Liz Bruenig and the white-baby men: The problem with “progressive” pronatalism

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Liz Bruenig is an odd duck. Though ostensibly a leftist, the Atlantic columnist is famous for pushing reactionary views disguised as progressive common sense. She has a remarkable ability to make the worst ideas sound innocuous, writing so blandly and “civilly” that readers may not even be aware of what she is doing. She is famously against abortion. In the past, as Jude Doyle notes in an excellent takedown of all things Liz Bruenig, she has suggested that “gay people might still be acceptable in the eyes of God if they stayed celibate” and “that crisis pregnancy centers — fake abortion clinics that promise “help” with unwanted pregnancy, then terrorize patients into promising they won’t get an abortion — could end poverty.”

One of Bruenig’s biggest ideological hobbyhorses at the moment is pronatalism–basically, as she sees it, the promotion of babies and baby-having–which in her mind should be a cause celebre for progressives as well as (or instead of) for the far-right. In an Atlantic piece earlier this year titled Why the Left Should Embrace Pronatalism, she laments that

progressives now seem inclined to reject the mantle of baby-friendliness; if the right wants it, the thinking goes, it must be bad. But pronatalism is not inherently right-wing. Birth rates really are falling: America’s declined 2 percent from 2022 to 2023 alone, and only six countries are expected to have birth rates above the replacement rate in 2100. The policies associated with pronatalism, moreover, naturally belong to the left, and there is a progressive case for making the country more welcoming to families in hopes of achieving a range of benefits, including a bump in the birth rate.

But the pronatalist movement today is dominated by far-right men (and a handful of women) who are less interested in population decline than they are in supposed race decline. They may talk about raising birth rates generally, but they are actually more interested in increasing the production of the “right kind” of babies–and by “right” they mostly mean “white.” Essentially, they want Western whites to pump up the output of white babies so as to outbreed the darker races.

Indeed, despite all the alarm about fertility rates, the population of the world isn’t actually declining but expanding. While fertility rates in the West, and in much of the rest of the world, have fallen below replacement level, population is still growing quickly in Africa, parts of west and central Asia, and on most Pacific islands. According to the UN, the world population will increase from the current 8.2 billion to more than 10 billion by 2080 before beginning a very gradual decline. But apparently Africa is producing the wrong kind of babies.

If those mainly white people fretting about fertility rates in the west were truly worried about population decline, they would be pushing for increased immigration from more fertile countries. Instead, they are horrified by the prospect of darker people taking their place, basically taking the same view as the Nazis who marched in Charlottesville chanting “you will not replace us.”

The pronatalist movement has always been racist and eugenicist. As Hope Not Hate notes in an investigative report on the pronatalist movement:

In the 1930s, the concern that white people were being outbred by other races was commonplace among fascists and other racists. For example, Action, [UK Nazi] Oswald Mosley’s newspaper, ran an article on “the danger of our rapidly-falling birth rate” and the possible “decline of our race.”

In the US, University of Pittsburgh history professor Laura Lovett tells The Guardian, Theodore Roosevelt blamed “women who are going to college for the first time for that eventual suicide of the … white race. There’s this linkage between women’s educational and aspirational futures and the declining birth rate. … There was this anxiety that white, native-born, middle-class women were having smaller families.”

Moreover, the ostensible celebration of motherhood in the pronatalist movement disguises its pervasive misogyny. In the eyes of many pronatalists, women are mainly valuable as incubators of children, and some want to restrict the freedoms of women to confine them to the home, so that, denied careers and resources of their own, they will be easier to pressure into motherhood. Abortion and contraception bans do the same thing, increasing the number of (unwanted) babies at the cost of women’s control of their own bodies and lives.

Bruenig knows all this. And even if she didn’t (which is pretty much impossible to imagine) she certainly would have learned this during the recent “NatalCon” in Austin, Texas, which she attended, and reported on, for the Atlantic–a gathering of mostly far-right weirdo men obsessed with the fact that people of color are, worldwide, having more babies than whites and that this will somehow result in the end of civilization as we know it. The conference was organized by a member of the “DezNat” movement, a Mormon nationalist group widely characterized as white supremacist; speakers included far-right conspiracy peddler Jack Posobiec and the racist weightlifter known as the Raw Egg Nationalist. Many of the other speakers were avowed eugenicists; one was a writer for the “race-science” obsessed Aporia magazine who, the Guardian notes, recently promoted an article in the magazine that “used the Holocaust to bolster the claim that black people are innately less intelligent than whites.”

But Bruenig reports on the conference as if the bigotry of most of the conference’s speakers (and presumably the majority of the attendees) was more or less incidental.

