My first job post-university was in the late 1960s, in a short-lived UK government department, the Department of Economic Affairs (DEA). The DEA’s main task was to boost the UK’s rate of economic growth, and my first task within the DEA was to analyse projections of population growth and assess their implications for regional planning. Governments at that time were convinced that boosting economic growth should be a major aim of government policy, and that continued population growth would help achieve that aim.
Since then it has become increasingly obvious that humans and their economies are integral parts of a living planet, and that there are limits to growth which, if crossed, can trigger collapse. Some governments have belatedly acknowledged concerns about limits, particularly in relation to climate change, but there has been no let up in their pursuit of economic growth. With regard to population, we are now told that low birth rates are harming economic growth, and that we should be thinking about how to boost them.
Fertility rate decline
There are many ways of representing the decline in birth rates statistically. The measure most favoured by demographers is the total fertility rate (TFR). This is the total number of children a woman will give birth to by the end of her child-rearing years if she has the same number of children as the average for women of her age. The decline in TFR over the past half century has been dramatic. The average TFR in the world as a whole was around 5 in the 1950s and 1960s, but it has fallen steadily since then, down to 2.25 in 2024.
When TFR falls below 2.1, a population is unable to replace itself. Global TFR is expected to fall below 2.1 sometime in the next couple of decades. This means world population should stop growing by the 2080s, when annual birth rates are expected to start falling below death rates. When the peak occurs, and at what population level, depends mainly on the extent to which females will have achieved reproductive freedom in countries where this is still lacking. The peak could be at least 2 billion above the present level of 8.2 billion.
There are significant differences between TFRs in different parts of the world. All high income countries now have TFRs below 2 (15 of them have TFRs below 1.4), while 15 low income African countries have TFRs over 4.5. In many high income countries, the negative impact of low TFRs on population is countered by net inward migration, usually from countries with higher TFRs.
Neoliberalism and pronatalism
Under neoliberal capitalism, concerns about declining fertility are being expressed with increasing frequency. Mainly this reflects worry about negative effects on economic growth. A growing economy can, in the short term, rely on inward migration to supplement its workforce, but this can cause social problems (not least upward pressure on housing costs which can deter the indigenous population from having more children) which are self-defeating in the long term. More and more politicians, particularly those on the right, are exploring how they might incentivise childbirth, as a way of maintaining growth without having to rely on large scale inward migration.
A supplementary concern relates to how declining birth rates lead to ageing populations. Instead of acknowledging the contribution of the elderly (grandparenting, volunteering, writing on Substack, etc), neoliberalism sees old age only as a burden, consuming resources in the form of pensions and healthcare. Rather than reorienting the economy around basic needs and care, neoliberalism prioritises growth, including population growth. It wants more births to make up for the numbers of ‘working people’ who are passing into retirement.
“The pronatalist argument that we must keep populations growing to keep economies growing has been rightly called a Ponzi scheme. The theory is that fertility rates must stay high to fuel GDP growth and keep a high ratio of young workers paying taxes to seniors drawing benefits. But that treadmill can’t go on forever. A system that relies on perpetual growth on a finite planet is a system in need of reform, and there are many options for caring for our elders that don’t involve pressuring people to have more children.”
(Nandita Bajaj, Confronting pronatalism is essential for reproductive justice and ecological sustainability, New Security Beat 26 Nov 2024)
Left wing pronatalism
It’s not just right-wing politicians who are exploring policies that they hope will boost birth rates. An article in a February 2025 essay collection, The birth rate challenge: ideas from the left, challenges the suspicions that some on the left have about pronatalism, particularly its frequent association with anti-feminism and xenophobia. It draws attention to pronatalist arguments by ex-Labour MP Rosie Duffield and by ‘luxury communist’ and Novara Media journalist Aaron Bastani, and concludes that “Public services are already coming under strain from an ageing population. With Labour pledging to bring down net migration, the economic case for increasing the birth rate is clear.”
Pronatalists on the left share the right’s obsession with economic growth, and share its disregard for the need to respect nature’s limits. On the far left, the ability of planned economies to grow faster than the capitalist west has often been lauded - “Five for the years of the five year plan”, we used to sing on CND marches in the early 1960s, “And four for the four years taken.”
Tara van Dijk is a Marxist-Lacanist who delights in pathologising feminists on X/twitter. Being child-free, she claims, is “a morbid symptom of late-stage capitalism in the West” - a new form of eugenics that operates ”through social pressure and economic constraints rather than overt coercion.” She suggests that the need for a growing labour force and tax base, coupled with a failure to support reproduction, has become a key contradiction of neoliberal capitalism, one that “has pitted individuals against the future itself.” Yet rather than questioning the capitalist obsession with growth, van Dijk suggests that the left should “advocate for the material conditions that make family life viable again.”
Providing support for women who want to have children is very worthwhile. Doing so because of a supposed need to feed continued growth, with its resulting ecological destruction, is not.
