TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. Have more babies, or civilization dies. That's the rallying cry behind a once fringe ideology that has made its way into the mainstream. Pronatalism has been in the news lately, with Trump policies underway to increase birth rates by giving away a $5,000 baby bonus for parents and a national medal of motherhood for moms who have six or more children. Pronatalists warn of an apocalyptic future - that if birth rates in the U.S. keep falling, we might be headed towards economic collapse, even extinction. They're pushing ideas like genetic engineering, limiting access to contraceptives, and the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, which believes that there is a plot to replace white populations with nonwhite immigrants.
One of the more well-known faces of the movement is Elon Musk, who reportedly has at least 14 biological children with several different women and has called the world's population decline the greatest threat to humanity. But critics argue that this movement isn't solely about increasing birth rates. It's about who gets to reproduce, under what terms and at what cost? They argue that this movement ignores the skyrocketing price of child care in our country, our broken parental leave systems and a woman's autonomy over her own body.
Well, today, we're joined by two people whose work explores this movement and the motivations behind it. Dr. Karen Guzzo is a sociologist and fertility expert serving as the director of the Carolina Population Center and a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And Lisa Hagen is a reporter for NPR who has been covering the pronatal movement and attended last month's second annual Natal Con conference in Austin. Lisa Hagen and Karen Guzzo, welcome to FRESH AIR.
KAREN GUZZO: Thanks for having me.
LISA HAGEN, BYLINE: Happy to be here.
MOSLEY: Well, I want to start with you, Lisa, and I want you to take us inside of this conference that you attended in Austin. First off, kind of set the scene for us. How big was it, and how would you describe this overarching message you heard this year?
HAGEN: Well, there were about 200 attendees. This was the second-ever Natal Con. The first one was held two years ago, and it was half the size. Still a pretty small conference. And I think what's interesting about it is that there were a lot of different kinds of messages. The tone had also shifted quite a bit from the first iteration of the conference. So you heard everything from people saying, you know, we should have a Child Tax Credit increase to, you know, our enemies are the enemies of humanity and that sort of language.
MOSLEY: I'm just curious. What was the breakdown of men versus women at Natal Con?
HAGEN: Oh, 95% men, absolutely. And...
MOSLEY: Ninety-five percent men.
HAGEN: ...Like, let's all hope - yes. So another interesting thing to note there, right, is, like, some - there were supposed to be some women speakers. They have lots of kids. So some of them - their kids got sick - or child care, like, whatever, right? Things fall through. I think there are some natural ways in which it ends up being a lot of dudes who are talking about this. The other thing is, this was a very, very white crowd. And I say that as someone who's been in a lot of sort of right-wing spaces. They're not always this white. There weren't no people of color there, but it's just important to sort of say that about who was gathered there.
MOSLEY: What kinds of policies or incentives were seriously being discussed at Natal Con now that there is a real understanding and almost a wind in this movement's sails by the Trump administration's priorities with pronatalism?
HAGEN: You know, Natal Con is a bit of a, I would say, pie-in-the-sky kind of gathering. It's very open to a lot of ideas that would take a lot of political change to actually bring into being, like parental voting, for instance, you know, having parents vote on behalf of their minor children. That was suggested. I don't know. I think that would be very hard to bring about. You know, you hear things about, like, the Child Tax Credit or getting rid of no-fault divorce. But what I would say, I think, is the throughline always is that there's something off about culture and that culture specifically needs to change and that mainstream culture has devalued motherhood, those kinds of arguments. So that's sort of one of the bigger things that you'll hear a lot - about how culture needs to change.
I mean, you also will hear sort of traditionalist religious arguments like, people need to stop having abortions, or, you know, pornography should be banned, or we need to rein in technology so that young people looking less at their phones and more focused on having babies. I mean, I think it's a lot of more generalized stuff about culture needing to change.
MOSLEY: OK. We're going to delve into some of those more granular details in the moment. But before we get to that, I want to go to you, Dr. Guzzo, to talk about the legitimacy of the problem that they're trying to solve. You're a demographer who studies when and why people have children. Remind us of some of the reasons, particularly here in our country, that we are actually seeing a decline in birth rates.
