If only the pronatalist turn in American politics were confined to one bespectacled, self-promoting husband and wife team starring in countless profiles over the last handful of years. “Meet the ‘elite’ couples breeding to save mankind,” is how the The Telegraph introduced Simone and Malcolm Collins in 2023. “America’s premier pronatalists,” as The Guardian dubbed them, “want to make America procreate again” per the Washington Post. What Simone and Malcolm Collins call their “pronatalist” program is consistent and undisguised: They extoll the virtues of big families engineered through compulsory motherhood, restrained through patriarchal gender roles, and with children isolated from any outside influence that might challenge the family’s worldview.
In recent decades, people who obsess about birth rates in the Western world have tended to do so from the fringes, rubbing elbows with conspiracy theorists panicked about “the great replacement” of white people—until they find their way to weirdo billionaires willing to repackage eugenics as a remedy. Now, however, the Collinses believe they have allies in the White House, even trying to sell pronatalism as public policy: As The New York Times recently reported, the Trump administration is apparently entertaining proposals ranging from government-funded education about menstrual cycles to so-called “baby bonuses” of $5,000 for each child an American woman bears. (It seems safe to assume they mean only cisgender women who are not immigrants.) The Collinses themselves have been drafting executive orders, including one to award a “National Medal of Motherhood” to mothers who have given birth to six or more children.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is cutting if not outright eliminating women’s health research. They are freezing federal funds for family planning, meaning pregnant people will lose critical care. Trump claims to support IVF and jokes that he’s the “fertilization president” one week, and the next he eliminates the team at the CDC working on IVF. Trump celebrates the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade as a personal victory, and after Dobbs, maternal mortality spiked. He’s breaking up families, jailing mothers and fathers and leaving their children alone to defend themselves before immigration judges—without their parents, without lawyers. The men he surrounds himself with openly lean into eugenic thinking: lackeys like Elon Musk, who believes “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” and HHS director Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, who complains that teens aren’t fertile enough and that “autism destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children.”
There is a continuity from the pseudo-valorization of motherhood to policing people through reproductive coercion. “One of the fastest ways to trap a woman in precarity is to push her into pregnancy,” Jessica Calarco, University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist and author of Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net, told me this week. After our conversation, it felt like these “pronatalist” policies are really more like DOGE, but for reproductive labor—taking a chainsaw to what few supports exist for supporting people’s pregnancies and families, making people’s lives more chaotic and unstable, and calling it making America “great” again.” As ever, we have to ask: great for who, and at whose expense?
With pronatalism, Calarco told me, “the goal is not to make raising children easier for everyone—really, it’s about providing a reward for families who do childrearing the ‘right’ way.” What that often looks like among the pronatalists is “breadwinner/homemaker families,” Calarco explained, men being the breadwinners, women being the homemakers, and women rearing the children, typically large numbers of children, perhaps homeschooling them. Hence policies that reward women for having many children, and “education” to steer them away from contraception and family planning and into monitoring their fertility.
While the proposals coming from the pronatalists are a bit thin, you can see this worldview reflected in the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, also known as Project 2025, which stipulates that government policies should “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life.” To do this, they advocate expanding government, telling policymakers “to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.” If “restoring the family” requires making government bigger, then so be it. To the extent that government offers people any resources, they will be contingent on one vision of the family. Project 2025 may deem these “pro-family” policies; in truth, they are pro-patriarchy. If they give women more resources, contingent on having more children, is that offering women choices, or exerting power over their choices?
When the goal is about dictating which families get support, Calarco said, “it helps to explain why we’re not seeing investments in things like paid family leave, or universal childcare.” At bottom, “it’s not about making childbirth or parenting more accessible, but about just a reward system for those who do it their way.”
What the pronatalists regard as “their way” may seem quite extreme—this motherhood medal could be lifted from Nazi Germany—but at the same time, it’s aligned with the American history of reproductive control. Calarco described “better baby” contests that arose at the turn of the twentieth century, coinciding with anti-immigrant panic about “race suicide” among whites. Such contests, she said, were “enormously popular at state fairs and other types of events and communities across the United States,” and they helped set standards for what made for “better” babies—”what we might think of as a sort of Aryan baby in the sense of blonde hair, blue eyed, conservative Protestant, typically a child being raised by a very conservative, oftentimes religious family”—as well as what made for ideal mothers.
The chainsaw maneuvers—cutting family planning funding, or Head Start, and other programs people rely on to keep their families afloat—are there to help make something like getting a “baby bonus” attractive. As Calarco told me, by shrinking and eliminating women’s other options, they are creating the conditions under which women will be more dependent on men. The combination of precarity and dependance can “set women up for abuse, for violence, for manipulation, for being forced into additional pregnancies that they didn’t plan for or don’t want,” Calarco added. “The goal is to really quite literally trap women in marriage,”
Pronatalism is a bit of a mess: It’s both an extreme ideology of reproductive control, and an ethos that comports with what were once mainstream ideas about reproduction and racism. And here it is again, elevated along with so many other fringe ideologies that have moved to the center, with open white nationalists getting a hearing from Trump, and with conspiracy theory promoters, such as Jack Posobiec, now afforded access to the White House. The Collinses’ schtick draws on all these strains:, Malcolm told Politico that American schools are “dedicated to cultural genocide.” Simone acknowledged to Mother Jones that her Puritan tradwife attire is meant in part as “trolling,” but also not. Now, someone who shares the pronatalist worldview finds himself one heartbeat from the presidency: Vance campaigned on his opposition “childless cat ladies.”
If we have arrived here, it’s because the core project of pronatalism has been quite successfully laundered into more neutral-sounding policy proposals. And that, in turn, is because the pronotalist platform is not so outside the patriarchal norm. It’s similar to the empty idealization of motherhood that has long been used to sugarcoat a lack of actual material support for mothers. Pronatalism only seems new or disruptive when we forget that fact.
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