American women have fewer babies than they used to, and for some, this is cause for concern. Elon Musk has called the falling birth rate an "underpopulation crisis” and said it is "the biggest danger civilization faces.” He is doing his part to abate the danger by impregnating as many women as he can, although there is evidence that he is less than completely attentive and loving as a parent. Vice President J.D. Vance is credited with helping popularize the “pronatalist” movement. He has cast aspersions on the morality and patriotism of those who choose not to have children, saying they do not have a “direct stake” in the future of the country. Vance says we should want more babies because “babies are good, and we believe babies are good because we are not sociopaths.” A society without enough babies, he says, is “icky.” (A society with babies is also somewhat icky, of course, due to these cute little humans’ predilection for wantonly spitting, shitting, and pissing everywhere.) Billionaire arms manufacturer Palmer Luckey has said, apparently seriously, that people who do not produce at least “2.1 kids” are “traitor[s] to the nation” because they are outsourcing responsibility for reproducing the “nation” to others. 

Leftists tend to downplay birth rate panic, although many leftist policies (job protections, family leave, universal healthcare, free college) would reduce the economic burdens that make it difficult to raise children. But in The Atlantic (a magazine that Current Affairs rarely has a kind word for), Elizabeth Bruenig argues that the left should share the “pronatalism” of the right and should not be dismissive of concerns about falling birth rates. Bruenig defines pronatalism as “the principle that having children is good and should be promoted by society.” She argues that this is a position we should not cede to the right. She says that “progressives now seem inclined to reject the mantle of baby-friendliness; if the right wants it, the thinking goes, it must be bad.” She points out that in surveys, women say they want to have more children than they actually do have, and they are often deterred for financial reasons. Bruenig mentions the benefits that leftist policies would have for those who want to have more children: 

The types of policies that promote people’s willingness and ability to have children tend to come in the form of family benefits, which is to say, programs that channel money and resources to parents and children. […] Genuinely pronatalist policies may therefore have more traction with the left, should progressives see fit to seize them—which they should, for all the usual left reasons: to promote equality (the rich can already afford to reproduce at will), eliminate poverty, and extend to each person born the best conditions for flourishing. 

But there is something misleading at the heart of Bruenig’s argument, namely a conflation of the idea that people should be supported if they want to have kids with the idea that people should want to have kids. On the left, we all affirm the former. It is not fair to say that progressives reject “baby-friendliness” because we think that “if the right wants it, it must be bad.” Bruenig cites no examples of progressives displaying this faulty logic, and in my circles at least, progressives are uniformly in favor of paid family leave and plenty of other policies that would help both those who choose to have children and those who don’t. The contentious part of the pronatalist position is not the part that suggests we should give economic support to people who choose to be parents. It’s the part that suggests we should have a normative preference for parenthood over childlessness. 

Bruenig seems to believe that we should have such a preference (“having children is good and should be promoted by society”) but is evasive on what “good” and “promoted by society” means. Does “good” mean, as J.D. Vance and Palmer Luckey intend it to mean, that people who have children are making a morally better choice than people who do not? That the “childless cat ladies” ought to want children? That there should be something a little shameful about a married couple choosing to just enjoy their lives together? Does “promoted by society” mean that the state should try to pull various levers in order to achieve a desired birth  rate? If providing ample economic support to parents did not succeed in achieving “replacement” level birth rates, should the state go further and sweeten the deal, say by giving parents extra goodies? (Vance has floated the idea of giving parents extra votes.)

In my own vision of left politics, we should be hesitant about social engineering, by which I mean deciding on which of a series of equally legitimate lifestyles people ought to want and trying to push people toward that choice (e.g., trying to use public policy to get people to marry who would not otherwise wish to marry). If people want to have children, economic factors should not deter their aspiration. But the state (and society) should be neutral on whether they have the aspiration in the first place, because it’s none of my fucking business whether you have kids or not. 

Vance and Bruenig both equivocate between somewhat different meanings of pronatalism, by suggesting that “children are good” (I agree, in the sense that I think children have value) when what they are actually trying to argue is “children ought to be produced” (I do not agree, because I am not a utilitarian who thinks there is an obligation to maximize value). The position that children are “good” is easy to defend. Look at their little smiles! Who could dislike a child? The position that the federal government should take an actual formal stance on how many children I should have is much more difficult to defend.

One way Bruenig makes the case is through pointing out that people are having fewer children than they themselves say they want. Therefore the government should at the very least close that gap. This reasoning is actually consistent with the left stance that the state should help people fulfill their familial aspirations. But it still doesn’t require you to adopt the pronatalist view that the state/society should have a position on what those aspirations ought to be in the first place. Just take the same old left position: help people achieve their preferred family arrangements while remaining neutral on what those arrangements are. 

