The Global Story: Pronatalism - Make America procreate again?

Hello, this is the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Valerie Sanderson with your weekly bonus from The Global Story, which brings you a single story with depth and insight from the BBC's best journalists.
Just search for The Global Story wherever you get your pods and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode. Here's my colleague, Lucy Hawkins.
Today we're bringing you a conversation I had with a family called the Collinses, who joined me from their farmhouse in Pennsylvania. By any measure, they already have a large family.
We are a family of six with a five-year-old, a three-year-old, a two-year-old, and an one-year-old and another baby on the way. But they want many more.
That's because the Collinses have a unique approach to family. They're pronatalists.
I would love to have as many children as I can physically have. So basically until my uterus is removed in a c-section that goes a little wrong.
For them, it's a solution for what they see as a demographic collapse facing countries like the US. And whereas many people will see their approach as extreme, there's increasing evidence that their ideas have traction at the heart of the Trump administration.
We want more babies to be born in America. We want more babies.
We need them. We need them.
They say their aims are a pragmatic solution to a pending catastrophe. But is there a darker side to their mission to make America procreate again? I'm Lucy Hawkins.
From the BBC World Service, this is The Global Story. I can speak to our Washington correspondent, Nomiya Iqbal.
Hi, Nomiya. Hey, Lucy, how are you? Hey, good.
You're with us today because a little earlier I had a conversation with a couple, Malcolm and Simone Collins, and we really want your help in putting that conversation into some context. Great, let's do it.
Simone, can you just describe to me where you live with your family and what your family looks like?

Our house is surrounded by a beautiful field that has fireflies in the summer,

and it's adjacent to the Valley Forge National Park, which is quite a large park in our area.

While our oldest is in kindergarten, our youngest are either with me or with neighbours who live right next to us. How would you actually define pronatalism? Pronatalism is about bringing attention to falling fertility rates and the geopolitical and economic and social consequences of this and looking for realistic and non-coercive solutions.
So if this is a solution, Simone, pronatalism, what is the main problem that you would say you're worried about? With demographic collapse, I'm worried not about the elite tech people that are often attributed with championing this cause, but rather the most vulnerable people in society. Like with climate change, demographic collapse disproportionately affects the people who are most dependent on social services, on governments working, on medical assistance from governments.
And when you run out of taxpayers who can fund those programs, including pensions, infrastructure development, police, fire security, things like that, you have huge swaths of people who are not only vulnerable, who not only don't have enough money for food or medical care, but who will likely die. So this is a very serious and very scary issue.
And if governments can't figure out how to continue to support the vulnerable people in their societies when they run out of a taxpaying base due to so many old people, we are in really big trouble. So, Nomi, Malcolm and Simone were explaining to me a couple of the ideas that seem very important in their lives.
But can you help us understand how their definitions fit into a wider view? Like they gave us the definition of pronatalism, but it's actually more of an umbrella term, isn't it, for quite a broad range of beliefs? It is. So a general definition would be it's any attitude or any policy that's pro-birth that basically encourages reproduction.
So any view that basically considers parenthood is the most amazing thing that you can do, the most powerful, incredible role. And so basically pro-natalists think that people should have more babies.
Others go further. They think it should be state sponsored.
And then you have this kind of crossover with those who are anti-abortion and they believe in total abortion bans. What seems to unite all pronatalists, though, Nomia, is this concern with population decline.
And Malcolm and Simone talked about this a lot, this idea of demographic collapse. What exactly is that? And are they right to be concerned?

Well, it means that there is a decline in birth rates. And that is true.
So for a country in the developed world, like the US to increase or maintain its population, it needs a birth rate of 2.1 children per woman on average, and that's known as the replacement rate. So here in the US, The fertility rate fell in 2023 to 1.62.

That's a record low.

And then last year, it was 1.78. So it climbed up.
But that's still low, especially if you think back to 1960, it was 3.65. And so if you're a pronatalist, generally speaking, your argument, well, certainly on the extreme end, I would say, of that movement, your argument would go something like this.
Birth rates are falling. If we don't take dramatic action, we're going to witness the extinction of entire societies.
The economy will collapse. Entire races and countries will be wiped out because of lower fertility rates.
Nomi, I've been speaking to quite a few people and asking them what their thoughts are around pronatalism. And I'm surprised how many people haven't actually heard of it.
How long has it been around for? I mean, it's not a new concept. If you read the Bible, you've got, you know, be fruitful and multiply.
And then there are lots of other religious traditions. And they go all the way back to, I think it's Louis XIV's France.
They had a policy in France of encouraging large families back in 1666. There was basically this edict offering tax privileges to fathers of 10 or more children.
And that was aimed at increasing the population, strengthening the nation. You had Soviet Russia as well.
They wanted to respond to population losses during and after World War II. The goal was increase the birth rates, bolster the workforce.
And then even here in the US in 1920s America, women had the right to vote, they could go to work. And so there were lots of concerns about what that meant in regards to having babies.
And now we've seen this resurgence, I guess, of pronatalism because you do have this modern tech look to it, don't you? You have many in Silicon Valley who have taken a big interest in pronatalism. Simone, you're outlining a really big problem as you see it.
But part of your solution is intensely personal in that you're having lots of children. Malcolm, how many would you like to have? Oh, well, that's not really my choice as the husband.
So I'll shoot that to Simone. I would love to have as many children as I can physically have.

