Episode 31: Pro-Natalism

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donnegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrienne, today we are talking about a subject very near and dear to my heart, but I've been obsessing about it so much that now my notes, my outline for this episode looks kind of like a cabin from a beautiful mind.

You know, it's just like it's.

Oh, God, I haven't seen that movie in like 30 years.

Is that the one where the camera rotates around Russell Crowe to show like he's thinking?

It's Russell Crowe as like in the world's least believable performance as a math genius who succumbs to insanity.

Oh, and Paul Betsy as a guy who's very obviously not there.

They're like,

you're like, yeah, no, we, we knew, dude.

No, the figures who are going to be very obviously not there in my mind are like Shulama's Firestone.

And we're going to have a really good time because today we are talking about the recent rise of pronatalism.

So Adrian, what do you know about pronatalism?

So it appears to be a rebrand of 1920s eugenics, it seems to me.

It's about where back then the worry was about the wrong people having too many babies.

Now the worry is no one's having sufficient number of babies for replenishment.

Although I wouldn't be shocked if you told me that like scratch below the surface, and they are worried about the the wrong people having babies, given that like Elon Musk has apparently taken it upon himself to kind of like seed the world with his spawn.

And I guess that already is the next thing I know.

I know it from the Silicon Valley context.

I'm sure there's sort of a triad wifey component to it.

And I think that those dweebs there in Valley Forge or wherever they live who keep getting profiled when people are bored of the.

leather face looking motherfucker, right?

Like they profile this couple who's like having tons of children.

Excuse me.

They've only had four.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Which is far too many for my taste, but it's not insane.

It's not leatherface level.

That's right.

But so like tech founders go in for this shit and it intersects with like long-termism and it dovetails sort of with effective altruism kind of circles, I would think.

And frequently also Catholic integralism, which we're going to speak about a little bit too.

Oh, Adrian Vermuel.

Yeah, our old friend, friend of the pod, Adrian Vermuel.

Yeah, I am.

Oh, my God.

So just briefly for a 10,000-foot level, I think the definition of pronatalism that we're going to be using for our purposes is that it is the belief in the advocacy that people should be having more children and that the birthing of more children should be encouraged both culturally and as a matter of public policy, right?

And this has kind of become a buzzword because of our good old friend of the show, JD Vance.

So, JD Vance

has

a tendency to say a lot of really creepy things about children and specifically to try and denigrate, disparage, humiliate adults and really women without children.

Cat ladies.

Yeah, cat ladies.

So this is like a series of remarks he's made that have become part of like the Harris Walls campaign's oppo-dump on JD Vance.

The guy just like cannot resist going on a podcast.

He's been on every in-cell, creepy right-wing podcast.

But he also says this in like places where he really should know that he has a big audience and also in places where he believes that he is writing in private, right?

Yeah.

So JD Vance's kind of most famous comment was disparaging Democrats as childless cat ladies on a Tucker Carlson interview that he gave in 2021.

He said, this country is run by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they've made.

And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.

He then went on to cite AOC

and Pete Budig.

Noted childless Pete Budig, man.

He did not have children at the time, but then he did have children, and they didn't like that either.

A month later.

Yeah.

But JD Vance also talks this way in private.

He was quoted in a series of recently revealed emails deriding the childless as, quote, sociopathic.

He made in public in 2021 a proposal that parents should be granted extra votes to cast on behalf of their children effectively limiting the political representation of the childless adults because he says people without kids should quote face the consequences and the reality and he has repeatedly said that those without children have no stake in the future of our country right that's right that's what lee edelman calls reproductive futurism right yeah the face of the child is the future you cannot be thinking about the future unless you think about that children.

Lee Edelman is a tiny bé noir of the group of people that we are going to be talking about a little more.

They don't give Lee Edelman as much attention as I would think they would.

They spend a lot more time talking about Schula Miss Firestone.

And for some reason, Rachel Cusk really gets under their nerves because they don't think her book about early motherhood is sufficiently laudatory of the experience.

Oh, I thought they like, they didn't like the outline trilogy.

They're like, she's just sitting on it for like 20 pages.

What the hell?

Well, it's a life's work.

It's a life's work that they don't like.

Maybe we should gloss for listeners who Lee Edelman is.

He's a queer theorist, an English professor.

And the book that they're likely not enjoying is called, I believe, No Future, Queer Theory in the Death Drive, which basically interrogates this kind of, this nexus about like reproduction and a claim to the future.

And also like, what is our ethical commitment to the future in some way, right?

Like, and he comes down on the side of like

queerness is the thing that unsettles that nexus.

It sort of says, we want to have fun here and now, you know, we want to imagine a future that is not just embodied by today's snot-nosed three-year-olds.

So, that book, I think it's still pretty influential, but like, I could imagine why these people would just absolutely hate it.

They also tend to go after Sophie Lewis, who is a British sex radical who wrote a book called Full Surrogacy Now.

They tend to link Lewis with Edelman.

I don't think that they actually have a ton in common because Lewis is actually very invested,

I would say, in pregnancy and birth, but believes that it should be divested from the nuclear family and treated as sort of like a community concern.

Which is sort of the way Shula Myth Firestone and the Dialectic of Sex talks about it, right?

If I'm remembering correctly?

No, Shula Myth Firestone actually has like a techno-futurist manifesto at the end of her 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex, in which she advocates for artificial wombs.

In vitro, yeah, yeah.

No, not in vitro, artificial wombs, like completely divorced from the female body, right?

Right.

That's what I was remembering.

Yeah, exactly.

Like what we need to do is Shulameth Firestone's prescription is like this feminist idea that we need to actually divorce reproductive labor.

from the gendered body so that those born aside female at birth, those codified as woman, feminized or unburdened of this particular kind of labor that is, you know, very onerous and dangerous and symbolically overladen and moralized.

We're getting a little ahead of ourselves because we are already treating these queer and feminist critiques of reproductivity much more seriously than the actual anti-pronatalists do.

So the thing about J.D.

Vance is that he's kind of not alone.

He's like the most visible.

of these pronatalists right now.

He says the quiet part loud in a way that some of them sort of avoid doing,

but he is just one of a series of emerging voices on the right that are really calling for social marginalization of childless adults, particularly childless women, the valorization of maternity and childbearing above other

life pursuits for women, and sort of the removal of the individual freedom to decline childbearing.

And I think it's very conspicuous, or at least to me, it's very conspicuous, that that this has become a very visible and increasingly mainstream line of conservative gender thought in the wake of Dobbs, which meant that in fact, not being a parent is something that is

denied in many states to many women by the force of law, right?

There is forced motherhood happening right now.

It is not theoretical.

It is an actual lived reality by a large, large percent of women of reproductive age in this country.

country, that is not a thought experiment.

That is something that is happening in the real-lived world, right?

And so, as we talk about the pronatalist sort of diagnosis of the cultural problem, what I want us to remember and what I hope we can keep coming back to is the fact that people are literally being forced to become parents by the state right now.

Right.

So,

you know, J.D.

Vance recently came under a lot of fire for his pronatalist comments and particularly for the way that his comments

got

interpreted and used against the Republican ticket.

I really think that you can draw a straight line from like J.D.

