Children were everywhere at the second annual Natal Conference in Austin, Texas, last month, where people devoted to the cause of population growth gathered to swap ideas. A toddler girl twirled on her toes and took a tumble to the floor beneath the grand rotunda of the Bullock Texas State History Museum; nearby, a gaggle of grade-school children encircled a table to play cards. Knee-high siblings wove through clusters of adult conversation made effortless by an open bar. Parents were not monitoring their kids especially closely. Workers had brought in plastic tubs of Hot Wheels cars and puzzle-piece play mats earlier to facilitate the seldom-seen phenomenon of children entertaining themselves. It mostly worked: Having more children around is somehow usually easier than having a few. Such was the wisdom of the conference, an odd get-together of far-right online personalities, traditionalist Christians, and envoys from Silicon Valley.
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. And the pronatalists’ more immediate concerns about aging populations seem similarly well founded: As birth rates continue to drop globally, the relatively smaller number of young people will struggle to care for the elderly, a worrying prospect regardless of one’s political orientation. 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. 
The speakers’ roster included a range of figures, some more extreme than others. There were far-right culture warriors whose interest in pronatalism seemed incidental, including Carl Benjamin, also known as Sargon_of_Akkad, a relic of Gamergate who’s become an ardent opponent of feminism, and the headliner Jack Posobiec, a Donald Trump super fan who spends a good deal of time issuing trollish proclamations about, for instance, overthrowing democracy, and certainly appears to sympathize with extreme forms of far-right politics. But there were also ordinary and mainly uncontroversial presenters, such as Lyman Stone, a senior fellow and the director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, and Daniel Hess, a researcher with a background in tech.
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, and Benjamin’s assertion that society ought to be reorganized to prioritize families, arguing that “if you don’t marry and have children, then your opinion is irrelevant.” (A flyer advertising the presentation of the pseudonymous speaker Yuri Bezmonov featured Trump in a McDonald’s apron leaning out of a drive-through window with the inscription TRUMP: THE ART OF THE TROLL.) 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. “The racism and misogyny of pro-natalist circles often gets overblown in skeptical media outlets,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who works on pro-family policy, recently wrote in an article for The Dispatch discussing the conference. “But that doesn’t mean those strains are completely absent from the lineup in Austin or the broader pro-natalism movement.”
More than a whiff of eugenics was also apparent. The press-hungry couple Malcolm and Simone Collins, a pair of former venture capitalists living in Silicon Valley, were on the speakers’ roster, bringing their peculiar approach to childbearing and parenting to the conference floor. The Collinses have chosen to procreate using IVF technology that allows for the selection of genetically superior embryos, a decidedly techno-futurist approach. Their parenting style, meanwhile, is more retrograde; Malcolm Collins once struck his child’s face in the presence of a journalist. (The couple told the reporter that their use of corporal punishment was inspired by their observation of a tiger swiping its cub in the wild.) Certain elements of their self-presentation are, again, seemingly intended to troll—Simone wears some kind of puritanical getup complete with a bonnet, and the duo proudly displays multiple guns on the walls of their house full of kids.
If some of those aims seem to contradict the goals of religious traditionalists also interested in the revival of big families, it’s because the two sets of ideas—the “trad” and the “tech”—belong to separate factions that have formed an alliance on several fronts, pronatalism included. The tech crowd is made up of people like the Collinses—Silicon Valley types who envision a radically different future made possible by innovations in technology. The trads, meanwhile, hearken to the religious beliefs and practices of the past, and are skeptical of many aspects of modern life. The tech people are interested in pioneering new reproductive technologies; the trads—at least the Catholic ones—object in principle to IVF and dream of a society with a tolerance for simple human difference, the kind of world in which a person with Down syndrome, for example, would be welcomed with open arms. The techies aren’t necessarily committed to having traditional families (see, for example, Elon Musk, the somewhat absent father of at least 14 children); the trads view the institution of family as the key to resolving the birth-rate crisis. These differences were on display at the conference: One speaker, the geneticist Razib Khan, suggested that the techies literally depart for space, perhaps to a Muskian Mars colony, and let the trads inherit the Earth.