GUZZO: Sure. So one of the things I think is really interesting about this movement is that there's not been a huge increase in the share of people who say they don't want to have children. Instead, what's really happening is people are still generally saying they want to have kids and they want to have two, maybe three, but they're saying, not now. They are taking parenthood and decisions to have kids really seriously. And s, they look right now at the future, at their own lives, at the world around them, and they're like, now is not a good time. So maybe later. And they keep making that decision to push it off and push it off because now's not a good time for them. And then that's how you end up with lower birth rates, because some people will find that it is never a good time.
MOSLEY: Yeah. I was reading how now more women over 40 are having children up against the steep decline in teen pregnancies. But there's also an economic part to this - right, Dr. Guzzo? - like, about 20 years ago, especially with the economic collapse around 2008, 2009, that we started to see a decline in having babies. And that was very much tied to the way of life, people's ability to care for children.
GUZZO: Yes. So one of the things I think gets lost that you brought up is that we have this remarkable decline in teen births and births to women in their early 20s. And that is a good new story in the sense that these are generally births to people who are saying, now's not a great time, so they're usually unintended or unplanned pregnancies. And we have spent years, decades and millions - and hundreds of millions of dollars shaming young women - not young parents, but really young women - about having births when they're not ready, when they're too young, when they're not in a stable relationship and when they're too poor, when they don't have a secure income.
And so we told people, you have to wait until you have all these things. You have to finish school. You have to have a good job. You have to be able to afford to live in a safe neighborhood. You have to be able to pay all your expenses, and you should have a good partner who can also do these things. So we've told people to wait, and now we're surprised that they're waiting until they have those things. And so it's sort of frustrating because we have not built a society where people can sort of readily have those things, and it's really picked up since the Great Recession and then exacerbated again by the pandemic. People are looking around, and they're like, yeah, I can't pay all my bills. How can I possibly have a kid? Not that I don't want to. It's just how can I do that?
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guests are NPR reporter Lisa Hagen and demographer, sociologist and fertility expert Dr. Karen Guzzo. We're talking about the resurgence of the pronatalist movement. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHARLIE HUNTER AND THERYL DE CLOUET SONG, "MIGHTY MIGHTY")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, we're talking to NPR reporter Lisa Hagen and demographer and sociologist Dr. Karen Guzzo about the growing global concern over declining birth rates. We're also digging into the resurgence of pronatalism, the movement encouraging people to have more children, and unpacking how fears rooted in the debunked Great Replacement theory are influencing that conversation.
Lisa, in your reporting, you featured a popular couple that has kind of been like rock stars in this movement - the Collins. They describe themselves as techno-puritans. Who are they, and how many children do they have? And kind of what's their overarching messaging?
HAGEN: The first time I heard of the Collinses - and I think this was a moment that maybe anyone who's heard of them possibly saw - is there was an article that sort of named them the elite couple breeding to save mankind, which is a great headline. And, you know, they have a very specific visual appearance. Simone Collins wears very chunky, memorable glasses. She dresses in a specific way.
MOSLEY: She dresses like a puritan. She dresses, like, from another era, another time.
HAGEN: Sort of, but, like, from Etsy, as she, you know, will tell you. They are very open about having designed their look and their appeal to draw attention. They have four children now. They have another one on the way. They plan to have as many as possible, and Simone has said that she is willing to die in childbirth to have as many kids as possible and sort of, you know, advance this movement.
GUZZO: Well, I think what's interesting about them is that they have evolved in how they appear in the media. They are now a very specific brand, and they are cultivating that brand. And one of the things they talk about in their brand is their view of, you know, everything is data driven. Everything they're doing is very calculated and designed to be really efficient. And that's how they figure out what kids and how to have kids and spacing and all sorts of things and parenting, except there was a profile of them a few years ago where Malcolm sort of swatted his child in front of the reporter, and the reporter was sort of aghast at it. And he said that his wife saw it on, like, a nature documentary - that this is what, you know, a lioness was doing to her cubs, and they thought that was good.
HAGEN: Tigers. It was tigers.