Vance's obsession with reproductivity and breeding to the Tim Wall's characterization of the right as weird and the sort of like reclaiming of a more normative politeness, honestly, on the part of like Democrats, right?

Which is an interesting clash because that's normativity is exactly what the pro-natalists claim for themselves, right?

But Vance is kind of just one of a series of people who are like ushering this into the mainstream.

Do you remember Blake Masters?

We talked about him a little on our JD Vance episode with Gabe Boynant.

Oh, yeah.

Blake Basters is

kind of a amanuensis to Peter Thiel, ran a horribly misconceived Senate campaign in Arizona and just lost the primary for a House seat in same state.

That appears to be his kink is losing contested elections in the state of Arizona.

Yeah, he is this really like weird, leathery, reptilian guy.

Whenever I see him, I expect like a forked tongue to flip out

of his mouth.

He's very pointy and he sort of speaks like a drill sergeant in these short declarative sentences that are just like absolutely sadistic and creepy.

And Peter Thiel keeps funding him to run for political office, and he keeps losing because he is so remarkably off-putting.

But he sort of jumped in in defense of his fellow Peter Thiel acolyte, J.D.

Vance, to say, If you aren't running or can't run a household of your own, how can you relate to a constituency of families or govern wisely with respect to future generations?

This idea that people who are not parents should not be like full citizens should not be leaders.

And Elon Elon Musk, who's also like probably behind JD Vance, like our most famous pro-natalist, a guy who is devoting his considerable resources as a billionaire to advancing like conspiracy theories about the need to breed more, a big endorser of the replacement theory.

He jumped in to call Kamala Harris an extinctionist because he decides that she's insufficiently pronatalist.

Yeah.

And we might say sort sort of great replacement theory does have an implicit pro-natalist message, right?

Like the elites don't want or they don't want us, whoever the us is, to have babies so they can bring in immigrants to replace them, right?

That's the that's the idea.

And that's a very, very old.

idea on the right.

I mean, I think great replacement theory comes originally from France, I think.

But I mean, like Lothrop Stoddard in the 1920s, the big books, what do they call it?

The revolt against civilization, The Menace of the Underman, right?

Like the idea that like we're replacing the babies, quote unquote, we should be having with what would later be called subhumans, right?

Like with people who are less than.

That's a really, really old concern.

Yeah.

And, you know, JD Vance, our buddy, just blurbed a book that describes liberals as subhuman.

But, you know, the great replacement theory, this conspiracy theory that elites, and it's usually implied or sometimes outright said that these elites are jewish yeah it's an anti-semitic strain are sort of orchestrating a decline of native white birth rates in order to replace that population with these black and latino populations who supposedly are much easier for the nefarious Jewish elites to control, right?

And pronatalism is positioned as one way to counteract this, right?

You could have more white native born children to change the population.

And that's sort of the like classic form that pronatalism takes is often as a gendered reaction to a racial fear, right?

It's like because the racial composition of our community is changing, we therefore need to exert greater control over women and extract greater quantities of children and of reproductive labor more broadly out of them in order to sort of rebalance or reassert racial superiority.

We're going to talk about that when we look at historical moments of pro-natalism in the American past.

I mean, it's interesting to think about the fact that, like, I think you're exactly right.

This is clearly about control of women's destinies, careers, and bodies, ultimately.

There is also kind of an element of cope here, right?

Like, I mean, I'm thinking like...

Great replacement rhetoric around someone like George Soros is really, really strong on the European right, where it's like this kind of, you know, I hope I'm not offending any listener when I say this, but like, it's always all funny, these like countries that are like, you know, that have very low birth rates, well below replacement, as far as I understand it, and are like, oh, they're going to like try and bring in all these Afghan men in order to replace us.

And it's like, I don't know how to put this, but no one wants to go to your countries, right?

Like, this is coke.

This is coke.

What you're noticing is like, yeah, there are few kids around.

Like, the composition society is changing.

And it's easier to yell about George Soros than to be like, huh, okay.

So the world in which, you know, these children will grow up will be very, very different from the one I grew up in.

In the United States, like a country that has vigorous immigration, that story has one status, but it's also important to note that it like, it's used in places to sort of explain and kind of thematize declining birth rates, where there's no risk of like anyone out of any free choice being like, yes, this is the shithole country where I wish to make my, this is what I left my warm homeland for, right?

Like I'm not going to name any specifics here but like right there are countries where you're like i'm sorry are you are you being overrun by people who are like yes this is the place i need to live i'll say like if i was a migrant who had made it from syria to say poland or hungary my greatest dream would be to get to germany you know like

my greatest dream is to get out of poland or hungary look i mean like some people you know enjoy these countries but it is it is just a fact that like, you know, that very few people, I agree, like leave Afghanistan.

It's not the caravans that come to the United States.

Like, there's something interesting there, too, right?

Like, there's almost a phantasmic element there where in great replacement theory, the birth rates are more real than the immigrants, ultimately, right?

Like, even though there are obviously tons of displaced people traveling the globe, I think the way the kind of narrative can become unmoored from whether there are any immigrants coming into your country does suggest that the birth rates are the secret, the thing that this story is secretly about.

Yeah.

So like you're kind of tapping into

what I would call like the unspoken unconscious of the pro-natalist argument, right?

Is that there's a lot of racial anxiety sort of simmering underneath.

And it also sort of bespeaks to often an awareness of national decline, right?

So like in the U.S., I think like we are in pretty clearly a moment of like imperial decline, right?

The United States is no longer the center of a unipolar world in the way that we were when we didn't have to worry about like international competition from say China.

And, you know, we are no longer

quite as powerful economically for large stretches of our middle class, which has really been sort of extracted out of existence and a lot more people are being forced into poverty, right?

And we are now much less politically stable than we were, say, 30, 40 years ago, right?

So like when you ask pronatalists about like when their ideal moment in American history was, they almost always point to whatever decade they grew up in.

So like the millennials say that it was the 90s, the Jed X say it was the 70s and 80s, the boomers say it was the 50s and 60s.

And like what these eras had in common is that the speaker was a literal child.

And it still has lead in their brain from back then, which probably also accounts for.

There's also a degree of nostalgia for childhood among a lot of pronatalists because that's something I want to talk about.

But like, there are these like far-right fringe pronatalists, like the Elon Musks, Peter Thiels, J.D.

Vance's, Blake Masters, who are really taking after two political theorists in particular, Adrian Vermeule, we've already mentioned, the Catholic Integralist, and Patrick Denin, who is a political theorist

at the University of Notre Dame, both of whom have really advanced a kind of hostility to individual rights and prefer what they call an idea of the common good, the idea that there's a

sort of collective interest that people's individual actions need to be compelled into line with, right?

And this is something that you will see echoed in much less explicit forms by this other crop of pronatalists who are sort of

straddling the far right and the acceptable center.

And some of them are really like apologists for pronatalism who are looking at a liberal audience, right?

And so I think the most prominent of these are two editors of The Point, Sasha Berg and Rachel Wiseman.

Their book, What Are Children For?,

is one of a slew of pronatalist books that have come out in 2024, but most of them have been from academic presses.