Even among environmental activists, there’s often an unwillingness to challenge pronatalism, Guardian journalist George Monbiot claims to “love not man the less, but Nature more.” Yet he insists that population growth is not a problem, because nowadays it occurs mainly among poor people, who don’t consume very much. It’s consumption growth that brings about environmental breakdown, he notes, and it’s the rich who consume the most goods and therefore cause the most damage. Monbiot argues that “we should resist attempts by the rich to demonise the poor”, but he seems willing to condemn the world’s poor to remaining poor, as he doesn’t think they will ever be rich enough for their consumption to be able to cause any damage. And he does not notice that the main pronatalist arguments nowadays are calling for higher birth rates in high income countries, which will lead to even more consumption.
`’The problem of too many humans should not be blamed on poor or non-white people in the developing world. It’s a problem created by the trajectory of human history, the result of our ability to get at more and more energy-rich carbon with new t“echnologies, leading to ecological degradation resulting from too many people consuming too much overall … The fact that we don’t know how to impose limits on ourselves doesn’t mean we don’t have to do it.”
(Robert Jensen, Population: the fear of limiting people and our things, Population Balance 5 Aug 2024)
One organisation that sees challenging pronatalism as an important element in avoiding ecological collapse is Population Balance. The vision of this US-based non-profit organisation is of “a future where our human footprint is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all lifeforms to thrive. … As we scale back our numbers, economies, and technosphere, the human family can return to a smaller and harmoniously integrated subsystem of the biodiverse global ecosystem, in which nature and animals have inherent worth and our human community is nestled within their wild and free expanse.” It’s a very different vision from neoliberal capitalism’s worship of inequality and the intensified exploitation of nature.
Pronatalist tech billionaires
Elon Musk has used his social media platform to tell his 219 million followers that “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming” (Twitter, 26 Aug 2022). He certainly intends to lead by example, having fathered at least 14 children (four more than Andrew Tate), by at least four different women, though this does raise questions about what he means by civilization. Natural reproduction and responsible fatherhood don’t seem to feature, as he employs surrogacy, sperm donation and IVF to produce many of his children (possibly because of the opportunities they create for eugenic selection?). Musk treats his offspring as another of his tech experiments - one son was called X AE A-12 to disguise his sex, and he was supposed to be raised without any conformity to gender stereotypes. That son is now a typical 4 year old boy who loves rockets. An older son now claims he is a woman - he says Musk was never there as a father to him when he was growing up.
“Babies are awesome, little love bugs. It’s great. I’ve spent a lot of time on AI and neural nets and so you can see the brain develop. You know, an AI neural net is trying to simulate what a brain does, basically, and you can sort of see it learning very quickly. It’s just wow. I’m talking about an actual baby.”
(Elon Musk, Joe Rogan Experience #1470, 7 May 2020 [3 days after the birth of X AE A-12])
Pronatalism, along with life extension, is an obsession of many tech billionaires. They have no problem with limits to growth, as they don’t recognise any limits. “Our enemy is deceleration, depopulation, degrowth”, insists Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto. “We believe our planet is dramatically underpopulated, compared to the population we could have with abundant intelligence, energy, and material goods. We believe the global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.”
These are not just the mad ideas of deluded men who have read too much science fiction in their youth. These billionaires are pouring much of their considerable wealth into normalising their dystopian visions, and trying to turn them into reality. Just as with their search for technologies that they believe might enable them to live for ever, they are seeking our acceptance of technologies that they hope will not just assist human reproduction, but take over from it.
“Much of the groundwork for getting people to accept radical genetic engineering has been laid by gender ideology … Gender ideology insists that sex is fluid and that individuals can transcend their biological reality. Its core message - that human beings are not sexually dimorphic, that sex exists on a spectrum and that men can breastfeed - prepares us to accept radical shifts in reproduction, such as the idea of male motherhood and pregnancy. This dovetails with the ‘tech -natalist’ idea that mothers don’t matter, and that superior humans can be gestated in laboratories outside a woman’s body … The whole concept of motherhood, which is increasingly viewed as irrelevant, is at stake.”
(Jennifer Bilek, How trans ideology paved the way for motherless babies, Spectator World May 2025)
It is by no means certain that artificial reproduction will become a real possibility. But the tech pronatalists are throwing billions of dollars into what they believe to be steps on the way towards it - transurrogacy, reengineered simulacra of extinct species, embryos created from stem cells, womb transplants, ‘biobags’ for premature infants, etc. etc. Whether or not they achieve total artificial reproduction, what is being realised on the way is already changing what it means to be human.
At present, women are choosing to have fewer children, and this is helping to make it slightly more possible for humans to live in harmony with each other and with the rest of the planet. Replacing mothers with artificial wombs would enable the tech billionaires to bypass women and trash nature completely while pursuing their dream of unlimited growth (a dream that would quickly turn into the nightmare of inevitable collapse). Humanity and the rest of the living planet would suffer. The children deprived of the bond with a mother that starts within her womb and continues after birth would have a particularly challenging start to life.
“Motherless children have a hard time, mother’s dead
They’ll not have anywhere to go
Wanderin’ around from door to door
Have a hard time”
(Blind Willie Johnson, Motherless Children, 1927)
Tech-natalism is pronatalism and ecological destruction on steroids.