Expressions of alarm about falling birth rates are coming thick and fast from political leaders nowadays.
South Korean President Yoon Sook Yeol told his cabinet in December 2023 that “We need to develop strategies on a new level to deal with low birth rates by taking the matter very seriously. We don’t have much time.”
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida believes low birth rates are “the biggest crisis Japan faces …… Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society. Focusing attention on policies regarding children and child-rearing is an issue that cannot wait and cannot be postponed.”
China’s President Xi Jinping told delegates at the 2022 Communist Party Congress that “We will establish a policy system to boost birth rates and pursue a proactive national strategy in relation to population ageing.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s State of the Nation addresses regularly assess the downward trend in birth rates, and what these mean for his interpretation of Russian national identity. Speaking via video link to the World Russian People’s Council in November 2023, he promised that boosting Russia’s population will be “our goal for the coming decades …. Having many children, a large family, should become a norm, a way of life for all the peoples of Russia.”
In 2019, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán expressed alarm about declining birth rates. not just in Hungary, but in Europe as a whole.“There are fewer and fewer children born in Europe,” he explained in his State of the Nation speech. “For the West, the answer (to that challenge) is immigration .… But we do not need numbers. We need Hungarian children.”
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, at the Budapest Demographic Summit organised by the Hungarian Government in September 2023, suggested that “In our view, demography is not just another of the main issues of our nation.” It is, she insisted, “the issue.on which our nation’s future depends.”
French President Emmanuel Macron used a televised press conference in January 2024 to call for “demographic rearmament”, arguing that “France will be stronger by boosting its birth rate.”
Is there any basis for pronatalism?
The main statistical measure that relates to the alarms expressed by political leaders is Total Fertility Rate (TFR). This is a projection of the total number of children who will be born to a cohort of females of child-bearing age at a particular point in time. A TFR of around 2.1 is needed in high income countries (slightly higher in low income countries) for a population to replace itself.
Recent data on TFRs in each country appear in a recent Lancet article. The global average in 2021 was 2.23, ie above replacement level. But there are considerable differences between countries in different regions, Every country in North America, Europe and East Asia has a TFR below 2.1, while almost every country in sub-Saharan Africa has a TFR significantly above replacement level.
The TFR measure is a projection of how many children will have been born to a cohort when all mothers in the cohort have completed their childbearing lifespan. The actual figure will depend on how closely younger members of the cohort repeat the patterns of those who have completed their families. Whether or not population actually declines depends not only on this, but also on what is happening to death rates, and, for individual countries, to migration. There is, in any case, a considerable time lag between TFR trending below replacement level and total population actually declining.
Birthgap, a 2022 documentary made by Stephen Shaw, has become hugely influential in stoking up concern and presenting pronatalism as a necessary solution.. It is not a reliable guide. It confuses TFRs with birth rates (live births per thousand population). Shaw calls the replacement level “the population tipping point”, implying that once TFRs go below it, the process becomes self-perpetuating. There is nothing inevitable about this. TFRs, as well as birth rates, rise as well as fall, even after they have gone below replacement level.
This is illustrated clearly in the Office for National Statistics data for England and Wales. Here, TFR rose from 2.04 (just below replacement level) in 1945 to 2.68 in 1947, then fell to 2.14 in 1951, before rising again to a peak of 2.93 in 1964. It fell below replacement level in 1973, down to 1.66 in 1977. From then it rose again, to 1.94 in 2010, before falling to 1.49 in 2022. TFR may have remained below replacement level throughout the last five decades, but its trajectory was far removed from the continual decline assumed by Shaw.
Pronatalist policies
Political leaders who treat below replacement TFRs as a problem come up with a variety of policy solutions, Many of them are understandable, and worthy of consideration whether or not below replacement TFR is considered a problem - extended parental leave, for example, or free fertility tests. Others are more bizarre. In 2022, for example, Putin revived a Stalin-era ‘Mother Heroine’ award for mothers with 10 children, and coupled it with a I million ruble (£8,500) financial reward. And in South Korea, investment in a high speed rail network was justified on the grounds that a faster commute would give workers more time at home to procreate after a long day at the office or factory.
None of these pronatalist measures have been particularly successful in restoring replacement level TFR. The closest is Hungary, where policies including generous tax breaks and free IVF treatment have been associated with a rise in LFR. But that rise has been short lived, and not necessarily a result of the policy initiatives. It seems that would-be parents, and women in particular, are resistant to allowing government incentives to influence whether or not to have children, or how many children to aim for.