Berg and Wiseman are at a trade publication and they have a like really sort of public facing and really like explicitly like liberal women facing pro-natalist argument that they're making, trying to convince millennial women to have children in this book.

But then you also get from like Yale University Press, like Jennifer Banks' Natality.

There is also from Harper Collins, this guy Tim Carney, who's like a perennial pronatalist.

I think we also talked about him on our Marriage Last Years episode with Rebecca Traister.

He just put out Family Unfriendly, How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Harder Than It Needs to Be.

There is also Begetting by Mara Vanderloot from Princeton University Press.

Father Time by Sarah Baffler-Hardy from Princeton University Press.

Just like kind of a slew of these.

They're kind of everywhere.

These books making an argument on a philosophical level or an economic level or sometimes a psychological level that people aren't having enough kids and really need to be having more.

And that the things that people are doing instead of having children are evidence of like decadence and moral decline.

Yeah.

And the, I mean, I'm guessing you'll get to that and the wages of second wave feminism, right?

There was a piece, I think, just a couple of weeks ago in First Things, the Catholic magazine, by a professor, I think his name is Carl Truman.

He goes after, he's basically, this is, these are the wages of like Shulamith Firestone and Donna Haraway, right?

So like, this is like also just a way to kind of like have fights with feminism from over 30 years ago.

Right.

I mean, we are at a historical moment.

I'm going to talk about this when I give you my like grand unified theory of pronatalism.

Yes.

But we are at a historical moment where all of the gains of second wave feminism, not just abortion, but also birth control, women in the paid workforce, the idea of marriage is voluntary and divorce is accessible, all of these accomplishments of second wave feminism are being re-litigated and having to be re-won.

I think they are actually sincerely endangered in a lot of cases.

And anti-feminists see a real opportunity post-ops to kind of not just force birth, but to like remake the whole gender order in order to undo the mid-century gains.

And they have a few of what are called like reactionary feminists trying to make this case for them from what they purport is a feminist point of view.

So there's like Nina Power, who just got fired from Compact for being too sympathetic to Nazis,

which has got to be a really hard thing to do.

Why do I know that name?

Yeah.

There is also, oh my God, Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry.

Both of those women are British feminists who is trying to argue that things like abortion and birth control and the stigmatization of premarital sex have actually been worse for women.

She makes kind of an evolutionary psychology argument.

I reviewed her book on My Substack a while ago.

It was like laughably bad, but I read it so that you don't have to.

And then they're kind of like liberal apologists for gender conservatism.

And of these, I would count Rachel Cohen at Vox, who is on kind of a pro-natalist kick, Christine Emba of The Atlantic.

Tyler Austin Harper, also of The Atlantic, and Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker, who are like people who have a critique of the decadence of liberal elites that has led them to like an appreciation for these socially conservative pro-natalist politics.

So there are people who are not on the extreme marginal too online millennial right

who are making this case that, no, feminism has gone too far.

We have not emphasized motherhood, maternity, and families enough.

And we need to sort of bring in at least some kind.

of renegotiation of the gender order away from women's individual freedom and back towards an encouragement of maternity.

Yeah.

There's already, I think, a kind of a duality here that I'm sure you're going to talk more about.

But I'm noticing, right, like on the one hand, you get a kind of pronatalism that is about policy and about how to make it easier for people to have children, right?

This is like, I mean, I think South Korea has really gone in that direction.

And then there's the kind of vibes-based stuff where it's just like, you know, women are getting oatmeal lattes instead of making the babies, you know, and especially for the kind of like that part of our chattering class, let's say, that seems to get most of its bylines from critiquing the foibles of like their 20 friends in Bushwick, right?

Like, we're going to get that.

We're going to get like, oh, my friends are too busy starting bands to like have children.

It's like, well, okay.

Not sure.

how generalizable that is.

But then there is the other one, which is like, you know, we need

better policies in order to incentivize people or to remove childhood penalties.

Of course, the question is then, like, what are we helping people to do?

Right.

Like, there's the Nordic model, which says we are doing this so that women can combine childbearing with a fulfilling professional life.

And then there's the one that's like, no, no, without the last part, we want women to just crack out more babies.

Not the professional thing, please.

So there's four major arguments that the pronatalists make.

And then there's a couple of arguments that their antagonists make, right?

To try and counter or integrate those arguments into like a more liberal worldview.

So the four arguments that the pronatalists make, I'm going to run through them now, are eugenic or eugenicist, which is in fairness to our modern pronatalists, not really what they're saying, at least not what they're saying into microphones.

We have some pronatalists who have clearly like a positive eugenics attitude, the idea that like we need to be like encouraging the most fit to have more babies.

I think Elon Musk, who decides to like, you know, impregnate every woman who says hello to him, is like clearly operating on a positive eugenics model.

Jeffrey Epstein, before he died and before he got arrested, had his kind of like crackpot positive eugenics idea where he was going to like breed a lot of surrogates.

on his island and then like populate the world with what he understood as his superior seed.

Like I will say the positive eugenicist model tends to be very narcissistic, right?

The people who are saying we need to be encouraging the most like quote unquote genetically fit to have more children are like almost always men talking about themselves.

Yeah, right.

But I will also say like a lot of the pronatalists who are talking about women who don't have children and how those women need to be persuaded and or compelled to have more children.

Right.

They're always talking about elite, liberal, highly educated white women in coastal cities, right?

They're talking about like frankly, like women they went to college with who went to private schools, got four-year degrees, got professional degrees, are earning six figures, are, you know, millennials.

They're not talking about people who go to high school, maybe go to like some college, some nursing school, who are living in rural places.

Cause candidly, those people are having kids and they tend to have kids in their 20s.

So there is like an elite focus that I think has a eugenicist undertone that we can talk about.

And we should say that this is a Western phenomenon, it seems to me, Europe and the United States, but the eugenicism is a lot more explicit on the European right, right?

Where the fear is not no one in this society is having babies.

The fear is we are not like, you know, whoever's speaking, usually white man, Muslims are.

So this is like something like Tiro Zarat scene in Germany with, for example, called Germany abolishes itself, how we're putting our country in jeopardy.

This is all about immigrants are coming and they have different birth rates.

It's like, you know, turns out that's not true.

But there you do get like the wrong people are having babies.

And I agree that in the United States, it gets sort of refracted through cultural issues, right?

You're like, oh, when you're saying, oh, women are looking for fulfillment and like hanging out with their friends in bars too much to have babies.

They're like, okay, we're talking about a very specific class of people, aren't we?

But it at least has the advantage of not being like, and here's who I think shouldn't have babies, right?

Like, that's, that's nice.

Thank you for at least that, I guess.

I mean, that has not always been historically the case in the U.S.

The U.S.

has a very long and very violent history of forcible sterilization, particularly of women of color and particularly via the welfare system.

Women who get health insurance via Medicaid in particular, or women who are eligible for like aid to families with dependent children or food stamps are often encouraged.

And by encouraged, I really mean like, you know, forced, coerced into either getting long-acting birth control or having tubal legations.

That is a really rich history, and it's not as far away as we think, and it's not as completely eradicated from our welfare benefit system as we tend to talk about.

So, like, this other kind of negative eugenics in the U.S.

is ongoing.

It's not something that the most visible pronatalists are talking about in the American context.