GUZZO: Yes. There you go. So I'm thinking to myself, wow, data driven. I'm like, well, as a family sociologist and demographer, I can tell you there's a whole lot of research on corporal punishment and child outcomes and well-being. So that data was, I think, inconvenient. So they're data driven when it's convenient and not data driven when it doesn't fit their brand.
HAGEN: You know, my understanding with the Collinses is that everything they do is sort of calculated to have some public impact and seem pretty interesting to people. The bit that I...
MOSLEY: Yeah, they've optimized their image to kind of go viral online - right? - to gain attention.
HAGEN: That's exactly right. They have a YouTube show and podcast called "Based Camp." They - you know, to a lot of mainstream media, they sort of try to present themselves as maybe not on the left or liberal, necessarily, but not classically conservative. And they talk a lot about wanting, you know, to preserve cultures that are open to LGBTQ folks and racial diversity and that sort of thing.
On their podcast, they sound a lot like a lot of right-wing influencer types. They talk about something called the urban monoculture, which Malcolm Collins has defined as, you know, being woke or just liberal culture in general. And he basically says that that's like cultural genocide. It only survives by creating popular culture and parasitizing children from other more healthy cultural groups. And what the Collinses are talking about with urban monoculture is, you know, you may want to raise your children and your family in a certain way, but modern mainstream society is going to try to pull them away from you in ways that you hate. And that's what they mean by sort of parasitizing - like, stealing children, essentially.
MOSLEY: It's really interesting where they sit politically. You mentioned that they don't necessarily consider themselves liberal, but they don't consider themselves on the far right. And they also have told you that they are pushing back against some of those racist ideologies that historically have been a part of the pronatalist movement. You all talked a little bit about how white nationalists are drawn to their podcast, and you actually talked to Malcolm Collins about this at the Freedom Economy conference. Let's listen to what he had to say to you about racists and white nationalists who are drawn to the pronatalist movement and how he's interacted with them.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MALCOLM COLLINS: To me, it's really exciting. Like, people are like, would you rather just keep this person out of your conference, or would you rather have them come to your conference and then change how they see the world? Every single time, I'd rather them come and change how they see the world.
HAGEN: What makes you think - what makes you believe that people have changed the way they think?
COLLINS: Well, they're at least changing what they're saying publicly using their platforms, and that matters to me. Maybe they haven't changed what they think inside. Maybe they just think now, oh, on the right, it's no longer cool to say these things. That's fine with me, as well.
MOSLEY: That was Malcolm Collins, a leader in the pronatalist movement, talking last year to one of my guests, Lisa Hagen. And Lisa, I want to point out that, I mean, of course, not all pronatalist arguments are inherently racist, but there is a clear and well-documented overlap between the rhetoric that they use and racist, xenophobic and nationalist ideologies. How much of that did you encounter during your reporting at this conference or more generally as you kind of, like, sleuth online and look at these worlds?
HAGEN: It certainly depends on the community that you're looking at. And as you say, there is no way to say that all pronatalists are racists or interested in those kinds of politics at all. However, you know, it is a big conversation on the far, far right. Discussions and fears about birth rates show up in the manifestos of mass shooters who are talking very explicitly about being replaced - white people being replaced by other races.
On the other hand, you know, at an event like Natal Con, where there are lots of mainstream journalists, you'll hear a different kind of language. Most people are a lot more careful about that sort of thing. But you also hear from folks like right-wing political operative Jack Posobiec talking about, you know, the enemies of humanity, and how we need to save Australia and Europe and America specifically. And so it's always kind of couched, but the language of sort of fear around immigration trends is present, a lot of the times.
MOSLEY: Dr. Guzzo, I know that you've also been following the different factions of this movement, and you've talked about some of the more religious factions against IVF and abortion. I'm thinking about some of the groups that might make up kind of the religious faction of the pronatalist movement.
GUZZO: I really think it's a term we bandy around a lot in the United States, which is Christian nationalism. So it's evangelical Christians who have a very specific view of what family looks like, and that it's not just religion, but it's specifically sort of Christian evangelist. And they are worried about the sanctity of life, so they're going after IVF. But they're also even going after certain types of contraception, thinking that they cause abortion. They would like to get those outlawed. They would like to, again, move against different types of mifepristone coverage or access to mifepristone, which is one of the medication abortion pills. They're really going after family planning writ large because they are worried about what it means when women can control their own reproduction.
