Today’s pronatalist movement revives centuries-old efforts to control who can reproduce and whose lives are valued.

Pronatalism is an old idea with roots in eugenics and nationalism, that is now fashionable among far-right influencers and policymakers. They talk of “moral decay” and see low birth rates as a threat to the future of humanity. In the mainstream media, pronatalism looks like father-of-14 Elon Musk blaming those who choose not to procreate for our nation’s low fertility rate and discouraging the use of contraception. This political agenda is shared by influencers like Simone and Malcolm Collins, the venture capitalist poster couple who champion the pronatalist movement, selling family expansion as a civic duty. 

But pronatalism also looks like Adriana Smith—a 30-year-old Black nurse, daughter and mother—who in February was declared brain-dead after suffering a medical emergency while nine weeks pregnant. For months, doctors at Emory University Hospital continued to keep her organs functioning to sustain her fetus. In their interpretations, Smith’s body was no longer hers. Her mother, April Newkirk, says doctors cited Georgia’s LIFE Act, a restrictive abortion law that bans most abortions after fetal cardiac activity can be detected (roughly six weeks into pregnancy), as the reason her daughter could not be allowed to rest in peace.

As Dorothy Roberts wrote in Killing the Black Body, the story of control of Black reproduction begins with the experience of enslaved women whose children belonged to the slave owner from the moment of their conception. Thus, reproductive control became a central aspect of the subjugation of Black women as objects or host bodies subject to social regulation. Adriana Smith’s story is not an outlier. It is a chillingly clear window into the ways pronatalist ideologies that originated with slavery unfold through coercive reproduction, affecting the lives and deaths of Black women in the United States.

What Is Pronatalism, Really?

Pronatalism is not a neutral policy just about encouraging births in response to declining fertility. Its goal is to engineer a future that permits only certain people to bear and raise children—even as others are coerced into or punished for reproduction and parenting. It is a calculated political project to consolidate power by using narrative, reproductive technologies and coercive laws/legislation in ways that are rooted in racism. Adriana Smith’s experience of coerced reproduction is an example of how pronatalism takes away the reproductive decision-making of Black women and birthing people.      

As Black feminists, we are committed to interrogating power through both political and personal lenses. We understand that while reproductive choices are personal choices, they are subject to structural impacts, like the reduction in government funding for social programs that support family-forming. When applying a Black feminist perspective, it becomes clear that pronatalism is a false flag political operation and a misnomer. Pronatalist leaders like Trump and Musk are supposedly concerned with growing families and sustaining life in the United States. In reality, they and their pronatalist team of influencers are establishing laws, policies and narratives that limit the reproductive choices of birthing people, a violation of our human rights. 

The pronatalists in power promote reproductive stratification, encouraging rich, white, able-bodied and cisgender married couples to reproduce while blocking the family-forming efforts of those whom they deem to be unfit to parent. 

Pronatalism promotes the idea that low fertility rates in the United States are the result of women’s poor personal reproductive choices rather than a systemic issue. In reality, concerns about economic and political instability, high living costs–including childcare, housing and healthcare–and reproductive healthcare access, immigration status and safety are barriers to family forming. Pronatalist influencers like Peachy Keenan and Simone Collins project white femininity as the model for parenthood and reinforce patriarchal and sexist gender norms online, underscoring the heteronormativity of pro-natalist beliefs. The recent social media trend of the “tradwife” also exemplifies pronatalist narratives at work, or, rather, at home, where women are relegated.

Pronatalists also place blame on people who decide not to reproduce—like when JD Vance derided women who choose not to parent “childless cat ladies.” Shifting the blame for low birth rates onto women deflects from analyzing the ways that conservative Republicans’ draconian social policies, like gutting Medicaid, along with unequal pay for women in the workplace and the persistently high cost of childcare, impact birthing people’s reproductive decision-making. 

Ultimately, pronatalism is about power. Pronatalist policies determine who gets to parent, who is forced to reproduce, and who is systematically denied the right to make decisions about their own body—especially when that body is Black, female, poor, queer, disabled or undocumented.

Facing 21st-Century Challenges to Reproductive Justice

Silicon Valley pronatalists also promote the use of assisted genetic and reproductive technologies to selectively design their children’s traits. It is primarily wealthy white people, as they are the group with the most financial access to these tools, who are adding preimplantation genetic testing to IVF, using questionable new technologies such as polygenic embryo scoring and promoting the development of dangerous technologies such as reproductive gene editing to select embryos that will suit their desired traits.

Meanwhile, marginalized people are and have been systematically denied the right to reproduce and to parent children. They also face social subjugation through laws that reinforce coerced reproduction and strip away their reproductive choices and bodily autonomy. Poor, queer and disabled people are systematically denied access to reproductive healthcare, and Black women die in pregnancy and childbirth at higher rates than their white counterparts. Black and Brown parents are disproportionately incarcerated, and the current wave of family-separating raids by ICE disrupts immigrant families in violent ways. 

Over 30 years ago, Black feminists sought to address these very issues by co-creating the term reproductive justice (RJ). Unlike neoliberal white feminism, which often narrows reproductive politics to the rhetoric of personal choice and access to abortion clinics, Black feminists insisted on the right to bodily autonomy, the right to have children, not to have children and to parent those children in safe, dignified well-resourced communities.

To update the 20th-century theory of RJ to meet 21st-century challenges, Loretta Ross, co-creator of the RJ framework in 1994, and Jallicia Jolly organized the inaugural Reproductive Justice Futurisms Think Tank Convening at Smith and Amherst Colleges in March 2025. This convening brought together approximately 100 frontline multiracial leaders working at the intersection of RJ, reproductive technology and human rights. We gathered as Black feminists and allies to discuss how to achieve birth equity and reproductive justice as we witness health and justice challenges related to reproductive technologies, as well as new forms of eugenics in the guise of scientific progress, such as CRISPR for reproduction, that seek to engineer a new human race.