Exactly.

The second argument they tend to make after the eugenicist one is, or maybe like really in the U.S.

context, foregrounded above the eugenicist one is economic, right?

They say, we need more babies because we need more people paying into social security and we need more people paying taxes and we need to have

more people who are going to grow up to be nurses, to take care of you when you're old, right?

This is like a social-wide version of the blackmail that gets made on an individual level to childless women.

It's like, who's going to take care of you when you're old is now they do it with like, who's going to pay for your social security when you're old.

But I mean, it's funny that this talking point is brought to us by people who do not pay their taxes.

Like, that's the other thing you could do.

You could just pay your fucking taxes, Elon Musk, or your rent on Twitter's headquarter.

And then that would already

probably offset a bunch of kids.

This is also a

problem both on the tax level and on the like nursing the elderly level that is already being solved, frankly, with immigration and could be solved with more immigration.

Like who is working as nurses in old folks homes that is not overwhelmingly like Native born Americans?

These are immigrant populations.

Like most of our nursing service is an immigrant population or a large chunk of it.

But, you know, this is also something that I think partakes of the opacity of economics to a lot of people.

Yeah.

Because the idea that there is this like one-to-one relationship between women's fertility and the size of of GDP growth has actually been like pretty thoroughly debunked in the economic literature, but it makes a lot of intuitive sense to somebody who doesn't totally know what they're talking about.

So, because it's so crude, because it seems so obvious, they kind of use it to beat people over the head with.

But there's actually a lot of policy interventions, including like alternative tax schemes or like increasing immigration that could offset this in the way that does not require actually

a reversal of the gendered progress that feminists have made.

But this idea gets trotted out.

It's like, okay, to be responsible citizens.

Sorry, we just have to make women property again.

It's like, there's no other way.

And it gets talked about as if it's

you know, the only sensible thing when in fact it is like a wildly disproportionate response to a problem for which there are like many, many different solutions.

Well, the other thing that I'm sort of picking up here as a theme is like this whole thing has the gesture of like humility and like wanting to do something altruistic, but ultimately being incredibly narcissistic, right?

Like it's all these men being like, hey, so maybe you should pop out a baby for me, right?

We're like, okay, so I guess I wish gave father to that thought to stay with the natalist metaphor.

But then the other thing here is like, oh, we should have more kids.

And then in brackets, so they can wipe our butts when we're older.

Like, it's just about your ass again.

Like, right?

I mean, like, we could be like, let's soil and green ourselves when we hit 70.

That would also solve this problem, right?

Like, let's turn ourselves into mulch, but that's not the offer that they're making.

They're like, no, I need to have a child who can like do menial labor for me, right?

Like, it combines or has this very thin veneer of altruism, but it's ultimately like narcissistic and self-obsessed, like to an almost comical extent.

Right.

Often deployed by men who I don't think are wiping a lot of babies' asses in the early years of childhood, right?

Like that, you talked about the creepy Pennsylvania couple in which the father, in one of his 100,000 interviews, because these people with the terrible glasses are just incessantly profiling.

I know.

They have some like annoyingly anonymous name.

They're like the Johnsons or whatever.

They're the Collinses.

The Collinses.

Simone and Malcolm Collins.

She's the one with the round glasses.

He's the one with the square glasses.

Those are the two genders.

Yeah.

And they're both with the punchable faces.

But they've been profiled over and over as this pronaless couple who say that they're going to have

until the wife's uterus literally ruptures because they have a pro-natalist agenda.

They're creepy conservatives.

And they have a domestic arrangement in which the father does absolutely no child care until the children are 18 months age.

Oh, is that true?

I didn't even know that.

I know he, he, his job is to hit the children, uh, apparently.

So

yeah, I'm sure they both do that plenty.

But you know, this is an idea that we need this menial labor done for us.

We need a servant class of children.

Is also, it always comes with with the implicit addendum, like, and they will be generated and raised by our servant class of women because these are not guys who are advocating for a ton of paternal involvement in child rearing.

So then the next argument that the pronatalists often make is really a moral one, right?

And sometimes this comes in what we think of as like

traditionally sexually conservative ideas, right?

That childlessness is a result

of an unnaturally unimpeded sexuality, right?

Like now we have

abortion, or we used to have abortion before jobs, and now we have birth control, which a lot of these political projects are now also going after, but that this has changed the natural consequences of sex and has enabled people to pursue a kind of sexuality that has insufficient constraints.

So the notion of sexual license as being

enabled by the prospect of childlessness and leading to like a kind of moral corruption among elites is something you get a lot.

And you can see this kind of idea of like excessive pressure or decadence bleeding into the way that the pronatalists talk about childless lives because they imagine them as like insane, like insane, amoral lives led by people whose

day-to-day have like no values and no stakes, right?

And so, like, they always talk about

people going out dancing, people drinking too much, people doing drugs, people having a lot of sex, people having a lot of casual sex, people having sex with multiple partners.

They think a lot about how the childless are having too much sex, you know?

Yeah, I mean, as a gay man, I cannot possibly imagine what it's like to have conservatives have vivid imaginations of what your everyday life is like.

And you're like, wait, my life is like 10% as cool as what you think.

And now I feel bad.

But no, this is a clearing of the single woman, right?

This is how conservatives have looked at.

especially gay men, I would imagine, for quite some time.

Yeah, you know, it reminds me of the way like I think about like what my life would be like if I had just a ton of money, right?

Like I would be on a beach all the time.

I would like do esoteric kinds of like weird yoga.

I would be like reading for pleasure and always on vacation and never on the internet.

When in fact, we know that the richest people in the world are actually constantly on the internet and they seem to live like kind of narrow, miserable lives, right?

Like the fantasy

that's like pretty clearly to me injected with envy, right?

That's right.

Of like a pleasure-filled life with no stakes and no Cotidian annoyances is like clearly animating the notion of the childless woman that exists in the pronatalist imagination.

And it just like has no bearing on how actual childless women live, which are like anybody else.

They have responsibilities.

They have often a lot of intimate connections.

They have tedious things they would rather not do.

But in the pronatalist mind, the childless life is one of just pure selfishness and pure pleasure, right?

So it's understood as children as like kind of a way to discipline adults, children as a way to like make adults more worthy, more responsible.

Raise adults.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's also worth kind of, I'm going to make two points here.

One very

stupid and one hopefully kind of nerdy.

One is this imagination of luxury, of women luxuriating in singlehood strikes me as also, of course, an anxiety about the fact that like, you know, we talked about this with the Taylor Swift episode, that there now are women who easily outearn the men around them and compete with them for jobs, et cetera, et cetera.

There's also something like that, right?

Like, there's a kind of an economic anxiety that now attaches to women in a way that, for at least those thinkers, seems to feel new, right?

Like, that's not to say that you couldn't have felt that way in the 1980s, but like they didn't think they had to worry about the ladies.

Now they do, and

it's not making them altogether happy.

well i mean like women no longer or or women at least in certain classes right this is actually very much not a universal experience but there are kinds of women who these pro-natalist pundits and thinkers are seeing a lot who do not require partnership with men for their economic survival right That is something that has sincerely changed since the second wave era when a lot of women entered higher paid paid work, entered higher echelons of paid work, entered higher paying professions in large numbers.