Who needs higher birth rates?
Measures to support adults who choose to have and bring up children may be a welcome side effect of some pronatalist policy initiatives, but policy design reflects a perceived need to boost population growth rather than to improve the wellbeing of parents and children.
A key aim of all pronatalists is to slow the increase in another relevant measure, the old-age dependency ratio. Allow birth rates to continue to fall, the argument goes, and it becomes increasingly difficult to pay the pensions, and provide the care, that will be needed by the elderly. This is not an insuperable problem. Current tax and pension systems were devised in an era when few people lived beyond retirement age - they can be re-designed to take account of changed circumstances. Policies to promote healthy ageing can extend working life and reduce care needs.. Technology to raise the productivity of younger workers can free labour to work in the care sector, or encourage the emergence of what ‘Who Cares’ author Emily Kenway has called a “commons of care”, where work and care are combined without financial penalty.
In the medium term, migration from poor counties with high LFRs to rich countries with low LFRs can provide workers needed in the latter who are able to send back remittances that benefit families in the former. Increased migration from the tropics to temperate regions is in any case likely to intensify as global temperatures continue to rise. Increased immigration, though, is not favoured by many pronatalist politicians, particularly those of a populist persuasion. For them, the opportunity to cease relying on immigrant labour is one of the main aims of their pronatalist policies - “We do not need numbers. We need Hungarian children”, as Viktor Orbán put it.
Historically, pronatalism has been associated with militarism - women being coerced to produce the children who will grow into the men who will be required to fight wars. Nazi Germany is the classic case. There are still militarist elements nowadays, in less extreme form. Putin’s recent promotion of family values and motherhood coincides with the unexpected scale of the loss of male Russian soldiers during the war in Ukraine. And Macron’s recent arguments for ‘demographic rearmament’ explicitly link increased birth rates with military power and the defence of French culture.
The capitalist push to violate boundaries
Underlying all pronatalist policies is capitalism’s objective of continued economic growth - an objective that is harder to achieve if population declines. It is telling that the reputation of Birthgap director Stephen Shaw as a data analyst was based on his earlier career producing short-term forecasts of auto purchasing. And that Adamo 2050, a short film that scared Italians into worrying about low birth rates, was produced for Plasmon, a baby food brand.
There are deeper, and more sinister, interests at play. Ninkatsu (active pursuit of pregnancy), which has become the catch-all term promoting pronatalist policies in Japan, started life as a marketing strategy of a pharmaceutical company that wanted to normalise assistive reproductive technology. Perhaps most significant of all, pronatalism has emerged, alongside life extension, as a major preoccupation of tech billionaires in the USA. Their pronouncements assume that population growth must be maintained. And they see enormous profit opportunities in the boundary violating technologies that could help bring it about.
“The Silicon Valley elite are betting big on reproductive technologies as a growth market. Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, Christian Angermeyer, Steve Jurvetson, Larry Ellison and others have all invested in fertility and genomic editing start-ups.”
Jules Evans, The Religion of the Future Police, Medium 16 Dec 2022
Elon Musk is a particularly prominent advocate of pronatalism. “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilisation than global warming,. Mark these words,” he tweeted in August 2022. “(And I do think global warming is a major risk)”, he added. He has donated $10 million to UT Austin’s Population Welfare Initiative, which researches possible consequences of population collapse.
Travel management entrepreneurs Malcolm and Simone Collins are also high profile advocates. Pronatalist.org, an organisation they established, promotes egg and sperm donation and surrogacy, and invests in what it calls “reproductive health companies at the margins of progress”. These margins include “polygenic risk screening, artificial wombs, and more”. The explicit aims are both eugenicist and transhumanist - ”to push the boundaries of progress in the reproductive space.”
Male entitlement
Reading through the various often conflicting strands of pronatalist argument, it is often possible to detect a common strand of resentment, mainly from men, that some women are not performing what Jordan Peterson calls their “sacrificial duty”, to bring children into the world. This is presented as being about species survival, but often reflects men’s sense of entitlement that they should be able to use women’s bodies as a resource. Sometimes men have expressed this by valuing their ability to impregnate women as proof of their virility, but amongst elite men it has become fashionable to believe that their value resides in their genes, and that it is their responsibility to pass these on.
This is typified by Elon Musk. He has fathered 11 children with 4 different women (including one surrogate mother), and sees fathering children as a eugenics project. He is more sceptical than some of his fellow tech billionaires about the possibilities of life extension. Instead he believes he will live on by spreading his genes.
