MAGA Pronatalism is Anti-Freedom No Matter the Packaging
But its sanewashing is underway
Weird scenes take place often in the Oval Office these days, but a healthcare event last month was a stand-out. The TV doctor in charge of Medicare and Medicaid called adults with few or no children "under-babied." The president, subject of dozens of sexual assault allegations, referred to himself once again as "the father of fertility," and the conspiracy theorist who runs Health and Human Services bemoaned the sperm counts of teenage boys.
Not long ago, this kind of bizarre pronatalist chatter was contained in extreme regions of the far right, from people who legacy media enjoyed profiling as the edge characters they are. Influencers Malcolm and Simone Collins, in particular, were frequent subjects of clickbait evoking widespread social media mockery of their tradlife cosplay. "Masculinists" with absurd online personas like Raw Egg Nationalist got each other worked up about Great Replacement Theory and repealing women's suffrage as they renewed the virulently racist and sexist pronatalism of past centuries.
Then a few things happened. Trump widened his public embrace of right-wing extremism and Christian nationalism, sending his VP pick JD Vance out on the campaign trail where he vilified "childless cat ladies" and once reelected, elevating fringe figures to high positions in his second administration. And powerful so-called conservative organizations including The Heritage Foundation saw the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade not as an end-point but "just the beginning" of well-funded campaigns to impose their vision of the family nationwide.
Last month Heritage livestreamed an event on birth rates, which it is now framing as the most important issue facing the US. President Kevin Roberts opened by arguing that Trump's promised economic and social "Golden Age" can only be achieved by tackling the "crisis." Moderators and panelists spent the morning identifying causes and offering prescriptions drawn from Heritage's recent report, "Saving America by Saving the Family" (SASF).
Echoing the SASF report, participants placed blame for today's lowered marriage and birth rates on major policy and cultural developments of the 1960s, arguing that The War on Poverty disincentivized marriage and child-bearing and that second-wave feminism demonized them. The speakers were careful to identify the problem of lowered birth rates as not purely economic or demographic — because it could then of course be handled by increasing immigration.
The event thus focused on the goal of "family formation" and the obstacles Heritage sees in its way. "Family formation" is a dispassionate-sounding term that helps Heritage— and the politicians it influences — to avoid seeming overly concerned with what other humans do with their bodies. But pronatalism of every flavor means pushing for a higher fertility rate, which happens to be measured by the number of births per woman.
The panelists agreed that America's women could have enough babies to save "civilization" if only their life trajectories could be redirected. That is, if they resumed doing womanly things such as marrying young to have lots of babies instead of manly things such as pursuing education and careers.
That Heritage sees women, particularly unmarried ones, as the source of the problem came into sharp focus when one of the few women speakers provided twisted mischaracterizations of feminist theory. Author Carrie Gress claimed feminism was based on the idea that "men are contemptible and women need to be just like them." Women today, she said, are being "indoctrinated" to want to be in control because they "don't understand their purpose." Motherhood isn't a choice, she argued, but a fundamental "responsibility" and "duty" of every woman — a divinely-sanctioned abandonment of self-determination.
Heritage Sanewashes the Weird and Unpopular
This speaker aside, the event was dominated by a tone of reasonableness and a celebration of incrementalism, a conspicuous contrast to the urgent ferocity of Project 2025, the righteous drama of the SASF report, and the slapdash oddity of the Oval Office event.
The men running Heritage understand that pols commenting on teen sperm and images of off-the-grid butter-churning have limited appeal. They also know that the majority of Americans are opposed to the abortion bans they dream of imposing nationwide: Pew finds six out of ten believe "abortion should be legal in all or most cases." While the event included nods to the sanctity of human life, Heritage elided its commitment to forcing births via restricting reproductive health care including contraception and abortion — the latter of which was mentioned 199 times in Project 2025.
So the event's speakers proposed modest federal programs and policy changes meant to incentivize more young people to marry, stay married, work, and have many children. (One example, the Newlywed Early Starters Trust (NEST), a Heritage twist on Trump Accounts, would benefit young couples in first marriages with newborns.) They avoided the fervent homophobia of the "Saving America by Saving the Family" document, which makes explicit what Heritage means by "family formation":
To end America’s family crisis, policymakers and civic leaders should treat restoring the family home as a matter of justice, driven by two truths. The first is that all children have a right to the affection and protection of the man and woman who created them. The second is that the ideal environment in which to exercise this right is in a loving and stable home with their married biological parents.
Why avoid this language at an event otherwise devoted to amplifying ideas from this report? Because defining marriage and the rights of parents and children in this way runs counter to the public's strong support for gay marriage, same-sex adoption, and IVF fertility treatments.
And while the report claims as a right of children "the presence of their mom and dad under the same roof for the entirety of their childhood," 8 in 10 Americans find divorce to be morally acceptable. In other words, Americans want to be free to love who they love. They want to be free to marry or divorce and have children when they think it's healthy for them and their family. They want to be able to define what forms a family. They understand that children deserve to be in safe and loving homes — and that parents not only deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but can offer these to children when they themselves possess them.
Responding to these desires, several panelists offered the language of liberalism to cover a basket of illiberal causes. After one panelist compared babies not being born to the loss of life if airliners went down every day, Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies wisely advised that the panel not talk about the "replacement rate" for humans but about "individual freedoms." Few want to hear that they should make babies as fodder for corporations or the military, Stone emphasized, despite this Heritage statement: "Without families, a country cannot create meaningful work and prosperity. It lacks a storehouse of strong and brave men to protect itself from hostile aggressors at home and abroad."
The event's refrain: Americans want more children. Indeed, a total of two-thirds of Americans say the ideal family includes two or three children, a recent Gallup survey showed. So the messaging to the "under-babied" then should be, according to Stone, "You know you want kids. You do," and if you don't have them you'll regret it and be miserable like Vance's imagined cat ladies. In other words, the right's appeal should be to self-interest rather than duty.
Avoiding Normalization of the Abnormal
Pronatalism need not be an illiberal cause, but it's a hard needle to thread, as sociologist Philip Cohen argued last year in The New Republic, especially as the rhetoric of left and right on the issue overlaps. In the past few years, legacy media has run a host of pieces presenting "the liberal case" for reproducing, often echoing far-right talking points about the childfree as unwilling to make sacrifices or failing to appreciate children (never mind the legions of teachers, child healthcare and childcare workers out there making miracles who don't have children).
Anne Lutz Fernandez
As with so much Trump Administration absurdity, the wacky statements of Dr. Oz, Trump, and RFK Jr. about birth rates and fertility are in danger of being laughed off. We know that Heritage's published intentions, draped in more elegant language and delivered by reasonable-sounding voices, have excellent chances of being afforded credibility by journalists and pundits and becoming the policy of MAGA-controlled governments. And those policies will not just involve modest government spending but government control over the most personal aspects of Americans' personal lives.