It became like very thinkable actually for women to survive without male support, which has changed the dynamics of heterosexuality because now men need to compete with something other than women's destitution and desperation in order to secure a woman partner.

Yeah, I mean, like, what's the, you'll notice, but what's the date?

At what point could women

procure a line of credit without

a man signing the papers?

It's

not within my lifetime but it's like in the 70s right yeah meaning that just doubles the number of people you compete with for you know that nice apartment that you wanted to put a down payment on or that you wanted to put the pay first month's rent on right like like this is this this does reflect something real but it's like you know fellas would do anything but you know

compete with women on a on a level playing field yeah right and not just compete you know for apartments, compete for jobs, compete for public esteem.

Like, I will say, I think I've told this story before, but I once had

before my career as a feminist, I was a young writer, and an editor was like, Moira, don't you think a male editor somewhat older than me was like, don't you think like sexism is over?

And I was like, well, what do you mean by that?

And he's like, well, you know, and then he tells the story about how he wanted a job that seemed like a really cool job and a woman got the job.

And to this, to his mind, this meant that if anything, women were now at an advantage over men.

And this is, you know, something that a lot of Republican politics is now trying to tap into, especially among when they pitch young men.

Yeah, yeah.

They're really.

The Andrew Tate wing.

Yeah, they're like really trying to cultivate a sense of a prerogative of dominance, social dominance, economic dominance.

as a as a masculine right that has now been denied, right?

Yeah, right.

Couched as like male victimization fantasy.

It's being taken away.

Your birthright is being taken away from you.

The other thing I wanted to point out is there is this, I wonder whether the origins of what you're describing, this idea that

the political ramifications of tattering family structures actually come out of the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution.

There's a bunch of conservative writers in Switzerland, France, Germany, immediately after the French Revolution who sort of write, like the reason why the French Revolution was able to happen,

which they hated, they were horrified by, was because the aristocracies,

like aristocracy, the aristocrats sort of like lost sight of their family structures, right?

They like were unable to sort of, right?

Like the women were sleeping around, everyone was kind of having parties all the time, right?

Let them eat cake, blah, blah, blah.

And then what did the women do?

They brought all those enlightened philosophers to the court.

And the philosophers were like, hey, should we maybe like not have a king or whatever?

And boom, they chopped his head off, right?

So this idea that like actually the dissolution of

aristocratic family really brought about kind of the downfall of that class was was extremely pervasive among the reactionary right in the let's say 18 teens 1820s and then their idea always was like we have to restore the family in order to restore the family of the state the other thing of course that's worth pointing out is that like

in some way some some very some much more republican or democratic elements in European political thought also thought this, right?

They thought that the bourgeois family was more natural and was more based on genuine affection and that it sort of showed why they had rightfully superseded the aristocracy.

Meaning, I mean, like, this is kind of going way back, but it does mean that like some form of democratic societies have implicitly justified themselves through their family structures, right?

They've said like the way we conduct our business morally, like not in the sense of like, you know, stealing or whatever, but in the sense of like, you know, mores, like our, our, our, our customs are better, right?

They're, they're more natural.

They're, they're more humane.

And that is the thing that renews the state.

Meaning, right, like when that goes, right, it does kind of call into question this sort of implicit assumption that I think

has subtended at least some democratic thought as well.

Yeah, you know, this is one of those moments where the radical feminists and the like

neo-patriarchs or, you know, organized misogynists sort of agree on their diagnosis and then disagree on the interpretation, right?

Because one's like, that's awesome.

The other one's like, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you see like this assertion that men's private domination over women and ability to control women and to control reproduction and to order private reproductive life via the family is the baseline locus of control that enables every other hierarchy and every other organizing institution of society, right?

And when you lose control of women, you unleash this anarchic questioning of all other kinds of hierarchical social orders.

This to me sounds really awesome.

And to Patrick Denin and Adrian Vermeule, like, you know, agree on that diagnosis, but they think it needs to be prevented at all costs.

I had one more argument that the cronatalists make.

Often in eugenicist and racist pro natalist accounts, there will be this like almost you have to hand it to them orientalizing fantasy about the gendered orders of the racial other who's like coming in to like outbreed you, right?

They will say like, you know, these people that we are in some that we imagine ourselves in a racial competition with, you have to hand it to them because they are better at controlling their women.

And that's why they are able to extract more children from their women.

And this is something that like J.D.

Vance kind of touched on.

He was on a podcast where this right-wing influencer was like, like, the whole point of the post-menopausal female is to assist with childcare, right?

Like, this is the reason that they are not simply, you know, killed off.

Drowned in a pond, yeah.

Yeah.

There was the same right-wing influencer who said that feminists needed to be raped.

That was before JD Vance agreed to go on his podcast.

Before JD Vance went on, I was going to ask him.

His podcast, yeah.

And then, and J.D.

Rance kind of like nods along with this post-menopausal female comment.

And then he goes, Yeah, this is actually a great advantage of marrying into an Indian family because they have a gender order wherein now my mother-in-law has a, some sort of perceived cultural obligation to provide me free child care.

So, you know, he managed to make it weird racially as well, but like he's partaking of this fantasy of like an Eastern culture with a more correct gender order, right?

Yeah.

So I'm guessing

the

gender division of labor in the advance household includes Usha not listening to fucking podcasts because I'd be like, I would throw the fucking phone across the room if I heard that.

I think Usha Vance knows exactly what she's doing.

I do not think of Usha Vance as a victim.

Well, maybe she's just, maybe she just doesn't listen to podcasts.

Have you thought about that?

Like, she like, she downloads like tomorrow.

She's like, honey, I downloaded the Apple Podcast app.

Like, oh, God, I'm going to move out.

This will end in murder.

Well, this is like brings us to the contradiction of what I think is like the fourth pronatalist argument, which is that

having children is both a guarantee of and a sign of psychological maturity.

Yeah.

So not just a moral disciplining tool, but a signal of having reached psychic adulthood, right?

So like

in sort of liberal accounts of this, you'll hear having a child depicted as a sign that somebody has like healed from or overcome past trauma, right?

Like now he's finally able to have a baby, which he was previously too wounded to do.

You know, you hear that a lot.

But then you also hear in like sort of

more traditionalist tellings, childbearing as like kind of an initiation into adulthood as like the thing that she's psychologically fit.

I don't want to blame the Freud revival.

for everything, but I do think we have to blame Freud here for this psychological paradigm of childbearing because he really did advance a notion that for women in particular, most psychic suffering could be cured by having a child and particularly by having a son, right?

He diagnosed something that he called masculinity syndrome, which was his pathological interpretation of women's aspiration to intellectual or psychic life.

And he said that the cure for masculinity syndrome was to have a child because therefore women could stop this misguided, wrong, in fact, sick desire to obtain a symbolic phallus in the form of like intellectual professional achievement by in fact just growing a literal penis inside them and giving birth to a son.

I think, you know, Freud had kind of a long night of darkness in the 90s and 2000s, which to me now seem in retrospect like liberal feminism sort of apiosis, right?