So basically until my uterus is removed in a C-section that goes a little wrong,

or I am unable to carry more pregnancies, I will keep having children.

10, 14, however many I can have.

So literally, Simone, you are putting yourself at risk, your life at risk for this. That's correct.
Yes. Does that frighten you? I'm really not afraid of losing my life in a pregnancy or compromising my health.
This is something that throughout history has been something that women have gladly taken on. Basically, in the past, women died in childbirth at around the same rate that men died in battle.
And yet you hear plenty of stories throughout history of both men and women being very excited to further their values, to support their families and their countries by doing these things, respectively. You must worry for her as well, though, Malcolm.
This is your wife endangering her life in order to have children. I do.
And people have asked me, they go, oh, you know, would you stop her from doing this? Right. And I'm like, well, but then that's stopping one of my kids from coming into existence.
Like and I've interacted with my kids. I love my kids.
And I appreciate what she goes through and the risk she puts herself through and her body through. I also understand that if I tell her to stop, I'm functionally erasing all future kids we have from existence.
Like if an intruder had your wife and your kid at gunpoint and they're like, choose, everybody knows the right choice in that situation. It's just that the way our society views kids right now, we assign no value to the life of a child that isn't born or conceived yet.
But Malcolm, I know for both of you, it's not just a question of how many children you have. It's kind of the other qualities that that child also has too.
And you use a lot of data and you make other considerations when it comes to having a child. Can you talk us through that data? So one thing that we do with our embryos is called polygenic risk score selection, PGTP, which is a more advanced version of the typical pre-implantation genetic testing done by many couples who do IVF already.
This has been done for over 10 years. This is just a more advanced and detailed version of it.
This allows us to look at which embryos have higher risks of things like cancer, which we're very concerned about, and then have the higher cancer risk children later with hopes that once they're adults, they're more likely to have access to screening and cures that will save their lives. Now, PGTP also enables families to test for things like height and intelligence, which are considered very controversial terms.
But when you look at parents' interest in giving their children the best advantages possible, their willingness to pay for things like test prep courses and send them to all these special tutoring sessions, we really have trouble seeing a big difference between looking at an embryo's odds of having high educational attainment or high earnings versus trying to intervene after they are born. What about after the children are born and the names that you choose to give your children? Because you obviously, your approach isn't just before they're born, it's after as well.
We want to give our children very strong signals in many ways throughout their lives that we have high expectations for them, that they belong to a culture that expects them to contribute to a better future and to the betterment of humanity. We also want a culture that differentiates them from the rest of society because we found that what we call the urban monoculture, basically the predominant culture in most developed countries and most urban areas, is very toxic.
As we can see through declining birth rates,

it is a sterilizing culture. So we give our children names like Octavian, Torsten, Titan,

and Industry to show them, among many other things, that they are different and they are

not like these other people because we want to protect them from something we find to be very

harmful. Namia, the Collinses talked about the qualities that they want their children to have.
So it's not just about having lots of babies, it's the kind of babies, the qualities that these children have. Is that also quite common among pronatalists? It's interesting, isn't it? The pronatalists, many of them don't want to just increase the birth rate.
Some want to sort of optimise the children being born. You get those who are pro-family and pro-natalist.
I think that's probably how I would try and separate the two. And not everyone who is pro-having kids probably tests their embryos to the extent that the Collins family do or even can afford to do it.
So you do get families who do the common testing to make sure their unborn child is healthy, not at risk of any hereditary diseases. But whilst the numbers doing what the Collins family is doing is much smaller, I think there is actually a huge push by the Silicon Valley tech world.
Prominent figures in the tech industry, they're not just passive observers,

but they're almost becoming like active participants

in this so-called reproductive revolution.

They're investing so much money,

like millions and millions in startups

focused on fertility and genetic technologies

to try and encourage so-called super babies.

And of course, that is just ethically hugely controversial.