“Having children with only one couple is very risky genetically. If your partner’s genes are not amazing, or they don’t complement yours well, you run the risk of a poor genetic make-up for your children. If instead you want to optimise your children’s genetic makeup to ensure your genes’ survival, the best way to do that is by partnering with women who are beautiful, successful, and as different from each other as they can be. A writer, a musician, and a technology executive sounds quite good in that regard.”
(Tomas Pueyo, Why is Elon Musk having so many kids with so many women?, Substack 13 Sep 2022)
Musk is not selfish. He wants other rich men to live on through their genes too. He urges all the rich men he knows to have as many children as possible, believing that they possess a unique genius which can be spread through their genes, preferably via as many different women as possible. In Musk’s eugenic updating of Apollo's patriarchal defence of Orestes, the genius sperm is combined with a diversity of eggs, and motherhood is reduced to passive gestation of the genius offspring. No wonder Stephen Shaw’s Birthgap (in which Musk has a starring role) is particularly down on childless women. No wonder, too, that if increasing numbers of young women obstinately choose to remain childless, this is used as an argument for normalising one of the tech bros’ transhumanist dreams - taking back reproduction from women, and birthing their offspring from artificial wombs.
The environmental downside of population growth
Total Fertility Rates may be falling almost everywhere, even in most of the global South, but this is unlikely to stop global population rising from the current 8 billion to a projected peak of more than 10 billion sometime in the 2080s. Only then is it projected to begin to fall. That’s a rise of more than 2 billion over the next six decades. 2 billion was the total size of the world’s population in the late 1920s, less than a century ago. Already, at 8 billion, humans and the livestock they own make up 96% of the world’s mammal biomass. Wild mammals, now only 4% of the total, will be even fewer when human population peaks. A growing human population increases pressure on nature, and inevitably crowds out wildlife.
Hardline pronatalists deny that there’s a problem with human population growth in a finite world. Here’s Jordan Peterson, using one of his podcast episodes to converse with Birthgap director Stephen Shaw:
“I believe that almost all the idea of natural resources is specious … if we organise ourselves and aim up there’s no real limit to abundance … We can learn and we can transform and we’re very good at that”
(Jordan Peterson with Stephen Shaw, Unplanned Childlessness, Podcast EP338, 2023)
Learning and transforming is a common theme, and one that many pronatalists associate with youth.“Greying economies innovate less” , The Economist suggested in March 2023, “Younger people have more of what psychologists call ‘fluid intelligence’, meaning the ability to solve new problems and engage with new ideas.” Louise Perry is one pronatalist who doesn’t deny that the living planet is under threat. She, like Musk, draws on eugenic arguments, and suggests that it is educated, environmentally conscious parents who will produce children gifted and aware enough to be able to innovate their way out of the climate crisis:
“If you’re the type of highly educated person who really cares about the environment and is going around saying ‘I’m not going to have kids because of the planet’ you are exactly the sort of person who is likely to have children who are going to develop the next form of energy that we need. I think probably the worst thing you can do is to refuse to procreate.”
(Louise Perry, Motherhood in Crisis, Spectator TV 18 April 2023)
Relying on technology and growth to solve problems created by technology and growth seldom guarantees success. Humans are in competition with other species. The ‘solutions’ to the climate crisis that we have innovated - wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, etc - require the rapid exploitation of new sources of critical minerals such as cobalt or lithium, Extraction of these minerals endangers wildlife, often in areas that have not hitherto undergone intensive development. Maybe humanity will at some stage come up with innovations that are more respectful of wild nature. Meanwhile, though, the increase in human population will have driven more species to extinction.
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Pronatalism pressures women, either with persuasion or coercion, into having more children than they want. It also intensifies the technological assault on reproduction. The first usurps women’s (partial, and only recently gained) freedom to choose. The second usurps reproductive sex.
If, as seems likely, women on average choose to reproduce at below the replacement level, it would enable a more balanced relationship between humans and other species. This doesn’t need to be a problem for society, so long as the economy is reoriented to prioritise need over profit, and communities again value giving elders the respect they deserve. And we can certainly do without the technological assault on reproduction that Silicon Valley billionaires are intent on developing.
Humanity needs defending against the transhumanists, not expanding against other species.
Very interesting, this explains a lot in terms of recent language changes and commodification of women, removing the holistic woman and making us a sum of parts and gender trumping sex. The older I get the more I see the evil of capitalism and that it truly is the cause of all our problems. Another one to add to the list of things I need to worry about!
Fantastic, Alan!