But he's back in a big way and the intellectuals and the elites are embracing Freud and ushering in his understanding of childbearing as a sort of like crowning achievement of psychic development, especially for women.

And I don't think you can ignore the influence of that interpretation either.

I suppose even though I think Freud in that way just reflected, like, I mean, he's pathbreaking in many ways, but the idea that hysteria could be cured by, you know,

putting a baby up in the hysteros was like pretty, pretty widespread at the time.

In some way, he's just falling back on the most conventional wisdom, as I'm guessing are some of these, these neonatalists, the new natalists.

At the same time, I do think it's really fascinating that like there is this kind of insistence on a

kind of sequential ordering and meaningful ordering of human lifespans, which I've,

you know, you know, I love this, this concept by the late Beth Freeman, chrononomortivity, right?

The idea that like there's a, there's a kind of a ordered sequence to our our lives and like, you know, you know, there's a moment for sowing your wild oats and then there's your the moment to settle down, et cetera, et cetera.

And the children are basically a big moral marker there.

And

I think it's very, very noticeable that like whether it's queerness, we talked about this in the fag hag episode, any refusal of that chrononormative kind of progression is read, I think not unjustifiably so, as a challenge to the way society is normally organized because it groups you you into

into

stakeholder groups basically right it kind of breaks down breaks you down into you know taxpayers into

uh school board members into people who are concerned about you know the number of unhoused people on the street or whatever right like it it it creates this kind of these kind of stakes that are sort of supposed to be part of of quote-unquote maturation process and and the you're absolutely right that that like the the symbolic child is sort of extremely extremely important for that.

Now,

the other thing, of course, is that that comes with a narrative of personal growth.

And as a, you know, not

new parent, but fairly new parent myself, I can just say like, God, the number of people who are still working out like their relationship with their parents, like through their raising of their kids is like enormous.

And like, it's right.

You get it when someone's 20 and having kids.

But like, again, like around me, it's 40 year olds having kids.

And you're like, are we not over this yet?

Like, still we're still re-litigating something that happened in 1986, like with this child that was born when Taylor Swift was already a thing.

Like, it's like, you know, it's, it's really remarkable that, like, you know, every parent's experience, I think, should contradict and contravene this impulse.

And yet, you know, I think it's, I think it's just like a big society-wide invitation to lie to yourself, right?

Like, you are, you have now reached a point of maturity.

It's like, you've reached jack shit, man.

Like you're you, you're, you're, you're worse dressed and there's a third person in your house.

Congratulations.

Like, that's nice.

But like for your maturation level, it's done, jack shit.

Yeah.

I mean, I think the idea that people are made into

psychological and moral adults by having children is just disproved by prolonged exposure to like.

any parents because you know they remain quite messy in all those familiar human ways whether there's a baby there to deal with it or not Yeah.

And think about the second adolescence.

I mean, this is like, you know, I was reading a novel set in 1978.

And like,

think about the set of second adolescence that parents undergo as they're starting to stare down empty nesteredom, right?

Like divorces, affairs, ill-conceived, you know, conversions of bedrooms into gyms or whatever, right?

Like sports cars, right?

Like the moment you take the kid away or

take it away, the moment the kid leaves for some other place mom and dad revert to or dad and papa revert to their absolute like

you know they're like eat chips on the couch and like invest in dumb purchases like on 1800 numbers that they're never going to use right like so we know this to be the case right like and and then we get the same kind of freak out about their autonomy right like oh this is the divorce generation or whatever like like what you heard in the 70s and 80s right like and often enough those were parents who had raised the kid together and then were like, or kids together, and then we're like, all right, I feel like they're taking care of how about we rethink this arrangement, right?

And people were still morally freaking out over it, but it's really more about like closing options and sort of telling you it's not, it's not appropriate or something like that than it is about like any description of what parenthood is really like.

Yeah, I think this brings us nicely to like the primary liberal counter argument from people who say that, you know, you have to hand it to the pronatalists, which is that, you know, this is something you'll hear a lot from people who are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, like, you know,

I'm not in favor of banning abortion, maybe, but you do have to acknowledge that it's too hard to raise a kid.

And what they tend to say is that it's too expensive to raise a kid.

And candidly, they're right about this, right?

So pronatalists like to trot out some statistics that they really, frankly, kind of torture to try and say that millennials millennials are not actually earning less than boomers were.

They have to really do a lot of this,

like statistical torturing.

And I won't bother taking you through the whole methodology of why they're kind of wrong.

Like on the whole, millennials are kind of earning less.

But what that argument about income never takes into account is how costs have increased and how costs have increased, particularly to two things regarding two expenses that are central to child rearing, which are A, childcare, and B, housing.

These have exploded in their costs.

If you want to look at like college tuition costs, which are also

really prohibitive and people can't get into middle class employment without a college education, and you can't get a college education without a tremendous amount of debt, which is prohibited both for indebted individuals who are trying to think about maybe starting a family and for people who are thinking about how they would afford a child and all the things that a child is going to need to have a successful life.

You know, these

things that, you know, nobody can afford to have a house big enough to put a kid in.

Nobody can afford the childcare that they would need in order to remain employed.

And nobody can afford to give the kid an education that she would need in order to get employed, right?

These costs have expanded so much more rapidly than income that the shrinking, and I do think they are shrinking proportional incomes of millennials are really no match for what's really extreme, which is the soaring increase of costs of these needs.

Yeah, right.

People, people in the 70s made a lot less than people make today, but then ask them what they pay for college, like for their kids, right?

Like, yeah, like $4.

Yeah.

But then, you know, and you bought a house for a hundred bucks

that you like that you made at your after school job, you know, scooping ice cream or whatever.

That's the, that's the boomer reality.

And that's still sort of the paradigm on which a lot of this advice is being given out.

And like, look, there's a, there's a lot of merit to sort of the liberal counter argument to the antenatalists, right?

Like, give us a, give us universal child care.

Give us universal health care.

Yeah, like make housing cheaper.

And I do think if those things happened, more people would have babies, right?

But it's sort of, my problem with it isn't that it's wrong.

It's that it's incomplete because it is leaving untouched the cultural argument, which is that childless lives have value and that when women are given a fuller range of options for their lives and a like more complete freedom, they will do things that we can find value in because their lives continue to be meaningful, right?

And this is really like the moral, psychological, cultural crux.

of the pronatalist argument because they're not really interested in expanding a social safety net, right?

Like J.D.

Vance famously like opposes IVF.

He missed a vote to expand the child cracks credit.

He doesn't support universal child care, right?

Like they're not actually that interested in this like populist alliance that sometimes people on the left try to make with them.

It's like, okay, maybe we could all be welfare chauvinists.

They don't give a shit about that, really.

The pronatalists are really much more interested in combating and reversing this cultural shift that has happened since the 1960s and 70s, in which women just can be more things and can imagine a wider variety of lives and can get esteem for things, social esteem for things other than marriage and motherhood.

That's what they're objecting to.

That's what they want to reverse.

Yeah, I mean, it's such a simple point, but it is worth making explicit.

The world in which people can choose, people will choose the option of childlessness, right?

For whatever reason.

They might get to that, you know, after a long journey or they might get to it easily or whatever.

The world in which that's not true is one with

that choice somehow blocked, right?

