago. Population growth was needed to strengthen state power and outnumber competing empires, so women were pushed into producing as many children as possible. Given the dangers of childbirth and the challenges of raising children, various social controls were established to manipulate women into having more babies. Motherhood was extolled and enforced while non-motherhood was censored and punished.

While the life path of non-motherhood has also always been part of women’s history (including my own), pronatalism remains deeply entrenched in every society, making it challenging to imagine what authentic and liberated reproductive choice even looks like.

Today’s declining fertility rates in many countries should be celebrated as progress towards such liberation. They are the product of decades of hard-fought policies, not a social ill to be reversed by government fiat.

Reactionary pronatalism threatens to unravel our progress, even as we have a very long way to go. Hundreds of millions of girls and women worldwide are still unable to control basic aspects of their lives. Dangling pronatalist incentives like a “baby bonus” in front of them, encouraging them to pawn their reproductive choice for favors from pronatalist governments, is grossly misguided. If progressives truly want to champion women’s rights and a livable future, they must cease flirting with pronatalism and stop legitimizing alarmism around declining fertility rates. And ultimately, they must recommit to their root values: defending women’s rights, autonomy and empowerment.