In March, during a Women’s History Month event at the White House, President Donald Trump said he wouldn’t mind being known as the “fertilization president.” His administration is considering giving people $5,000 for every baby they birth. Another idea being floated around are “motherhood medals” awarded to people who have six children or more.

It’s all part of a pronatalism strategy that’s growing in popularity most vocally among conservatives, Silicon Valley elites and far-right hardliners, including President Trump, Elon Musk, Vice President J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, and influencers like Malcolm and Simone Collins.

“The simple definition of pronatalism is the idea that the population is declining in many countries, but projected to decline globally, and that what we need to do is have more children, not by forcing people to, but by developing policies that make it easier to have more children,” said Victor Kumar, associate professor of philosophy at Boston University.

Ironically, major improvements that are celebrated in society, such as increasing wealth, greater freedom, more education and a significant reduction in teen pregnancies are attributed as the main causes of population decline, Kumar said.

“However, they’re leading to something that could drag society down,” Kumar said. “If we don’t have enough people to maintain Social Security and other kinds of government funding, that leads to technological stagnation, economic stagnation.”

But increasing the birthrate can be a controversial topic, particularly because the conversation often veers toward a lack of personal reproductive choice, said Dr. Deborah Bartz, an attending physician in OB/GYN at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.

“Restricting people’s reproductive autonomy and not trusting them to make decisions that are right for themselves and their family as it relates to the growth of that family is, in part, a technique of maintaining historic social hierarchies,” Dr. Bartz said.

Dr. Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, founder of the Center for Black Maternal Health and Reproductive Justice at Tufts University School of Medicine, adds that an additional cause of anxiety around pronatalism is its ties to racial and demographic shifts, which could, in turn, lead to a shift in power dynamics. There is also a longstanding connection between the pronatalism movement and eugenics, which was focused on creating better humans through selective breeding.

“There’s a racial implication to natalism, there’s demography implication, and there is a financial, economic, social, political response,” Dr. Amutah-Onukagha said. “This is why it’s being watched so closely: because people that are in power want to maintain power, whatever racial ethnic group is holding the power for that particular country, it’s in their best interest that they maintain the power. So that sociopolitical lens is at the intersection of a reproductive justice, bodily autonomy conversation.”

And though small societal changes can be made to potentially improve or flatline population decline, such as tax breaks, universal health care, more access to paid parental leave and even changes in the way we parent, Dr. Bartz said perhaps the issue itself needs a reframing.

“If our economic sector requires population growth, then maybe we need to … find other workarounds to fix our economic sector over promoting births,” Dr. Bartz said.

Guests

  • Dr. Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha, the Julia A. Okoro Professor of Black Maternal Health in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, founder of the Center for Black Maternal Health and Reproductive Justice at Tufts University School of Medicine.
  • Dr. Victor Kumar, associate professor of philosophy and director of graduate placement at Boston University, director of the Mind and Morality Lab, member of the interdisciplinary Moral Psychology Research Group.

Dr. Deborah Bartz, attending physician in OB/GYN at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, associate professor at Harvard Medical School, author of “Blessed be the Fruit - the Contemporary Rise of Pronatalism.”