What If Both Sides in the Birth Rate Debate Are Wrong?
The Trump administration’s ideologues keep coming back to birth rates. The new National Security Strategy, released on Friday, declares that Europe is facing “the stark prospect of civilizational erasure” because of “migration policies that are transforming the continent” and “cratering birth rates,” leading to a “loss of national identities and self-confidence.” What Europe needs, the NSS states, is more “unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history,” and a “revival of spirit” that today’s far-right parties promise. To match that energy in the U.S., the administration offers a “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health” based on “growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.”
As if we needed more reasons to compare our current predicament with the rising authoritarian movement in Europe a century ago, when continental leaders were also in a panic about falling birthrates and flagging national virility.
When it comes to birth rates, unfortunately, the panic is not confined to the authoritarian right. We are in the midst of a social panic in which a growing left-right chorus is trumpeting the supposed demographic crisis. The right has been louder about it, of course, with Elon Musk and JD Vance leading the charge for more baby-making. But the left has not been entirely dismissive. A recent Jacobin essay by sociology professor David Calnitsky argued that “the population-decline scenario is one where life gets worse and worse long before it ends,” and The New Republic, though often critical of right-wing pronatalists, published an essay earlier this year arguing for “encouraging woman to have all the babies they want.”
The two sides often present a stark choice when it comes to boosting birth rates: the hard way and the easy way. It’s a choice we should refuse to make.
The hard way is to take away options for women to steer them into motherhood. For example, a Heritage Foundation report recommends eliminating federal subsidies for higher education so that women, free from career distractions, can focus on marriage and children. The hard way also includes banning abortion, which is why Vice President JD Vance famously chose an anti-abortion rally—and his first speech as vice president—to declare: “I want more babies in the United States of America!” At the same time, they launched a mass deportation campaign, literally removing babies and the women who bear them (foreign-born mothers birthed one-in-four babies in the U.S. in 2023). Republican state governments also block access to a variety of reproductive healthcare services.
One hundred years ago, European fascists responded to population panic by constraining choices for women—in Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, and Franco’s Spain. Mussolini imposed a tax on bachelors and gave preferential treatment to fruitful civil servants. Hitler’s marriage loan program required the wife to leave the labor force, then forgave a fraction of the loan for each child the woman bore. Franco offered family allowances, but they were paid as a supplement to the husband’s wages—not available to single mothers or families with unemployed men. And of course all these governments criminalized abortion and contraception. They would solve the birth rate problem by returning women to the realm of “strong, traditional families.”
On the other hand, there is the easy way to promote births, favored by liberals, which is about smoothing the path to successful parenthood. This includes work-family integration policies such as subsidized parental leave from work, preschool care, housing support, and progressive child allowances. Such policies have most thoroughly been implemented in the Nordic countries, and historically Sweden led the way, as has France.
One thing the hard way and the easy way have in common is that neither has shown stark success at raising birth rates. Hitler got a birth rate bounce in the 1930s (as did Hungary and Russia under recent authoritarian rulers). But they were fleeting at best, tending to affect birth timing but not increasing population growth in the long run. Liberal policies, too, especially childcare, increased birth rates by a little. But all the countries mentioned here have birth rates solidly below the so-called replacement levels of about two births per family—similar to the United States or lower—and still falling.
So neither the hard way nor the easy way achieve their stated goals. But they have dramatically different effects. The hard way has the effect of oppressing women, rallying traditionalists with patriarchal family nostalgia, and virtue-signaling racist and anti-immigrant attitudes. The easy way has a tendency to make life better, reducing poverty, improving material well-being for families and children, promoting women’s careers, and drawing fathers into parenting.
It is tempting to choose the easy way and just ignore the failure to actually raise birth rates. But there is a cost even to accepting the choice. For one thing, giving in to population panic and endorsing a plan to increase birth rates implicitly supports anti-immigration politics and yields ground to racist fear-mongering. After all, most problems caused by America’s declining replacement rate that people say they are worried about—such as growing the economy, caring for old people, and funding retirement programs—can readily be solved, at least for the next few decades, by welcoming some of the millions of foreigners who are eager to come to the U.S.
And even progressive pronatalism risks ratifying the notion that women’s most important contribution to solving major social problems is to birth and raise children. More children inevitably (so far) means fewer women in the workforce. That tradeoff reduces the other social and economic contributions women are making right now, just so they can produce future workers. Pronatalists like Dean Spears and Michael Geruso worry that low birth rates mean “fewer and fewer people to discover new ideas”—but having more babies risks derailing the careers of already-born women today.
Finally, what happens when liberal pronatalism doesn’t successfully raise birth rates enough to resolve fears of a demographic crisis? Having accepted the premise that birth rates need to be raised, I’m concerned that liberals will find themselves politically boxed in—and end up endorsing hard-way approaches.
Instead, we should deny the entire framing of the natalism debate. In the U.S., simple projections show that if we maintain reasonable levels of immigration—a million immigrants or so per year, as we had in the recent past—the U.S. population will peak in the 2040s, and then start to decline at a manageable pace. That buys us time to address our real problems: climate change, the threat to democracy, and the rise of nationalism. In the process, we can continue to look for ways to make life better for today’s mothers and their families, rather than making social sacrifices now for children who won’t join the workforce for decades.