And the cultural argument, right?

Like, so you can say like, oh, we need a new, it's a numeric argument, right?

You said with economics, we can try and get that number up if people are so obsessed with this, right?

Like you can get that number up.

But the cultural argument really doesn't permit that, right?

The cultural argument really says like there's something wrong with that.

And at that point, well, gee, that kind of feels like you don't want people to make that choice.

Like, are you, then, then isn't that going to commit you to basically getting rid of the possibility of choice at all and i think i think that's that's the thing that worries me so much about it and which is why i think you're right to reject even very very good policy proposals if they come with this kind of

this kind of thing in the background precisely because ultimately it's about curtailing options right right because you're unhappy right it's the way that america that democrats used to talk about abortion right like oh i'm unhappy about abortion but i i guess we just have to allow it

It's like, no, that, that, that ends up being an anti-choice talking point, right?

And the same thing is, is true here, I think.

Yeah, I mean, I think it is a unalloyed, unqualified moral good for women to not only have the option to pursue, but in fact, to pursue lives that do not include.

the traditional value structures of marriage and motherhood.

I think more women are doing that.

And I think that is actually

good.

And look, I'm going to walk you through the history of pronatalist movements in the U.S.

at three historical moments, because I think that they show that the one thing pronatalism always has in common historically is that it blames feminism and puts itself counter to women's freedom.

And I promise we're almost out of here.

And then I want to talk about our own historical moment, right?

And what I think has happened with feminism, with gender relations, it has made the idea of babies really potent right now, right?

Because pronatalism, like in the 20th century, it came about in the 1940s, right?

Like after the Depression and during the war,

in part because there had been a really huge shift.

in gender and family relations during the depression and the war like during the depression women were having more abortions and abortion was becoming much more visible because they couldn't afford children.

They could really afford the children they already had, right?

The number of abortions skyrocketed during the Depression.

Interesting.

The number of births per women in the United States peaked in the 21st century in 2007.

What happened in 2008?

You know, like the birth rate goes down in situations where women have more freedom and in situations where everybody has less money, right?

Right.

So, like, there is this moment where there is a lot of abortion restrictions coming back in

in that like 1940s era, in part because

there is a move to sort of correct the depression, but also in part because World War II really changes gender relations domestically because women go into high paid work.

They become, you know, famously like Rosie the Riveter, but they do all kinds of these high skilled, high-page jobs that a lot of men are not available to do.

And that freaks people out, right?

So I'm going to read briefly from Leslie Reagan's excellent book, When Abortion Was a Crime, about this era of the 1940s, in which these old abortion bans that were on the books from the 19th century started to be like really enforced for the first time in decades, right?

So she says, the backlash against abortion reinforced the era's pronatalism.

During the 1940s, women faced intense social and ideological pressure to bear children.

At a 1942 conference on abortion, New York City judge Anna Cross observed, today, the pressure is going to be more and more population.

The Ladies Home Journal urged women to, quote, correct the mistakes of the 1920s and 30s by having numerous babies.

In the mid-1940s, influential Freudian psychologists equated maternity with female sexual gratification.

By the 1950s, the, quote, domestic revival, unquote, was in full swing.

American women married younger, and the birth rate actually rose for the first time in the 20th century.

Although the push for maternity and domesticity was primarily directed at white women, women of color also felt pressure to subordinate themselves to women as wives and mothers, right?

So that really frames gronatalism in very explicit terms.

Yeah, yeah, fascinating.

As a backlash, right?

As something that

recurs at these moments when assaults on

assaults when women's independence come

and push for maternity come

at moments when there has been a great big gender transformation, when women's vulnerability to control by men seems like really precarious, right?

When they seem more independent, when they seem more willing to forego those roles.

And there's actually one other historical moment that I wanted to draw your attention to, which is the 19th century when these bans first went on the books, because what happened in that century was frankly urbanization right a lot of people leaving their pastoral lives and their agricultural-based lives for these cities where they were shoved into close quarters with strangers and exposed to different ways of life It was an industrialization in which large numbers of unmarried white women actually went into paid industrial work in a way that like really seemed threatening to the sexual order at the time.

And it was also a time of mass immigration, like what we were talking about with this eugenic anxiety behind a lot of pronatalism.

And so these initial abortion criminalizations, abortion was legal for much of early American history.

They began to become illegal when these trends started to have social effects.

So there was one 1866 editorial from a Philadelphia doctor.

who wrote that women sought abortions and declined to have children owing to, quote, the simple desire not to be bothered by babies and not to be prevented by fulfilling maternal destiny from running about town, visiting friends, dressing finely, and attending parties, theaters, balls, and the like.

So it's like childishness is this moral depravity of the idle, narcissistic rich.

And then one more quote, Adrienne, one more quote, because keep in mind this fun-loving, childless, decadent, horrible woman who's going to a party and a ball, because I want to read you a tweet from August 2024, our beautiful age, by a contributing writer at The Atlantic named Tyler Austin Harper, who says, a lot, not in a majority, but a lot of college-educated Democrats are anti-child and view having a family as a threat to their all-important freedom, he puts freedom in scare quotes, to do what they want.

Consider how many liberals of the family having age view children in bars, restaurants, coffee shops, or public spaces as a gross imposition that detracts from their quote freedom to enjoy their espresso martinis.

I think espresso martinis is kind of load-bearing in this fantasy of the decadent, narcissistic, immoral, undisciplined, evil, and contempt-worthy childless adults.

Also, like, what is the over-under on this just being like too frenzy has?

I mean, like, it just feels like

I mean, it's definitely a guy who hates some women he knows, right?

All of these guys have that vibe, but I think it bespeaks to a historically reoccurring attitude that women, if not disciplined into maternity, will do these decadent, pleasure-filled lives

that will pursue things that don't have

a

social value, supposedly, in their own right.

And that's how freedom becomes a dirty word when it's women's freedom, when it's freedom to not have children.

And I wanted to like end on this note from Melinda Cooper, who I thought had like a really interesting exegesis of why pronatalism has arisen at this historical moment, right?

I think you really can't understate the effect of Dobbs for my money.

I think Dobbs is hugely important.

I think what we are seeing in part is a push by pro-natalists to convince American women that what they lost with Dobbs was something that they didn't like need to have, something that wasn't worth having, a freedom that was kind of not worth it, right?

And there's a kind of attempt to defang the political impact of Dobbs by degrading childlessness and by degrading the option to not have children.

But Melinda Cooper, who I think all of our listeners should be reading, also had like a really interesting account of the rise of pronatalism now that she gave in an interview to Mother Jones.

She said, I think the wider acceptance of homosexuality brought about by the legalization of same-sex marriage has shifted the line of deviance from sexuality, that is, hetero versus homo, to reproductivity.

Hetero versus homo has been replaced by the reproductive versus the sterile.

Judgments around childlessness were always there, but it has become the focal point.

The stigmatization is sex asymmetric.

It weighs on women in a way that it doesn't weigh on men because of our asymmetric understanding of female bodies as bearers of family lineage.

There's a reason there is no male equivalent to the cat lady.

It's interesting to see that the stigmatization of trans people now turns around issues of sterility.

I would say that a few decades ago, transphobia overlapped with homophobia to a much greater degree.