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.

That may be the dictionary definition of “pronatalism” but it hardly describes the “overarching thesis” of the pronatalist movement in general or of this particular conference.

She does acknowlege, rather gently, that at the conference she was basically surrounded by woman-hating, white-supremacist eugenicists.

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.

“Sometimes.”

She follows this by insisting that at the conference “there were also ordinary and mainly uncontroversial presenters,” though she only mentions two–one of whom, it turns out, is a rabidly anti-abortion researcher who’s written for the far-right Federalist; the other is a fan of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán.

She seems to regard the more extreme pronouncements of the various speakers as little more than trolling.

The more radical attendees proposed a variety of odd and unsettling ideas about falling birth rates and how to boost them, some of which seemed rather deliberately formulated for provocation—such as a suggestion by Charles Cornish-Dale, a puckish English reactionary with a large online following who goes by the name of Raw Egg Nationalist, that war may be a useful driver of population growth … .

How puckish! How delightfully droll!

And there was much consideration of the decline of the West in particular (though birth rates are dropping globally), a tendency closely associated with nationalism and theories of racial superiority.

“Associated with.” The fact is that worries about the “decline of the west” are inherently racist and nationalist, which is why this is a central talking point (and recruiting tool) of the far right. This is like saying that Nazism is “associated with” anti-Semitism.

She follows her vague and equivocal acknowledgement of this racism by quoting a pronatalist think tanker saying that “the racism and misogyny of pro-natalist circles often gets overblown in skeptical media outlets.”

Not really.

At another point in her column, Bruenig celebrates “the energy and dynamism” of the right, declaring that “the Natal Conference alone was teeming with policy ideas and theories of society.”

Of course Bruenig doesn’t bother to discuss any of these allegedly dynamic policy proposals in any detail. She notes that Trump is trying to expand access to In Vitro Fertilization, or at least says he is, and mentions in passing that “other strategies proposed at the conference included deregulating day cares or banning urban-growth limits in order to build huge quantities of single-family housing.”

Deregulating child care? I’m sure that would work out great.

But these aren’t the “policy proposals” that ignite the imagination of most pronatalists, who are much more interested in pushing reactionary and often coercive policies that would drive more women into the home and force them to have more babies through cultural pressure and restrictions on abortion and contraception. Indeed, many of these pronatalists seem more worried about women having rights than they are about women not having what they see as enough children; their pronatalism seems to be based less on worries about the birth rate than it is by their desire to curtail the rights of women.

Here are some of the things being said at the conference that Bruenig doesn’t see fit to mention.

In his speech at the conference, the lovely Jack Posobiec launched into a dirge about declining birth rates in the US, Australia and Europe: “If we don’t reverse the tide … there are … dark clouds on the horizon. Everything that we have worked for and built, the cathedrals would crumble, the Constitution would fade, the West would become a memory, a footnote in someone else’s story.”

Subtle, Jack, subtle.

Also, I think the Constitution is already pretty much moot, though not because of birth rates.

“This is the war for civilization,” he concluded, “and we are going to win it, one life at a time.”

Speakers at the previous NatCon were even more blunt.

Businessman turned far-right influencer Charles Haywood declared that women needed to be expelled from the workplace. He also asserted that “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever.” I should probably note that Haywood aspires to become a “warlord” in “more-or-less open warfare with the federal government” in some sort of Mad Max future world.

Another speaker at the first conference, avowed eugenicist Jonathan Anomaly, seemed far less interested in getting people in genderal to breed than he was with getting the “right” kind of people to pop out children. In a 2018 article, he wrote that we need to disallow those “who lack the adequate skill or foresight” from parenting by requiring parental licenses, which wouldn’t be given to those who “lack the means to provide food, shelter, medical care and education to their children.” It’s probably just a coincidence that this would criminalize parenthood amongst large portions of the country’s people of color.

Outside of the confines of this particular convention, prominent pronatalists have other reactionary and antidemocratic agendas.

Aporia magazine offers these, er, solutions to the baby bust in Western countries.

Roll back the welfare and pension state and lower income taxes. The transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars a year (in the US) from men to women artificially harms men’s relative economic status, which in turn harms marriage prospects.

Roll back the regulatory state. Women tend to be overrepresented both in government jobs like teaching and in jobs created by government regulation like HR, which artificially inflates their wages relative to their market value.

End Affirmative Action for women and ban (or de facto ban, as similar lobbying organizations for men are) the thousands of organizations, scholarships, and programs that exist to promote women’s career success (particularly in the best compensated and highest status jobs) at the expense of men.