HAGEN: Catholics are also a big part of this movement. You know, you have JD Vance. You have other Catholic speakers who were at Natal Con. So certainly, the religious interest is broad.
MOSLEY: What do the Collins think about IVF? Did Simone Collins actually have her children through IVF?
HAGEN: Yeah. They say that they've used a lot of procedures in their births. They're very pro. They are interested in leveraging any and all technology that exists, sort of without limitations, really.
MOSLEY: I think what's so interesting about what you all are sharing is that there is, like, no one main pathway to building a greater population. Like, there are several different segments of this movement that have varying different ideas on how to do that. Dr. Guzzo, can you talk a little bit about the three segments of the pronatalist movement?
GUZZO: Sure. So we've talked about the Collins. And they sort of fit into this tech world where sort of, you know, they want to use the best technology available to have the best and brightest children and make sure their children, you know, have the best possible chances in life and sort of maximize their own fertility. And then you have sort of the more religious groups who would not want to use technology, who would be against IVF because life begins at conception, and so destroying embryos is destroying human life. And they're really concerned about getting people married earlier and having them have births within marriage. Yeah. And so they are not interested in raising, necessarily, teen birth rates unless they are marital teen birth rates. So they're really focused on the two-parent family, and really, it needs to be married, too, and preferably Christian.
And then you have sort of the more racist groups who are very concerned that somehow true Americans - and I say that with sort of quote marks, you know - true Americans are going to be outbred by immigrants. And so this is a long-standing idea. So we've, of course, heard about it in the great replacement theory, but this goes back 25 years. You know, Pat Buchanan wrote a book, "The Death Of The West," in 2001 about sort of the danger of immigrant populations coming out and - coming to the United States and having more children than native-born, true, real Americans, and that this was going to ruin our society. So this is not a new idea.
I would say they all have overlap, so you would think - the Collins have been pretty clear that they don't necessarily care about race or ethnicity. Having said that, when you talk about having the best and brightest and using technology, you are really darn close to eugenics. We have done this in the United States before, where we have sterilized poor women. We have sterilized women who were considered feeble or unfit. There's tons of really rich but sad research on Mississippi appendectomies - you know, about women of color getting sterilized against their will.
And so that - those - these are some of the same ideas about who should and who shouldn't have kids. So you want to have the best and brightest kids. Does that mean that people who are having kids the old-fashioned way are somehow second-class citizens? Is that what we're moving towards? It's very science fiction-y, but it makes, you know, many of us who are in demography and know our history very uncomfortable.
MOSLEY: Our guests today are NPR reporter Lisa Hagen and sociologist Dr. Karen Guzzo. We'll continue our conversation about the resurgence of the pronatalist movement after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF BLACKOUT & STEFON HARRIS' "UNTIL")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, we're talking with NPR reporter Lisa Hagen and sociologist and demographer Dr. Karen Guzzo about the resurgence of pronatalism, which is a growing movement encouraging people to have more children. We're exploring how concerns over declining birth rates, once seen through the lens of Cold War era fears over population and communism, have shifted today into calls for national renewal, economic security and even cultural preservation. As the conversation around fertility changes, so do the policies and political forces shaping it. When we look at actual demographic data, how significant is immigration in offsetting the birth decline in the U.S., compared to boosting?
GUZZO: Immigration has been really important for the United States, and it has for a long time. And so it has actually kept our population growing. So our total fertility right now, which is kind of a hypothetical estimate of how many births women will have over the course of their lifetime, is below what we consider replacement. So the replacement level is 2.1, and births are around 1.6 right now. But we're not facing population decline right now because we have high rates of immigration. Now, in certain areas, mostly in sort of rural areas, we are seeing populations decline because young people aren't having kids, in part because a lot of young people have left rural areas.
But immigration, by and large, has really propped up the United States, not necessarily directly through births, but really through just bringing working-age people to the United States. And that is something that if we are able to accommodate, will continue to be a boon to the United States population. They are really important for the labor market. They actually do pay taxes often, even if they don't collect Social Security later. So they're really important. And countries like Japan, which has basically closed immigration, they're facing declining population in part because not only do they have low birth rates, but they're not allowing immigrants in either.