So far, Nomia, we've looked at how pronatalism is influencing the Collins' approach to their

own family and how they're raising their children. But next, I'm going to ask them

about how they think that should apply to families across the US. You're listening to The Global Story from the BBC World Service.
With me is Nomiya Iqbal, and I've also been speaking to pro-natalists Malcolm and Simone Collins. So we've talked about your personal lives and how you're raising your family, but pronatalism is a part of a movement that you want to start as well.
How are you planning to scale up this approach that you yourselves are taking and make it something bigger? That's not our goal at all, is to scale this up. We are one experiment to get through the crucible of fertility collapse.
You're encouraging others to do it though, Malcolm. This is something you'd like other people to do.
No, I'm encouraging others to find new and their own way of doing this. I would be disheartened if people tried to copy exactly what my wife are doing, because what my wife and I are doing with our family is an experiment,

and it's an experiment that might fail. And what the Pernatalist Movement really is,

is it's a collection of people running with their families their own experiment about how they might modify older traditions or older ways of living or come up with entirely new ways of living. And it's one of the reasons why internally the movement is so diverse.
You know, we're about to go to NatalCon. And when I go there, I am meeting and friendly with people of radically different traditions, whether they are a traditional Catholic or a transhumanist Mormon or people like techno Puritans like us.
And that's one of the most exciting things about the movement. Can I ask you about some of the other solutions that people have to falling fertility, that economic policies, for instance, should just be better, subsidized childcare, tax breaks, housing that's more affordable? There's a really big difference between family friendly policy, that is to say, things that parents would love to see, and policies that will actually help families have more children and encourage families to have more children.
It has been pretty clearly shown that sending people free child care or giving them very generous maternity leave or giving them payments for having children will not meaningfully increase birth rates. Hungary has spent five to six percent of its GDP on really expensive programs encouraging parents to have children that really just aren't moving the needle enough.
So Malcolm, what about just straight immigration, bring in more people to America? The most persistent and durable trend tied to falling fertility rates is the more income a group has within a country or the more income a country has, the lower its fertility rate on average. Why is it the less money you have, the more kids you have? It's about not being willing to sacrifice your current lifestyle to have more kids.
To the question of just strict immigration, this is a purely predatory policy. If we look right now at Latin America, we are across Latin America seeing a fertility rate collapse, much sharper and much steeper than what Europe has gone through or what the United States has gone through, with Latin America collectively falling below repopulation rate all the way back in 2019.
So if you're talking about solving it with immigration in the United States, you're literally just victimizing other countries that take the time to train and educate and spend tax dollars on people when they're in the parasitic phase of life. And then we get them during their productive phase of life.
Yeah, it might be all well and good for us, but it's hurting them. Simone, a really important point that I think listeners would want me to put to you is that when you describe pronatalism, a lot of people are going to think it sounds a lot like eugenics.
What's the difference? The difference between eugenics and what we practice, which we call polygenics, comes down to consent and individual choice. Eugenics, by definition, involves basically establishing these are good traits and genes, these are bad traits and genes.
And on a population level, we are going to try to maximize the good genes and minimize the bad genes. So one trait that may be very disadvantageous today could be the lifesaver of tomorrow, depending on how conditions change.
As a result, it's really important to have a diverse population and to allow families to select for traits that they think are important. And that's what we're all about.
For example, even though we could theoretically with polygenic risk score testing, screen autism out of our children, like many parents want to do, we don't because we actually think that there are a lot of benefits to certain types of autism, which are within our family. So the big difference comes down to coercion.
Is a society on the whole being forced to do or not do this thing with regard to how they have children? And about the importance of diversity and traits and understanding that there is no such thing as a universally good or bad trait. I asked the Collinses something I think they're asked a lot, Nomiya, about the children that they're having, the quality of the children.
When they are accused of or compared to eugenicists who only want certain races or classes to procreate, they say they're different. They say pronatalists are not like that.
But is that true? I imagine pronatalists would never go around saying we only want white people to be born. We only want white children.
I think, however, when you look at the movement more closely, there is a fine line between the concern about birth rates in the developed world and the great replacement theory. This is considered racist.
It posits that white Americans and Europeans are being replaced by non-white immigrants. I was asking the Collinses immigration why a solution wasn't just to bring in more people to America.
Many would say that the Collinses do have a point there, but it does leave them open to this argument that certainly liberals would make, which is if you want to increase birth rates, if you want to address the decline in population, then why not have more immigration? Why not bring people over from other countries? It has proven to be effective. Net immigration is actually the main reason why the US population is currently growing.
But then you do get those who are sceptical about pro-natalists' claims that this is just about economic reasons. They would say those certainly who are involved in pretty far right politics are more concerned about just quite bluntly having white babies and that they want to protect a vision of a more European culture.
I mean, the hard policy reality is that raising birth rates enough to address the problems of population ageing and eventual decline is impossible on the timescale required. Legal immigration, interestingly, in this country is a bipartisan issue.
President Donald Trump has said he wants legal immigration.

Of course, illegal immigration is incredibly contentious. But as I say, there are those who would argue that immigration would be the way to solve declining birth rates.

It would probably be the most effective way of doing it compared to having more babies.