That is, trans people were tainted with a brush of deviant homosexuality.

Now the defining issue is threat to reproduction, either through the supposed sterilization of children or imagined pedophilia by trans adults.

That's great.

I know.

I mean, she's Melinda Cooper.

She's a genius.

But I wanted wanted to wrap this up and say that, like, you know, the pro-natalist, they all love to blame feminism, but feminism really kind of backed away from its anti-natalist arguments, right?

If anything,

the kind of radical feminism that had the most lasting influence, I think, is not like the Shulamith Firestone, techno-utopian artificial womb kind.

It's not the Sophie Lewis.

This is more like girl boss stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's it like what really kind of got integrated was this idea of having it all.

And if anything, the cultural feminist, like to my mind, like bioessentialist and creepy ballerization of motherhood and of women's biological capacities is what really like kind of stuck more.

The idea is great.

You know, interesting.

Girl power, you can do it all.

You can be a powerful mama.

The idea that like motherhood had been unfairly socially degraded and needed to be rehabituated and that this was a feminist project.

That is, I think, what has been much more

persistent persistent and influential from that era, not really the Shulamith Firestone comparison of giving birth to shitting out a pumpkin, which I actually thought was kind of funny.

Like, that didn't really, that didn't really stick.

Right.

And so, like, I don't think feminism, feminism is like a useful bogeyman because it's so imprecise and everybody kind of hates it or has some version of it in their mind that they hate, right?

And so it's a, it's an unpopular enemy that's easy to blame, right?

But I think actually the people who took up up like the Edelman-like

challenge to the reproductive futurity and who made this like broader reconsideration of the family and kinship and time possible for like the kind of mainstream imagination was actually the trans people, the increased visibility of trans people over the past, you know, 10, 20 years.

I think is what has really pushed this whole

much more broader scale reconsideration, not just of straight and queer life, but of male and female lives and what these look like.

I think

I think the boogeyman and maybe the sort of hero for

a feminist revival that might involve a rejection of reproductivity as a biological destiny.

We might have to give trans people the credit for that because the pro-natalists are certainly giving them a lot of blame.

Yeah, I think that's right.

I mean, and it is a way that the trans

body becomes kind of the stalking horse for liberalism and that the attack on trans people becomes sort of the attack on

liberalism or on

the liberal state where people have rights, right, as individuals.

To cool.

And when you told me you were going to do this episode, I did some, did a little bit of reading and I found this text from

our friends at the Heritage Foundation from

July 2024.

Did you read this by Emma Waters?

No.

Yeah, who's a senior research associate in the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at the Heritage Foundation.

That's a bunch of words you don't want to see in one sentence.

But anyway, so

one of the key takeaways in her piece is that in order for the birth rate decline to be reversed, women need to trust that the losses and changes of parenthood they might fear will be worth it.

Right.

And so you might think like, oh, okay, so now they're going this direction of like, you know,

we're gonna, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna make

being a parent easier and remunerative or whatever.

And that's not at all where she comes down.

I'll read you the final two paragraphs.

Women need to trust that the losses and changes of parenthood they might fear, of their bodies, lifestyles, sense of self, and current relationship dynamics will be worth it.

They need to believe that having children is a good that is worth the sacrifice, just as Christ promises that it would be.

Indeed, as Jesus says in John 12, 24, 26, truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

More true words could not be said about the call of motherhood and fatherhood.

We need a generation that encourages people, despite the unknowns, to embrace the self-sacrificial call of Christ, right?

This is like submerge your identity, forego your individual self-realization in favor of submersion in some kind of collectivity that we posit, right?

This is ultimately, right?

What trans people refuse to these people, according to these people, is

the yoke of gender that we're all quote unquote naturally born with.

What the childless cat lady refuses is the fact that she has to go this, has to enter this risk in order to be a member of the community.

She has to possibly die in childbirth, possibly has to die of an ectopic pregnancy, possibly has to

or just, you know, sacrifice any other desire or vocation.

And the contempt with which these people say the word travel.

I know, right?

Because they position, they position anything that women might desire besides birthing and raising children as in competition with this better, truer calling that all women supposedly have to birth and wave children, right?

And like to be able to do anything else, anything else besides birthing and raising children, the woman is tasked in this pronatalist worldview with justifying those pursuits as greater than children, which they can't do because children are positioned as an absolute moral good, right?

Right.

And so, like, it's an impossible demand, right?

Justify all of your life choices against this pristine moralism.

And it's also a demand that is like not made of men.

Well, that's exactly it, right?

But I love your parallel that you're drawing with trans people, right?

Because like, it's all about policing the body, right?

The cis woman is compelled to arrange her body in such a way that she has children and becomes, you know, a slave to that capacity, right?

And the trans body is compelled to revert to a cisgender embodiment and a cisgender social role, right?

And these are bodies that are deviant from the prescription, right?

I hate saying bodies when I mean people, but like they actually are quite specifically talking about bodies here.

And what is a more like ultimate and transformative form of like a vision of a liberal individual freedom than the freedom to not have your body dictate the course of your life?

I do.

That is the core freedom that like cis women and trans people really share.

And that's why I think trans people's example has the potential to like reanimate a cisgender feminism.

Yeah.

Because like they're really showing what the stakes are.

That's great.

Anyway, that's my soapbox.

I'm done.

We've been talking for an hour and a half.

You probably have stuff to do.

No, no, this was great.

Thank you.

And can't wait to see what people think.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening.

If you got this far, you should rate and review us on iTunes.

Yes, rate and review.

And if you got this far, you should probably read Melinda Cooper's family values because I don't think much of what we talk about made sense without it.

Yes.

And we should get back to her about about being on the pod as well.

Yeah, this is, we've been talking about, you know, we're Melinda Cooper fangirls here at Indead with her right.

So we got to

get her on.

Yeah.

And if you're still listening, also pre-order my book, The Cancer Culture Panic out on September 24th.

I just RSVP'd to your party.

Yes.

It's going to be really fun.

It's going to be a good party.

At a bar with no kids.

River's not coming?

No.

I think she's not allowed.

That's the other thing about like the weird

kids in bars thing.

Like, isn't that even that's, I think that's illegal.

You're not really.

I've just never been like, and I don't understand this epidemic of supposedly child.

Like, as a withered old prone with no children, I've never been bothered by the presence of children in public.

I don't understand like where this anxiety about.

I think the only ones you can bring are like ones strapped to your chest, which, like, who gives a shit, right?

Like, I don't think you can bring a five-year-old or a six-year-old into a bar at all, and at least in the state of California.

What would she do there?

You know, I don't know, but I know friends who I have friends who have children who own a bar and I think the children are not really supposed to be in there when they're when they're up and running.

Like, obviously, when they're setting up, they can be there.

But I think once a bar opens in the United States, it's a difference to Europe where, you know, most kreshas also double as martini bars.

Fun fact.

Yeah.

And

but it's going to be my pronatalist agenda is turn every daycare center into a bar that opens at like 7 7 a.m.

and suddenly everybody will be having babies.

Yeah,

the babies are

having their first milk of the day, their first feeding, and the moms are having coffee martinis.

The men with the right would like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lau.