MOSLEY: You know, I know historically most people know and understand that, particularly when it comes to Black people, descendants of enslaved Americans, we've kind of been absent from this more modern-day conversation. We know the history where eugenicists used this pseudoscientific language should justify racial segregation, for instance. But you've talked about, Dr. Guzzo, more recent efforts underway, like limiting welfare and the whole idea of the welfare mom. Can you talk about that a little bit as it relates to this idea about who should be a part of this pronatalist movement and who's actually not?
GUZZO: There are very few people of color in the pronatalist movement. There's a separate movement by Black feminist scholars and activists called reproductive justice, which is about, you know, basically giving people the right to have children, the right not to have children, the right to have bodily autonomy as to when and under what circumstances, and the right to have children and raise them in a safe environment. And so we've often demonized poor women, women of color, for having children under the wrong circumstances. And yet, these are people who have made vibrant communities, and that's all they're asking for. But instead, we've sort of policed them. So, you know, there's a lot of research on the violence towards families that is part of the foster care system, that we punish women for being poor and disrupt families.
And so we talk about being pro-family in the United States, but we are so anti-family to so many people and to so many groups. And that's - I think what's missing from the pronatalist movement is actually attention to being pro-family. We have one of the weakest social safety nets of any industrialized country. And right now, we're looking at chopping major parts of it, which sort of baffles me. If we really wanted to be pro-family, we would not be cutting programs like Head Start. We would not be facing huge cuts to SNAP funding, you know, the food stamp program. And so, you know, to me, I hear these things, and I'm like, $5,000 bonuses, and yet you're going to cut Head Start, and you've got to raise prices on everything through tariffs? I'm like, that doesn't make sense to me.
MOSLEY: Oh, well, that's a question I have for you, Dr. Guzzo. Like, do incentives work? I mean, $5,000 in this economy to have a baby?
GUZZO: They don't work (laughter). I mean, there's so much research on this that really shows that countries have tried this. And so they have this little tiny bump. They might change the timing. You might decide to go ahead and have that first kid, or you might decide to have your second kid a little bit sooner. But by and large, they do not have any appreciable impact on birth rates overall or the number of births people have over their own lifetimes. They don't work because it costs, on average, something like $300,000 to raise a kid from birth to age 18. Five thousand dollars isn't going to cut it. We had the expanded child tax credit of the American Rescue Plan in 2021. That halved child poverty, and we did not vote to expand it or continue it. And so the idea that we'd be revisiting this in a different way on a much more limited basis is really concerning.
HAGEN: I just want to also mention expanding the child tax credit is something that JD Vance has talked about specifically, and he had an opportunity to vote to expand and extend the child tax credit and did not. So I think something that's important to mention is that the pronatalist groups, for the most part, have a tendency to be very supportive of the Trump administration and specifically what Elon Musk is doing with DOGE. But, you know, these are, as Karen is talking about, these are not policies generally associated with helping families that are struggling.
GUZZO: And even these birth bonuses they're considering, they're not available to everybody. What was neat about the American Rescue Plan is that it wasn't something that was just you got money back at taxes. You got $300 a month if you had a child under age 6, and you didn't necessarily have to pay income taxes. They expanded eligibility for it so it went to everybody. These new plans they're talking about, they're not going to give them to poor women, to the people who would really need them most. They are, again, trying to say, no, no, only some people should be having kids.
MOSLEY: You mentioned how these types of ideas do not work. But I was just wondering in other places, in other countries, 'cause I know that Hungary and Russia, I think even Singapore, have introduced these kinds of incentives. They like tax breaks and housing benefits. I think that Hungary even offers free fertility treatments. How effective are those types of measures?