We're speaking to you ahead of the annual natalism conference. You've mentioned it already, Malcolm.
It's happening in Austin this weekend. And you are going to be sharing the stage, though, with some eugenics advocates and some people who promote extreme views that you yourself have said you don't agree with, including, I know, Kevin Dolan.
And he says that eugenics and pronatalism positions are very much aligned. Malcolm, are you comfortable when you have to share a platform like that with someone like Kevin? You know, it's a very different way of seeing the world.
I personally, and as I've said, what I like about the pronatalist movement is the diversity of views within it. And that when I go to the Pernatalist conference, I get to hear ideas and perspectives that I don't get to hear anywhere else.

There's been this investigation, Nomi, into the organiser, Kevin Dolan, and they found his pseudonym Twitter account.

And on that, he shares homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic views as well.

And you mentioned that great replacement theory. He promotes that conspiracy theory as well and said that eugenics and pronatalism positions are very much aligned.
How do you think, Naomi, the Collinses keep a distance between themselves and these groups when actually they're sharing the same platform with them? Well, the way they keep the distance is just by saying, don't they, that we don't agree with them. We agree with the actual movement of pronatalism.
We agree with the concept of increasing birth rates, but we don't share that view. That's why you do get critics of the pronatalist movement who say, well, if you want to advance this movement, if you believe that this is the right way to increase birth rates, then you've got to look at who else is joining you with that message.
And, you know, just also worth saying that critics of pronatalism, they say it doesn't just overlap with racism. They also are concerned about misogyny.
They think that the sort of the pronatalist movement, certainly, again, the more extreme parts of it, view women as breeding machines whose job is to repopulate the earth. When Donald Trump entered the White House for a second time this year, NOMIA, his two top officials in his new administration, J.D.
Vance, the vice president and Elon Musk, are both men who have been very supportive of pro-natalism in the past. Have they actually used their platforms, though, to push pronatalist ideas? Well, Elon Musk is constantly accompanied by his child everywhere he goes, whether it's the Oval Office, whether he's on Air Force One and what have you.
And he recently welcomed his 14th child with another woman. but he's someone that's completely on record for saying that human population is on the verge of collapse.
I mean, he's really sowed panic over it. And he is saying that low birth rates present this huge risk to civilization, much more than global warming, he claims.
You've got J.D. Vance, the vice president.
He has three children. We know he's had a lot to say about women who don't have babies in the past, calling them childless cat ladies.
Before he was elected, he downplayed it. But when he gave his first speech as vice president, this was at the March for Life in Washington, D.C., regularly held every year by those who are anti-abortion and those who call themselves pro-life.
He said that he opposes abortion because, to quote him, he wants more babies in the United States of America. And then also another key member of Donald Trump's administration is Sean Duffy.
He was confirmed as the Transportation Secretary. And shortly after that, he circulated an order telling his department to give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average when awarding grants.
The Collins, as though Nomiya, definitely feel like this new Trump administration poses a huge opportunity for them. Given what you've just said, you can see why.
Definitely. And, you know, Donald Trump is also very closely aligned with the tech world.
Fertility generally is becoming this sort of pet project in Silicon Valley. I think in 2023, there was about $174 million invested in it.
You've got Sam Altman. He's the head of open AI.
He wants to have a big family. He's investing in experimental fertility technology.
It's a startup working to make egg cells out of other cells in the body, which basically means that a woman without viable eggs or even two men could make a baby. You've got some that are experimenting with using artificial wombs.
And, you know, in some ways, this technology forward vision of pronatalism has become a religion. And so I can see why families like the Collins would look at the Trump administration as a real great opportunity for them to push forward their philosophy.
Nomiya, thanks so much. And you, thanks so much, Lucy.
Pronatalism now has two very powerful advocates right at the heart of government, N.J. DeVance, the vice president, and Elon Musk.
Simone, what are your expectations of those two men in office? Elon Musk is a little bit busy with Doge, so I don't expect him to be very involved in pronatalist policy, but he's been always a huge advocate of pronatalist policies, as well as raising awareness about demographic collapse. We are profoundly grateful for that.
We're thrilled that J.D. Vance is vice president and that in his first speech as vice president, he talked about the importance of America having more babies.
When you look not just at these two men, but many people within the Trump administration, you can see that pronatalism is really permeated throughout the entire organization, from Carolyn Levitt, who sometimes brings her infant in to work with her, to just the number of children that members of the administration have. We're talking five, six, seven.
You can see that these are people who just fundamentally agree that children are good and that the future is important. And we find that to be incredibly helpful.
We have submitted executive

order drafts to the administration for low hanging fruit that we think could make lives a lot easier

for parents and increase the total fertility rate of the United States. We have very high hopes for

this administration. And thanks so much to you for listening.
Wherever you're listening in the world,

this has been The Global Story. Thanks for having us in your headphones.

Goodbye.