A progressive vision for pronatalism

Progressives shouldn't cede pronatalism to the far-right fringe

Pronatalism– the philosophy that societies should promote higher birth rates – became an unexpected lightning rod in the 2024 election, thanks to J.D. Vance’s remarks calling Democrats “childless cat ladies,” proposing that parents should get extra votes, and condemning Kamala Harris for lacking biological children of her own. Vance’s views sound fringey, but similar sentiments have bubbled up on the right for some time. They tap into racist and sexist wellsprings: fears of a “great replacement” of white Americans with other ethnicities, and a desire to clamp down on women’s reproductive freedoms.

It’s easy to call this rhetoric “weird,” but progressives should worry about the falling global birth rate too. Shuttered maternity wards, elementary schools converted into nursing homes, and empty college dormitories remind us that elderly people already outnumber babies and children in many developed countries. The median age in Japan is now 49 years; in Italy, it’s 48. In South Korea, the birth rate has fallen to 0.72 babies per woman, and the country’s population is on track to halve by 2100. The rest of the world is poised to follow.

Falling birthrates threaten future prosperity. We need young people to power our workforce and care for an aging population. We are also deep into a loneliness epidemic. Record numbers of young people express that they do not want children, reflecting a troubling pessimism about the future. In challenging noxious strains of pronatalism, we should not throw the all-important baby out with the bathwater. Here are six guiding principles that progressives can champion to craft a more inclusive, pragmatic pronatalism.

Six principles for a progressive pronatalist movement

Principle 1: Progressive pronatalists value collective care

From our earliest evolutionary past, children have received care not just from biological parents, but from other caregivers – what anthropologists call alloparents. The nuclear family model that pervades modern societies would strike our ancestral forebears as odd and lonely. Alloparents are stepparents, adoptive and foster parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, childless cat ladies, and paid caregivers too. Decades of evidence has pointed to long-term benefits from high-quality childcare. The same conservatives who invoke evolution to essentialize gender roles are oddly unwilling to recognize that group care settings like daycares and preschools are a better approximation of our hunter-gatherer past than the single, isolated stay-at-home parent.

Progressive pronatalists celebrate all caregivers. Instead of attacking Kamala Harris’s lack of biological children, we should applaud her contributions to her stepkids’ lives. And we need to stop paying childcare providers worse than McDonald’s employees. If we want people to embrace parenthood, we need to signal that care matters. The individualist ethic of the United States casts parenting as a costly, competitive enterprise rather than a contribution to the public good. Progressive pronatalists recognize that raising the next generation is a team sport, a collective act that warrants public investment. We can’t get people excited to have babies if we aren’t willing to build a care infrastructure that actually supports young families.

Principle 2: Progressive pronatalists welcome immigrants

The United States boasts a higher birth rate than most of our OECD peers. We can thank immigrants for that. Compared to native-born citizens, immigrants are younger and have more children. Given that a key goal of the pronatalist movement is to infuse the population with working-age young people, pronatalists should love the DREAM Act, created for young adults who came to the United States as children and are poised to contribute to the economy.

Instead, far-right pronatalists want us to believe that all births are not equal. White births are great, whereas black and brown births make us “poorer and dirtier.” But their nativist predecessors thought the same about Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants a century ago. In the early 1900s, Midwestern public schools taught kids in German and Polish. “No Irish Need Apply” signs proliferated in cities. The children of these immigrants went on to contribute tremendous value to our economy. In fact, a startling number of highly-paid Fox News commentators are Irish-American. If we want a stronger, fast-growing economy, shunning and scapegoating young immigrants is the worst possible move we could make. A clearer path to citizenship could boost our workforce and our birth rate.

Principle 3: Progressive pronatalists advocate for reproductive healthcare

On the right, pronatalist and anti-abortion rhetoric go hand in hand. But ironically, states with the strictest anti-abortion laws also have the highest maternal mortality. Childbirth is about twice as deadly in the United States as in other OECD nations. Defunding Planned Parenthood exacerbates the problem. After Texas passed a particularly restrictive abortion ban in 2021, infant mortality spiked by 23%.

Many U.S. women now live in OB-GYN deserts where they struggle to find reproductive healthcare. Providers don’t want to practice in states with punitive anti-abortion policies, and medical residents do not want to train in them.

Abortion care can make future pregnancies possible. Take Kate Cox, the woman who sued Texas to obtain an abortion after her fetus that was diagnosed with a fatal abnormality that might compromise her fertility. “We want to be able to have more babies. We want to give siblings to our kids," Cox told reporters at the time. She ultimately traveled to New Mexico for the abortion, and is now expecting her third child. If we want to encourage young women to have more children, we need to ensure that that they can get high-quality healthcare before, during, and after birth.

Principle 4: Progressive pronatalism is a man’s job too

Far-right pronatalists love to blame women, and their cats, for driving down the birth rate. But increasing numbers of young men also say they do not want children. This disinterest in fatherhood tracks with indicators that young men are withdrawing from stabilizing milestones like marriage and college completion. As the man-expert Richard Reeves has written, the “breadwinner-carer” dynamic, with wages on one side of the equation and domestic labor on the other, no longer describes most marriages. But women’s roles have expanded faster than men’s: even as many women outearn their spouses, few men have stepped up as primary parents. Reeves calls the result a “dad deficit,” with men seeing their contributions as chiefly economic even as women crave more help at home. If we don’t address this deficit, we might start to look like South Korea, whose battle of the sexes has torpedoed birth rates. Paternity leave would help, along with cultural narratives that elevate the transformational importance of fatherhood.

Principle 5: Representation matters

Vance has argued that parents should get more votes to cast on behalf of their children. But ironically, his party benefits from a Senate and Electoral College that overrepresent parts of the country that are older, whiter, more rural, and losing population compared to faster-growing places, like the Sunbelt states. And both parties have suffered from a gerontocracy that has been slow to cede power to younger generations with the most skin in the game when it comes to childrearing. Only 7% of Congress members are mothers of young children. The lack of representation helps explain why many playgrounds remained closed during the pandemic, even as malls, bars, and gyms opened up. Legislators and lobbyists didn’t prioritize little kids, because parents of young children were not at the table when decisions were being made. The creation of a National Association of Parents and Caregivers, a caregivers’ lobby modeled after the powerful AARP, would help foreground issues like family leave and the Child Tax Credit.

Principle 6: Progressive pronalists fight for future generations

Progressive pronatalism is not just about having more children, but ensuring each child can thrive. Progressives should push for an abundance agenda of policies that can be broadly grouped around the banner of promoting the welfare of future generations, including not just family leave, the Child Tax Credit, and affordable childcare but also access to healthcare, sensible gun laws, climate protections, and student loan relief. Biden’s original Build Back Better package included historic investments in childcare. These policies got left on the cutting room floor due to pushback from Republicans (and Joe Manchin). Perhaps the renewed right-wing interest in parenthood can provide an opening to fully invest in care infrastructure.

Policy fixes will not be enough to stanch the falling birth rate. Even countries with much more generous benefits are still struggling with a baby bust. Reversing this trajectory will require a deeper engagement with existential issues, like how we find meaning and purpose in our relationships with others, even in a transactional culture that values self-actualization over self-sacrifice. Boosting birth rates will require a bipartisan effort – one in which we recognize that many paths to parenthood are possible and celebrate the people who do the hard work of caring for the youngest and most vulnerable among us.