Abortion was always slated to be a top issue in the 2024 presidential election. But virtually no one predicted that politicians would be openly blasting those ambivalent about having children.
“We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too,” JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, said in a now-famous statement in 2021.
One starting place to understand where all this is coming from is pronatalism, an ideological movement driven by concern that the world is not producing enough children and that society should work to change that.
Not all pronatalists are politically conservative, and not all conservatives are particularly pronatalist. But those worried about declining birth rates paint a scary picture of the future. As the number of babies dwindles, the number of workers will shrink, too. There will be fewer people paying taxes to support welfare systems, which will still be supporting large elderly populations. The result, they warn, will be economic stagnation and political strife.
Others see the increased focus on birth rates as a way to scapegoat individuals — primarily women — for societal issues that politicians could otherwise address, such as improving care for the elderly or taxing the rich more aggressively.
That there’s a “proximate economic problem … doesn’t necessarily mean increasing birth rates is the solution,” said Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The concerns about fertility aren’t taking place in a political vacuum, in the U.S. or anywhere else.
Still, those who want to voluntarily increase the number of children say we must have a real conversation, no matter how uneasy it makes us. Some are hopeful about emerging technologies — like artificial wombs and lab-grown eggs — to one day bring more humans to life. Others warn that sexist, racist and ethnonationalist forces will fill the void if liberal leaders fail to solve the problem themselves.
“If we wait, the less inclusive, less compassionate, less calm elements within our society and many societies worldwide may someday call depopulation a crisis and exploit it to suit their agendas — of inequality, nationalism, exclusion or control,” warned Dean Spears, the director of the Population Wellbeing Initiative at the University of Texas.
All over the world, fewer children are being born, including in some of the most populous nations such as China, India, the United States, Brazil and Mexico. The United Nations has projected that it is likely the number of people on Earth will peak in the next 75 years.
Why? There are several leading explanations, from postponing childbearing to people having less sex overall or despair about what the future would look like for children in an overheating world.
Spears, who believes in reproductive freedom but also thinks falling birth rates are a serious problem, compares this moment to decades ago when leaders realized they needed to address climate change.
In Spears’ view, there’s still time for leaders to reverse declines in population, because we’re still years away from when the number of people on Earth is set to peak. His point is that we have never really brought our best resources to bear to tackle these questions, and if we seriously invest in doing so, we could build more economically stable societies that better align with families’ reproductive desires.
“I think that if we truly change society’s commitment to taking care of one another, and to taking care of the people who take care of one another,” Spears said, “then we could invent new ways to live.”
Rachel Cohen is a senior policy reporter at Vox who focuses on social policy.