GUZZO: So the country that probably has had the most effective fertility plans is actually probably Israel because it makes IVF really widely available. So when people delay having kids, in part because they're getting education, they're building careers, that does seem to help Israel. But most of these other programs they're very careful about how they extend them. So many of these countries, again, don't give the benefits to single women or unmarried women, LGBTQ families. They don't have big impacts. They help a little bit on the margins, but for the cost of them, they are not having big impacts. But the ones that matter most are the things that actually make it easier for people to combine work and family. So one of the things that people worry about is if we offer, quote-unquote, too generous of a social safety net, people won't work. There's not a lot of evidence for that. People generally want to work. When they have kids, they want to work a little bit less. They want to stay home more, which is something we all think that would be great for kids. We know that actually having parental leave is great for kids and for bonding, and it's good for both mothers and fathers. But investing in a robust child care infrastructure is really important.
MOSLEY: Sweden, I was reading about, has a high female workforce participation rate. They also provide robust child care and parental leave. They tend to have higher fertility than countries where women have fewer rights. What can we learn from a place like Sweden?
GUZZO: Yeah, so that's interesting. So Sweden has also seen a decline in fertility. And so when I was giving interviews, you know, 10, 15 years ago, I'd say, oh, I wish we could be Sweden. That would help us. And, of course, they've seen these declines, too. What I will say is Sweden's fertility rate is much, much, much better than Japan or China or South Korea, where they have social safety nets, where they have child care programs and leave programs, but they don't have gender equality in any way, shape or form in either the labor force or in the division of labor in the home. And so gender equality might be what keeps places from tipping well below replacement and into that super low levels that people start to really worry about.
And so I think that's what a lot of young adults are looking at. They're like, I think that's what I want. I think I want to have a partner who'll help me out, and we are in this boat together. And what tends to happen is a lot of people have that thought before they have kids, and then the constraints of the labor market make it such that it's really difficult to have in practice. So if you can't afford child care, one of you's going to stay home. I guess it's often going to be mom. And then you kind of default back into traditional divisions of labor, even though that's not what people originally wanted - or at least said they wanted.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guests are NPR reporter Lisa Hagen and demographer, sociologist and fertility expert Dr. Karen Guzzo. We're talking about the resurgence of the pronatalist movement. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF YO LA TENGO'S "HOW SOME JELLYFISH ARE BORN")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, we're talking to NPR reporter Lisa Hagen and demographer and sociologist Dr. Karen Guzzo about the growing global concern over declining birth rates. We're also digging into the resurgence of pronatalism, the movement encouraging people to have more children. The last time I had an infant was 12 years ago. And the price of affordable child care was so high that really, it was a matter for many families on whether to work or not, because many families will spend an entire income or close to it just on child care. It costs as much - or more - as rent or a mortgage.
GUZZO: Yeah, it's a really big problem in the United States. And it's one that other countries, including countries that do have low birth rates - other countries have dealt with. In the United States, we are very much individualized. You know, if you're going to have a baby, you better figure out how you're going to pay for it and whether you can afford child care.
So, you know, budgetary rules - they recommend that child care should cost no more than 7% of your income. There's not a single state where that is possible. The minimum - it's, like, 10%, and it goes up to, like, 20%. And there are studies on child care deserts and - that compare the price of infant care to the price of a four-year college degree. And so I think it's something like 38 states and D.C. where the average annual cost for infant care is more than the cost of tuition for a public university. I mean, that's the kind of stuff people are faced with.
So what happens is just what you're saying, is people leave the labor market. And when I say people, we - I mean mothers. It's almost always mothers because they do often make less money than their partners. And it's also the case that, you know, they do need to recover. We have - because we don't have paid family leave in the United States, about one in four women return to work within two weeks of giving birth. That is way too early. That is absolutely shameful. And only about a fifth of people have access to paid leave in the United States.
And so, you know, we don't make this a very family-friendly country. We shame high-earning women and well-educated women for working too much and not staying home with their kids. And then we shame poor women for wanting to stay home with their kids because their income doesn't offset the price of child care. You can't win. And that's really, I think, a big problem.
MOSLEY: Elon Musk has been evangelizing. He's been sending these dire warnings that unless the low birth rate changes, civilization will disappear. He's framing it as the biggest threat to civilization. What do you make, Dr. Guzzo, of tech leaders kind of stepping in? I mean, some techno pronatalists also argue that a bigger population means, like, more geniuses and innovation.
