JD Vance is one of the first important politicians in the United States to directly take up one of the preoccupations of this newsletter — the ongoing collapse of birthrates across the developed world and the grim consequences of an aging, childless future — and it’s fair to say it isn’t going well so far. Not just his dig at “childless cat ladies” but also his past support for a system where parents cast votes on behalf of their children have been fodder for the Democratic Party’s newfound narrative about the Trump-Vance ticket: that it’s creepy, bizarre, weird.
Even when the cats are left out of it, alas, the problem of weirdness is a chronic one for pro-natalists. I have many years of experience talking to people (to you, dear readers, but also to friends and neighbors and relations) about the birth dearth, and I can promise that no matter how you frame the issue, pro-natalism often comes across as extremely strange.
This is not to concede that it is actually weird to care about the birthrate: Children are good, human beings are good, a prosperous future for the human race is good, and it’s absurd not to care about looming depopulation and all the social and economic problems that come trailing in its wake. Future generations (to the extent that they exist!) will find it much, much stranger that so many people barely noticed this issue or dismissed it than that a Republican vice-presidential candidate once floated giving children political representation through their parents.
But if you are a pro-natalist, you still have to understand the reasons an aura of weirdness hangs over the idea.
There are the historical associations with white racial panic — wildly misapplied in the case of Vance (whose wife is the daughter of Indian immigrants), but certainly you can find racist pro-natalists on the far-right fringe. There is the general American impulse to separate the realms of intimate life and individual choice from politics of any kind. (Indeed, much of what I’m saying here applies more in America than elsewhere — natalism seems less weird in other parts of the world — but American pre-eminence means that our habits of mind influence the entire planet.)
There is the liberal resistance to any big idea that seems to cast doubt on elements of the sexual revolution. The idea of freedom from procreation as a hard-won feminist liberty, especially, means that any talk about increasing birthrates instantly evokes “Handmaid’s Tale” anxieties about patriarchal coercion. (Recall that in Margaret Atwood’s novel a birthrate collapse is the engine of the totalitarian takeover.)
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