Defund education. Women outperforming men in education seems to be a universal feature of the modern world. This high performance is not matched by corresponding real-world success, meaning that girls are relatively better at school than they are at learning or applying that knowledge. There may be ways of eliminating or reversing this pro-female bias in the school system, but I’m not aware of any successful attempts. But that doesn’t mean nothing can be done. … Defunding higher education entirely would reduce education across the board, making it less attractive and important for both men and women.

Pronatalist monetary incentives should be targeted at married husbands, rather than mothers. If it must be done in a sex-neutral way, then do it in the form of income tax breaks, as married men make the most money and pay the most income taxes. Almost all actually existing incentive programs reverse this, thus reducing women’s incentives to marry.

Roll back the Sexual Revolution. This is easier said than done, and can’t be done through legislation alone. It would look like once again stigmatizing extramarital sex, ending no-fault divorce, encouraging young marriage as the default life path, and generally making the married nuclear family the normative unit of society again.

These reactionary pronatalist proposals aren’t just hypothetical. The Trump administration, heavily infected with pronatalism, is basically starting to carry them out. Indeed, it has already perhaps unconsciously adopted much of Aporia magazine’s agenda, with Elon Musk undermining welfare programs and social security, and Trump pushing lower taxes (except for the hidden taxes that result from tariffs) and launching an outright war on higher education.

The Trump administration also seems obsessed with programs that would make (married) parents into privileged citizens. In late January, a Department of Transportation memo declared that the agency would “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” And JD Vance has mused publicly about the possibility of giving those with children more votes than their childless counterparts. (He also infamously ranted about the evils of “childless cat ladies.” Most pronatalists really seem to hate childless women. And cats.)

Meanwhile, Malcolm and Simone Collins, those weird bespectacled hipster nerd pronatalists you see in virtually every article on the subject, have been tapped to help the White House propagandize for more babies; they have provided a draft Executive Order that would give out awards to mothers who have six or more kids. As you may recall, the Nazis famously gave out similar awards to mothers with four or more kids, the The Cross of Honour of the German Mother, known as the Mutterkreuz.

Meanwhile, the Guardian points out,

elected Republicans have tended to invoke pronatalist rhetoric in support of their top culture-war causes.

They have repeatedly condemned gender-affirming healthcare for allegedly “sterilizing” people; in 2022, as Idaho weighed whether to ban kids from accessing the care, one Republican state legislator said: “We are not talking about the life of the child, but we are talking about the potential to give life to another generation.” When a Republican lawmaker from Michigan introduced a resolution to condemn same-sex marriage, he told reporters: “This is a biological necessity to preserve and grow our human race.” And last year, in a lawsuit to cut access to a common abortion pill, the Republican attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri argued that access to the pill had “lowered birth rates for teen mothers”, leading to a falling state populations, “diminishment of political representation and loss of federal funds”.

Today, of course, it is Trump and Musk who are the biggest threats to federal funds.

Meanwhile, JD Vance plainly admits, as he did in a speech in January, that he opposes abortion because he wants “more babies in the United States of America.”

Then there’s Musk, who won’t shut up about the alleged danger of population decline. “If the alarming collapse in birth rate continues civilization will indeed die with a whimper in adult diapers,” he Tweeted (X-ed?) in 2022. He has made many similar pronouncements on X and in interviews and presumably pushes pronatalism relentlessly in his discussions with Trump. Musk of course is trying hard to make sure that one kind of baby is produced en masse: that is, the kind that bears his DNA. He’s had 14 children so far (that we know of) by several different mothers, including a trans daughter who hates him and who he has basically disowned. Musk is clearly far more interested in producing children than he is in caring for them.

Similarly Trump, who enthused endlessly about “beautiful babies” on the campaign trail and now calls himself the “fertility president,” is much more interested in cajoling or forcing women to give birth than he is with making sure their new children have decent lives. Indeed, his policies and policy proposals are pretty much designed to make the lives of children–or at least the children of all but the rich–much worse. In a chilling ProPublica piece, Eli Hager notes that under Trump,

The staff of a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. The federal office that oversees the enforcement of child support payments has been hollowed out. Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en masse, some as soon as May 1. And funding for investigating child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children; responding to reports of missing children; and preventing youth violence has been withdrawn indefinitely.

The administration has laid off thousands of workers from coast to coast who had supervised education, child care, child support and child protective services systems, and it has blocked or delayed billions of dollars in funding for things like school meals and school safety.

Hager goes on in detail to describe just what Trump is doing, or what he wants to do, to programs ranging from Head Start to Medicaid (a major source of support for poor children). It’s not clear how anyone can take seriously the administration’s constant claims to care for children.