However its components ultimately relate to one another, this new coalition is part of a broader political realignment taking shape along axes defined by Trump. It isn’t any secret that most of the energy and dynamism in contemporary politics now belongs to the right; the Natal Conference alone was teeming with policy ideas and theories of society, while liberals remain scattered in a defensive crouch, with elected Democrats tripping over themselves to disavow a toxic party brand. The right’s profusion of resources, followers, and thought is perhaps partially why it’s dominating the discourse around an issue that isn’t inherently conservative. But maybe the greater reason is that liberals seem almost uniformly unwilling to address the subject of population decline whatsoever—a stance that warrants reconsideration.
“Liberals are reluctant to wade into these matters—talking about families may imply a critique of other people’s choices,” Alice Evans, a senior lecturer in international development at King’s College London, recently told me. Some may believe (mistakenly, in my opinion) that conceding that having children is good and ought to be encouraged requires conceding that not having children is bad and ought to be punished, a kind of discrimination. And others may be repelled by the growing association between the subject of birth rates and the political right, forming a kind of feedback loop in which liberals avoid the topic, because it seems like a right-wing fixation, and thereby strengthen the existing association further. Whatever the source of liberal inattention, yielding to the far right the notion that humanity ought to persist on this Earth strikes me as absurd.
One doesn’t have to maintain, as I do, that humankind is excellent—the paragon of animals—in order to affirm the importance of bringing children into the world; much more rational, empirical reasons place political importance on strategies that enable families to welcome children. A society in which the elderly greatly outnumber the young will encounter a multitude of hurdles to flourishing: “As populations age, a shrinking workforce will support more elderly dependents,” Evans said. “Older people usually work at lower rates, while being less innovative and less entrepreneurial. The entire economy becomes a bit sluggish. Costs will also rise—to pay for elderly health care and pensions.”
Countries experiencing precipitous birth-rate declines, such as South Korea, are already undergoing ominous changes. “A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly,” the author Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote of South Korea in a New Yorker feature earlier this year. “About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary.” For rapidly aging countries, immigration may function as a short-term stopgap measure, but sourcing young people from other countries shifts the burden of aging populations on to immigrants’ countries of origin.
What to do about falling birth rates depends on what’s driving them down, and figuring out what those forces may be was a pervasive theme of the conference. Speakers and attendees presented a number of potential reasons, identifying fallout from the sexual revolution, harmful chemicals in food and water supplies, and the proliferation of porn, gambling, weed, and technology. One can imagine a number of extreme and quixotic responses to that constellation of possible causes—a Unabomber-esque rejection of modern technology, for instance, or an acceleration of technological approaches to reproduction. This year, Trump issued an order that would expand access to IVF, dubbing himself the “fertilization president” at a Women’s History Month event last March. 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, along the same lines as my Atlantic colleague Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s buzzy new book, Abundance.
But perhaps the more obvious approach is essentially a leftist one: Just give families money.
Many young people considering childbirth today are discouraged by the high costs of raising kids, including exorbitant child-care fees and income loss associated with time off work to take care of children. Sitting at a conference table sharing cups of Cheez-Its and gummy bears from the kids’ buffet table, my mother (whom I had brought to the conference because she was curious about the subject, and because it provided a convenient excuse to visit our home state) leaned over to admit that she would’ve had “a whole houseful of kids, if we could’ve afforded it.” I had never before known that I might have been one of many as opposed to only two, but if people dealing with the much lower child-care and education costs of the 1980s and ’90s were financially dissuaded from raising the number of children they wanted, it would follow that the same problem has worsened for today’s would-be parents. This perhaps partially explains why America’s fertility gap, or the difference between the number of children the average woman has and the number of children she says she would prefer, is the highest it has been in 40 years.
And so it makes sense that people hoping to help couples bring children into the world should support setting the marginal cost of having a child at zero, which some involved in the pronatalist movement have already discerned. Stone, the policy expert who spoke at the conference, has written that “pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies. Anybody saying otherwise is mischaracterizing the research. But it takes a lot of money.” 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. These kinds of proposals are typically made by the left, but the right has lately begun to rethink its typical approach to welfare programs—or at least members of the right say they have. J. D. Vance, for example, has in the past supported a $5,000 child tax credit, thousands more than the current CTC, and has said that the government should “make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids, to bring them into the world and to welcome them as the blessings that we know they are.” And why not? The right now has control of the federal government, and the attention of an entire nation. It’s free to institute pro-family policies at any time, something several conference speakers noted. What those efforts may look like largely depends on which faction in the pronatalist coalition claims victory over the others, and that is anyone’s guess.
