Republican vice presidential candidate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) speaks during a fundraising event at Discovery World on July 17 in Milwaukee.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
The United States is currently enjoying full employment, energy independence, crime rates dropping to record lows, and the longest period this century without its soldiers at war abroad. So of course its leading presidential candidate and his party cannot stop talking about impending civilizational collapse.
This week, in his attempt to find something, anything, that could be described as a looming U.S. catastrophe, Donald Trump tapped into a concept that had previously been the hobby horse of a few Silicon Valley billionaires and ultra-traditionalist religious types: that we’re doomed if women don’t start having more babies.
The pro-natalist movement promotes the belief that smaller family sizes and non-growing populations – usually considered indicators of prosperity, education and equality – are in fact a crisis of imminent ruinous decline. And J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator and Wall Street financier who was named Mr. Trump’s vice-presidential candidate on Monday, is one of its most outspoken proponents.
In a speech in 2021, Mr. Vance described low birth rates as “a civilizational crisis,” denounced prominent Democrats such as Vice-President Kamala Harris as “the childless left,” and proposed that the problem could be solved if parents were given an extra vote for each child they have.
Mr. Vance is very enthusiastically backed, and reportedly funded, by a circle of tech billionaires led by electric-car magnate Elon Musk, and Mr. Vance’s radical pro-natalism is a big reason for their support.
Mr. Musk has probably taken the pro-natalist cause further than any individual in the movement: This spring, according to headlines, he fathered his 12th known child. He unabashedly claims that these kids – generally delivered by in-vitro fertilization or surrogacy, sometimes by executives at companies he owns – are his personal answer to what he views as an existential threat.
“Look at the numbers,” he declared in 2021. “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble.” The next year, he offered: “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Or, just this April: “If birth rates continue to plummet, human civilization will end.”
Curiously, the pro-natalists, including both Mr. Vance and Mr. Musk, are ardently opposed to bringing new Americans into the world the other traditional way: by welcoming the huddled masses of other countries onto America’s shores. Both men, despite Mr. Vance being married to a child of immigrants and Mr. Musk being an immigrant himself, have described current immigration as an “invasion.” Both have been accused of using such language to promote the racist-right “great replacement theory.” Mr. Vance is actually promising to deport 20 million people.
In reality, there is nothing to suggest that smaller family sizes or non-growing populations are a threat – quite the opposite, in fact. Birth rates generally fall because citizens have become more free (Poland, Italy and Spain during the 20th century, for example), more urban and prosperous (China and Turkey), or more educated and equal (Canada and the United States).
Countries that have suffered years of population decline, such as Japan, have maintained very successful economies and influential societies, albeit with higher taxes. Countries with rapid population growth, such as Afghanistan and Nigeria, notably haven’t. North Americans don’t face “population collapse” – even worst-case analyses don’t see any population decline until the second half of this century. The only things known for sure to cause big fertility increases are major wars and economic disasters. The world has a good number of people (if distributed poorly) and we should all wish for the things that cause fertility to decline.
A falling population does present economic challenges: It’s harder to maintain economic growth – and the world will need growth in the coming decades to switch to a non-carbon economy. And a handful of countries, such as Canada and Australia, need population growth to recover from historically low population density.
There are good reasons to make it easier for your country’s citizens to have children. Young couples, facing high housing and living costs and uncertain employment, tend to encounter a “fertility gap” – the difference between the number of children you plan to have and the number you end up having.
Even more curious, then, is that Mr. Vance and his comrades appear actively opposed to most of the measures that have been shown to close fertility gaps – notably de-zoning to allow housing growth, and the provision of subsidized child care. Universal daycare, Mr. Vance has said, “is a class war against normal people.” And “normal people,” he made clear, are mothers who don’t want to work.
The pro-natalists, then, are not actually interested in preventing their imagined “civilizational collapse” by maintaining population growth or in helping people have more babies – except in the very narrow case of people who are exactly like them.