Unless we can envision a society in which the family takes social priority, the idea of a wide pronatalist coalition is implausible. That’s probably a good thing, even if it bodes poorly for politics.
Still, the push for a sort of bipartisan pronatalism is gaining initiative, encouraged largely by the Trump administration’s current policy proposals. The driving concept, the birthrate, has been present on the Right for some time, what with family policy often too life-coded for anyone else to adopt. From this set grows the Right’s own philosophical spread, wherein figures such as Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts and Tesla CEO Elon Musk ally under a shared agenda. More apprehensively, writers and researchers from the Left join in on wanting to promote fertility decline as a serious risk.
The problem with this ordinarily good array of interest is that it’s already wavering. The Right’s traditional conservatives and its altruistic techno-optimists are at odds, but quiet about it — they can’t go very far or say very much, so policy remains vague. Division is obvious even in surface-level probing of pronatalist efforts. Whether that signals collapse (or stagnation) is yet to be seen, but given the religious motivations of the conservative side, differences on issues such as in vitro fertilization and family structure may prove more decisive than the administration lets on to the public. Something more sprawling but no less pointed, such as a pronatalist coalition including the Left, needs unity on precisely the things dividing the Right.
Assent of that sort could be reached, and to some degree, it’s what we have now. People generally approve when they see families forming, but where their delight lies is a private matter. The result is distant and piecemeal ground for real social policy. We promote the family implicitly when we say we love humanity, but the specific human good is left out of “harem”-esque models like Musk’s.
In the more diverse, more fertility-focused realm the movement currently imagines, there is almost no shot at sustenance. Supporting children will not be prioritized, and pronatalism will burn out. Consider the Leftist perspective that sees the family as a useful entity for (only) its pro-social effects. While it contains some truth, the defense is reductive. The common feminist hears a diminishment of women’s choices and their individual value, and so swings even harder away from natalism.
BRINGING ‘RESISTANCE’ TO THE FERTILITY DEBATE
That speaks to larger cultural and relational trends, of which the primacy of abortion is the best example. Given the lifestyle implications, it might even be that the Left ceased to exist if it forsook abortion. We know that won’t happen. And so even normal left-leaning “pronatalists,” separate from strict social capital adherents, are willing to allow women to opt out by the most brutish means available — abortion — in their pursuit of the ideal society.
Authentic pronatalism, of course, holds family and children as goods worth some self-sacrifice. The position requires as much, because whatever the family requires to survive, so does pronatalism.