GUZZO: Yeah. So Elon Musk is interesting, in the sense that there are a lot of people in the tech world who are good at math and think that makes them good at demography because it - it's a math-related field. But they don't really understand some of the theories, some of the ways we do modeling and think about this. So at one point, Musk was projecting something, and he had projected us all the way down to zero. And I was like, well, no, that's not right. But he has this huge influence, and so people are listening to him. So it is important to take him seriously, but some of the stuff he just says, to be honest, is pretty bonkers. He has this whole thing about C-sections - that women should have C-sections because that allows their babies' brains to be bigger than a vaginal birth. And that is just so utterly bonkers. I mean, babies' heads - their skulls are not fully fused for an evolutionary reason, to go through the birth canal without, you know, crushing their brains. And so this - the idea that we're listening to this guy - I mean, it chills me.
HAGEN: It also deeply ignores the fact that those are really personal decisions that carry real health risks for people giving birth, right? So it's a very specific focus on the product of the birth rather than the person doing the birthing.
MOSLEY: Elon Musk has a lot of kids, but he definitely is not a traditional family man. Is that something that's also been discussed in thinking about traditional family, lots of kids, the nuclear family and just this need to have more children?
HAGEN: Of course, there are folks, especially on the sort of religious end of pronatal advocacy, who, you know, say, you know, I don't love everything about the way that Elon Musk is building his family. But there is a sometimes explicit, sometimes underlying acknowledgment that he is the biggest beacon of this issue. He's very rich. He's very powerful. And folks in the pronatalist movement, though they may not agree with the way that he's living his life, they would all love his support and for him to continue doing exactly what he's doing. And so that sort of tells you about the focus on purpose rather than any of the specific values or disagreements these communities may have with each other.
MOSLEY: Dr. Guzzo, one of the things I'm trying to reconcile are the thoughts in the past around pronatalism along with today's action. So, for instance, during the Cold War, population control was seen as a kind of master key. So American elites actually believed population growth caused poverty and that poverty then turned into communism. How does this square with today's movement?
GUZZO: So one of the things that's interesting is that this all has this idea that reproduction is the future, and it's the key to everything, and all we have to do is control women. So for me, it's always really hard to separate the arguments about populations from the fact that this is about what women should or should not do and who gets to decide what women do. And so when I think about low birth rates right now and what does that mean for, you know, the economy, well, it does mean, potentially, fewer workers. But then we also have things like technological advance. We're having a whole separate conversation about the meaning of automation and robotics and AI. So maybe we don't need as many workers. And the research really shows that young men, they don't want to have kids right now, either. If we wanted to raise birth rates right now, young people are saying, yeah, I want to have kids. I just can't right now for these reasons. We could try listening to those reasons, or we can say, you know, we're going to give you a medal if you have six.
MOSLEY: Lisa, I was just wondering - you mentioned how Vice President JD Vance has kind of echoed these worries. The - Trump's White House has been asking for suggestions from married couples to boost birth rates. How empowered does the movement feel with perceived allies in government that all of this will turn into concrete policies? Did they talk about this at all during the conference?
HAGEN: Oh, yeah. Natal Con was a very celebratory moment for folks. They certainly wouldn't argue and say that they've brought this conversation about, but they're so excited by the fact that things that they were talking about, you know, previous to this iteration of the Trump administration are now being discussed by people in very powerful positions in our country. Absolutely.
The other thing that you will hear a lot - you know, there are a lot of different groups, as we've discussed, within this movement, but they have a throughline. And the throughline is our current culture is messed up, either culturally or through policy, or feminism has screwed things up - birth control, whatever it is. But what you hear a great deal less about are that there are perhaps other options for why things are messed up. And so I think what this does is it takes dissatisfaction with the very difficult world that we're all trying to survive in, and it says, hey, the solution is more babies, and sort of leaves out this whole range of other things that we might be talking about to improve people's lives and confidence to bring children into the world.
MOSLEY: Lisa Hagen and Dr. Karen Guzzo, thank you so much.
HAGEN: Thanks for having us.
GUZZO: Yeah, great being here.
MOSLEY: Dr. Karen Guzzo is a demographer, sociologist and fertility expert, and Lisa Hagen is a reporter for NPR. Coming up, guest critic Martin Johnson reviews a new jazz album from Wilco guitarist Nels Cline. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