Even here, however, the actual data isn’t as concerning as the pronatalists make it out to be: 

Graphic: New York Times

We can see that it’s been the case since the 1970s that women say they want more kids than they do end up having. They used to say they wanted three, but tended to have two. Now they say they want about 2.7 but tend to have about 1.8 (on average, of course, since nobody says they want 2.7 or has 1.8). That is likely in substantial part because it is very difficult to raise a child in a country that does not have public policies supportive of parenting. But it may also in part be because once people have a child, their preference changes. (Perhaps it’s easier to want three kids before you’ve found out what it’s like to have one.) In and of itself, the fact that people do not fulfill their previously-stated aspiration for an optimal number of children is not good evidence. I would be more interested in surveys of people late in life showing how many are disappointed they didn’t get to have more children (and how many regret having had children, which most don’t but some definitely do!) 

Bruenig repeats the right’s warning that if we are not explicitly pronatalist, we are announcing our indifference to the future of humanity itself: 

Should humankind continue? If the answer is yes, then we’re already dealing in the realm of pronatalism, where the good of childbearing is taken for granted—and differences in approaches would likely come down to policy particulars. But if the answer is no, then all of politics is moot anyhow. The cause of humanity’s future is too important to cede to a political right with questionable intentions, or to be ignored.

You may already be a pronatalist, then, if you answer “yes” to the question of whether humankind should “continue” and if you believe “the cause of humanity’s future” matters. But the answer to the question is not as obvious as Bruenig would have it. Personally, I do not think it is obvious that we have any obligation to ensure humankind continues indefinitely. I certainly do not share Luckey’s view that members of a “nation” (an absurd construct that should be eliminated from our discourse) have a duty to help it continue forever. If the human population shrinks over time, it is a matter of perfect indifference to me. I want the people who do exist in the future to be happy and to live well, but I have no opinion on how many people there ought to be. If, in the very long run, our species goes extinct, I do not think that is a matter of moral concern. Let the manatees inherit the Earth. This does not mean that I think human beings are some kind of cancer on the planet, that we should go extinct. It means that I think our job is to care for the people who happen to show up in the world, not to ensure that people do show up, and I believe our most urgent task in that respect is preventing the most serious threats to humanity’s future, namely climate catastrophe and nuclear war.

But even if you do share the position that “the cause of humanity’s future” means we should worry about there being enough babies for the species to avoid extinction, there is simply no likelihood that insufficient reproduction is going to doom our species anytime soon. The global population is still expanding at the moment, and as long as there are subpopulations that reproduce above “replacement rate,” humanity will be here indefinitely. Plenty of societies still do have high birth rates, so the existential “future of humanity” simply cannot be the issue here, unless by “humanity” one means the (mostly white) West, an assumption underneath which lies the racist view that our species’ future population should not be predominantly African. If the global birth rate is fine, or the birth rates of subpopulations guarantee the survival of the species, then the stated concern about “humanity” is really a concern about the future of particular populations. Many on the right would admit openly that what they fear is “replacement” by non-white people, but there is something troubling to me about any argument that low birth rates in Western societies specifically threaten the future of humanity as a whole.

The left stance on the birth debates strikes me as being exactly correct as it stands and not in any way in need of Bruenig’s intervention. First, we point out that it is strange that a party complaining about national population decline is so hostile to immigration and birthright citizenship. After all, if you just want more babies, immigrants are just babies from elsewhere. You can fix your population “crisis” by letting more people into your country! The fact that the right does not want this obvious fix suggests that they have an implicit hierarchy of babies in mind. (Bruenig allows that the immigration of young people into the country could help but notes that “eventually, newcomers tend to assimilate into the local culture and have fewer children.” So why not just keep letting immigrants in?)

But we do not just point out inconsistencies. We also have a policy response that should satisfy everyone who wants to be a parent. We want to give ordinary people more free time, less onerous labor, better universal education, and the healthcare they need. We want to give you the kind of life that will make raising children as easy as it can be (it will still, of course, be difficult!). Where we part company with Vance and Bruenig is that we do not believe it is our place to tell you the kind of life you ought to be living, to take a normative stance on whether there ought to be more parents. We do not claim that parenthood is good—that would imply that childlessness is bad. We are for personal autonomy, true freedom of choice (not the mirage of freedom touted by the right). We are neither “pro” natalist nor “anti” natalist. What we say is that you ought to be able to have kids if you want kids and to not have kids if you don’t want kids, which is why we support both paid family leave and free abortion on demand. That strikes me as the unambiguously correct leftist position, and yet again I do not believe our movement benefits from listening to the supposedly constructive suggestions found in the pages of The Atlantic.