Vance, for his part, has one policy proposal that isn’t totally regressive: a $5000 “baby bonus” for each new kid a family has. But given that it will cost middle-class American parents an average of $310,605 to raise a child born in 2015 through the age of 17, according to the Brookings Institution, I’m not sure such a bonus would help to raise the birth rate very much.

Nonetheless, Bruenig sees this as a step in the right direction. Her plan to raise the fertility rate is much friendlier than that of her far-right comrades in the pronatalist movement, and basically consists of giving parents money. Though she insists that “the right has lately begun to rethink its typical approach to welfare programs,” this is obviously untrue; Trump and Musk, as I noted above, are slashing everything in the budget they can slash (basically illegally) and the effects of these cuts will cost families a lot more than $5000.

But Bruenig dreams on, setting forth her fantasies of what she sees as truly progressive pronatalism:

Policies aimed at closing the fertility gap include making birth free, sending new parents “baby boxes” with all of the essentials for welcoming a newborn, offering free child care and pre-K, covering all of children’s health-care expenses, and paying families a monthly cash allowance to offset other kid-related costs, all of which could have the pronatal effect of closing the fertility gap.

She adds: “These kinds of proposals are typically made by the left.”

Huh. I thought the left was a bunch of baby hating antinatalists. Turns out they support policies to make life easier for parents and children. Turns out that I have long supported such policies–along with generous family leave policies and more money for public education–despite not having any kids myself.

The difference is that liberals and leftists don’t support these policies as a way to bump up the population, but rather as a way to make life better for parents and children alike. Which is just as well, because research shows that these sorts of policies don’t actually do much to increase the birth rate. Viktor Orban launched a massive and expensive program to raise the birth rates in Hungary in 2010, and expanded it in 2019, using a variety of incentives for parents including interest-free loans, subsidies on homes and cars, and tax breaks. The programs did boost birth rates for a time, but they have since come back down considerably, and seem destined to go lower than the low rates that prevailed before the programs were launched.

Not to mention that these sorts of policies are absolutely anathema to most pronatalists in the US, who typically hate spending money on ordinary citizens, especially poor ones, at least as much as they hate the idea of being outbred by Africans. Far better to increase birth rates by curtailing the rights of women.

Despite the fact that liberal and leftists widely support the sorts of family friendly policies that Bruenig does, albeit for different reasons than her, she still sniffs that “liberals seem almost uniformly unwilling to address the subject of population decline whatsoever.”

Maybe that’s because, you know, the population isn’t declining?

The weird thing is that Bruenig herself seems to be wearying, at least a little, of this whole topic. Perhaps being surrounded for days by regressive, racist, woman-hating pronatalist dudes got to her a little. Or perhaps it was that stomach-churning Wall Street Journal piece about Musk and his attempts to manage his “legion” of children. Bruenig wrote about the article, and Musk, in an Atlantic piece that was (atypical for her) dripping with scorn, calling the mothers of his children a “harem” and noting that “fatherhood, for Musk, ends with conception, except for lingering payouts.” Her harshest critique of Musk is that

he appears to acknowledge few, if any, bonds of genuine duty and responsibility among family members, much less bonds of care or love. Musk seems to have reduced traditional family relationships to mere financial arrangements, undermining longtime conservative agreement around the importance of family.

At no point in the piece does Bruenig set forth her own argument for pronatalism, or even acknowledge that she has one; if you didn’t know it was written by Bruenig, you might take it as a critique of the movement–or at least of its “techno-libertarian” wing. Of course, reading more closely, one notices that she offers no critique of the family obsessed “trad” wing of the movement–at least the trads pay attention to their kids! I doubt she has given up on the pronatalist project; I suspect she’s mainly just disgusted by Musk and his “techno-libertarian” ilk. She’ll probably return to cajoling leftists and liberals to embrace pronatalism as soon as she gets the taste of the WSJ article out of her mouth.

As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think the left should be pronatalist or antinatalist. Leftists should be (and mostly already are) pro-letting people be free to decide whether or not to be parents, for whatever reasons they want. As I mentioned, leftists aren’t opposed to helping out parents, with things like better parental leave policies and child care as opposed to giving them more votes, because this improves the lives of parents and kids alike; they also support abortion because sometimes those with uteruses don’t want to use them to make children and they shouldn’t be forced to. A fairly straightforward principle. The whole point is choice, for women and men.

Bruenig, who doesn’t believe in this sort of bodily autonomy, should stop trying to guilt-trip liberals and leftists into joining up with a movement that she knows is reactionary and hateful at its core. Politics makes strange bedfellows, to be sure, but some are far too strange to sleep with.

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