But The Birthrates!

If "pro-natalists" really believe we're on the brink of civilizational collapse, they'd better start paying moms like it's the end of the world.

Hey friends. I’m back from a break spent hosting family from abroad. There’s a pleasant anarchy to a very full house, generations crashing on couches, always someone cooking but also someone cleaning up, keeping an eye on the kids, making a grocery run.

While I was offline, another family made headlines for its own full (and apparently very cold) house. Malcolm and Simone Collins, a “pro-natalist” couple who routinely rub shoulders with eugenicists and cryptofascists, were profiled in the Guardian where they were revealed to forgo heating their Pennsylvania home, rely heavily on iPads for their young children, and—most alarmingly—strike their toddler in the face.

The Collinses (you might recognize them as the interesting faces of the “elite couples breeding to save mankind” meme) often cast themselves as the rational arm of an overwhelmingly right-wing effort to increase birth rates. The couple was in attendance at a recent conservative pro-natalist conference where other speakers described parenthood as a campaign to out-breed ideological enemies and railed against women in the workforce. Speaking to the Guardian, the Collinses defended association with racists “because we convert them,” ostensibly to less-racist beliefs. “It’s actually really easy when you show them the data.”

Vague allusions to data are a frequent fallback for this crowd of tech-adjacent birth rate obsessive when their methods (the Collinses plan to keep having babies via cesarean method until Simone “start[s] haemorrhaging”) or their motives (I really cannot stress how many overt racists are part of this movement) come into question.

But okay, let’s take birth rate data at face value. Where are the birth rates falling, and what might be done to reverse the trend?

Helpfully, the Economist ran a feature examining this issue last month, just days before the Guardian dropped its profile of the Collinses.

It’s true that birth rates are declining, particularly in wealthy countries where women have more economic opportunity. But much of that decrease—more than half the drop in the U.S. birth rate—reflects a precipitous decrease in teen pregnancies. For those who become pregnant before 19, early motherhood can represent an enormous economic impediment, with young people pushed out of education and careers. Teen parents’ incomes “may be as much as 30% lower at ages 30–42 years compared with women of the same generation who have not had children,” British researchers found in 2017.

If the pro-natalist movement is honest in its data, it should probably foreground the fact that birth rates of past decades relied on millions of children giving birth, often into poverty. The movement should acknowledge the coercion hidden in those old teen birth rates. And it should make explicit exactly how much coercion it’s willing to introduce in order to return to those past birth rates.

In their Guardian profile, the Collinses say they oppose coercive methods of population control, and support making parenthood more attainable for people who want it. But it’s soon revealed that the couple (Simone is running for state government as a Republican) do not support maternity leave. They similarly wave off subsidies for parents, arguing that those programs have not rebounded birth rates in other countries.

They’re right—to an extent. The Economist notes that many wealthy and middle-income nations have invested in procreation-friendly policies, to underwhelming ends. Since 2006, the Economist notes, South Korea’s government has spent “just over 1% of GDP a year, on baby-making incentives, such as tax breaks for parents, maternity care and even state-sponsored dating.” In Poland, “each child that resulted from Family 500+, in the years from the Polish financial-bonus scheme’s introduction in 2016 to 2019, cost $1m.”

That’s a lot of money! And yet, if these countries truly believe themselves to be facing civilizational collapse (seriously, that’s how pro-natalists like Elon Musk describe it), it’s not that much money? The sticker shock begins to fade when one weighs the initial outlay against each child’s future economic contributions.

The average Polish worker has a labor productivity of approximately $37 per hour. That’s not their take-home pay, which is considerably lower: an average of around $11 per hour. Over the course of their lifetimes, the children resulting from Poland’s Family 500+ program can easily generate more than $1 million for their employers. (That worker, of course, is much less likely to ever have $1 million.)

Likewise, the approximately one percent of South Korean GDP spent on child-friendly policies seems to pale in comparison to the pure financial sacrifices of parenthood. (Consider the U.K.’s 30 percent disparity in wages between teen mothers and childless peers by 30, and the three percent increase in wages an American woman can expect for each year she delays childbirth.) South Korean couples without children have also pointed to the country’s “skyrocketing child-rearing costs and property prices” and gendered divisions of labor that see women taking on the majority of household duties on top of their careers.

Like the Collinses, these national policies are attempting to promote voluntary parenthood, in order to make up for lost births, largely from accidental and teen pregnancies. It won’t work, the Economist notes. At least not at current payouts.

“Most existing pro-natal policies are trying to do something much more difficult than merely restoring previous fertility patterns,” the outlet notes. “They are trying to persuade women to have more children than they actually want, and are doing so with sums that are small compared with their lifetime earnings.”

Birth is hard work. Raising children is hard work. These realities are recognized in the fact that people (especially women) generally do not want many more children than the 2.1-per-woman population replacement rate. (The most common American preference is 2 children.)

Nations have long expected women to provide this reproductive labor for free, often against their will. Now that birth control, abortion, education, and workforce participation have enabled women to have their desired number of children, governments are clutching their pearls at the notion of paying for this labor, even as they acknowledge that their economies depend on the steady production of future workers.

If pro-natalists were serious about keeping populations at peak levels, they would argue to fund new life at a level that reflects its value. They would fight to make their countries the most welcoming, competitive destinations for new immigrants. That they don’t, and instead promote a project of demographic warfare and financial low-balling, gives away the game.

Near the end of the Guardian profile, the author witnesses Malcolm Collins strike his two-year-old in the face for jostling a table in a restaurant. Though the Collinses portray themselves as data-driven rationalists, research overwhelmingly shows that corporal punishment of children results in negative outcomes that can last throughout their lives. It also results in poorer behavior. Hitting children is definitively and clinically (not to mention morally) bad.

Malcolm later tries characterizing the slap as an evidence-based practice borrowed from the natural world (his wife saw a tiger do it). Again, he turns to data to suggest that his is the way of the future. All he’s doing is rebuilding old hierarchies.

Hi, thanks for reading MomLeft, a new newsletter for moms on the left, and for bearing with me while I took a vacation. I’m back now and ready to rumble. >:)