ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Billionaire Elon Musk told Fox News recently that falling birth rates keep him up at night. It's a drum he's been beating for years.
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ELON MUSK: The birth rate is very low in almost every country, and so unless that changes, civilization will disappear.
SHAPIRO: Musk is one of the world's most visible beacons of this anxiety. Vice President JD Vance also talks about wanting to increase birth rates in the U.S. And it's not just them. There are discussions across the political spectrum about birth-rate decline and what it means for the economy. One response to this decline is a cause that's been taken up by the right, and it has a name - pronatalism. Many of its advocates met up recently in Austin, Texas, at Natal Con. NPR's Lisa Hagen was there.
LISA HAGEN, BYLINE: Simone Collins, in her thick-rimmed, round glasses, is one of the more visible faces of pronatalism - on purpose.
SIMONE COLLINS: My whole entire, like, Etsy getup right now, it's intentionally cringe.
HAGEN: She's here at Natal Con in her signature look, which she describes as techno-puritan.
COLLINS: There should obviously be more cybernetics in my outfit, but we are combining, like, chunky hipster glasses and a lot of modern equipment with a bonnet and linen clothing.
HAGEN: Think Thanksgiving pilgrim in a school play, with a baby strapped to her back.
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COLLINS: Oh, you'll get to do that soon.
HAGEN: That's 1-year-old Industry Americus. Indy's three older siblings are home with neighbors in Pennsylvania. Simone and her husband Malcolm are expecting a fifth child this year, and she's said that she's willing to die in childbirth to have as many kids as possible.
COLLINS: I would rather not do that, but historically, women died in childbirth at roughly similar rates to the rates at which men died protecting their land or country.
HAGEN: The Collinses have made themselves available for profiles in pretty much every major news outlet you can think of.
COLLINS: The No.1 goal we have is to make everyone universally aware of demographic collapse as a catastrophic issue. Our big focus is primarily on just signaling that this is a culture that values family and kids, and secondarily, taking a regulatory foot off the neck of parents.
HAGEN: Simone and her husband are big fans of Elon Musk. He's famous, he's got 13 kids, and he also tends to talk about falling birth rates in catastrophic terms.
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MUSK: Nothing seems to be turning that around. Humanity is dying.
HAGEN: That's him on Fox News recently. Musk and the Collinses are seen as members of the tech camp of pronatalist advocacy. Venture capitalism, technology, like IVF and AI, are key parts of their recipe for maximizing human potential via more babies. The Collinses are also very interested in genetic engineering. Another pronatalist camp includes the more religiously motivated and believers in strict gender norms. It's referred to as the trads, as in traditional.
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CHARLES HAYWOOD: And generally, women should not have careers. They should be socially stigmatized if they have careers.
HAGEN: That's Charles Haywood at the first Natal Con a couple years ago. This year, he's behind the scenes as a sponsor. He made his money as a shampoo magnate. Haywood blames birth rate declines on feminism and the overturning of what he sees as natural hierarchies of gender and race.
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HAYWOOD: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever for the history of this nation.
HAGEN: So it may seem like a challenge to square a Charles Haywood with a Simone Collins. She's an entrepreneurial woman with a master's degree from Cambridge. But they share a commitment to spaces like Natal Con because they both believe modern culture has stopped prioritizing nuclear families and having kids, which is not really how most demographers describe what's happening. Katherine (ph) Benjamin Guzzo is a University of North Carolina sociologist who runs the Carolina Population Center.
KAREN BENJAMIN GUZZO: The United States has low fertility right now. Up until the Great Recession, we were sort of humming along, you know, right around two kids per person.
HAGEN: Then birth rates began to fall, partly because the U.S. succeeded in reducing teen and unintended births. America was actually a couple decades late to the declining fertility trend. It's something that's been happening at different rates all over the world.
GUZZO: And this is true in, you know, Italy, and it's true in Japan. And it's true in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. India has a below-replacement fertility rate in some parts.
HAGEN: The theories about why this is happening are pretty complicated. But there's also another trend emerging. We're used to thinking of richer, more educated people having fewer children than the poor and working class. Recent research shows that tendency has actually started to reverse in many countries, including the U.S. Guzzo says surveys show most people want kids, but nowadays, in this very competitive world, they have a vision of what being a good parent means - a stable home, income, a partner, hope about the future.
GUZZO: People are not being irrational and selfish when they're deciding not to have children. People are making a series of decisions to not have a child now - maybe in the future. And then that keeps happening because we aren't giving people the societal supports to meet their visions of having a good parent.
HAGEN: For her, that should include things like more government funding for health care, affordable housing, schools, child care, addressing climate change. But many pronatalists, including Natal Con's organizer Kevin Dolan, see their biggest allies as the folks in the White House right now. Here's Dolan speaking at the conference over lunch.
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KEVIN DOLAN: But the topic of demographic decline clearly matters to Elon Musk, JD Vance and many others in the Trump administration, which means that the great ideas developed here can get a hearing that would not have been possible last year.
HAGEN: Dolan left his data science job in 2021 after his anonymous Twitter account was exposed. Among other things, he'd used it to promote the racist notion that white men are superior to other races and women. After getting doxxed, Dolan continued sharing his thoughts about how society should be ordered on his podcast.
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DOLAN: We're expected to lie about the existence of these hierarchies all of the time. And if our goal is to rehabilitate hierarchies of nature, then the best place to start is the most fundamental natural hierarchies, which are found in the family. And that brings us back to where we started, with selective breeding.
HAGEN: Matthew McManus is a lecturer at the University of Michigan and an expert on the modern hard-right writers Dolan takes inspiration from.
MATTHEW MCMANUS: The idea is essentially that our society has become excessively effeminate, weak, compassionate. And what they want to do is breed or elevate an aristocratic class that's going to be masculine, violent, not necessarily motivated by, let's call it, empathy.
HAGEN: For these thinkers, restoring this masculine culture means feminism and multicultural democracy need to be rooted out.
MCMANUS: Women are to be subordinated to men, largely going to be responsible for managing the household, although with no real particular authority. And of course, they're going to have an awful lot of children.
HAGEN: It's not explicit on the Natal Con stage, but part of Dolan's vision for the conference is to help build this world, where men like him can't be doxxed because they'll be in power. Dolan says his conference is nonpartisan, and he invites speakers who say stuff like this.
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PEACHY KEENAN: We don't really want to market natalism to the progressive feminists. The people maxing out their fertility should be people, ideally, who won't raise their children to be gender-neutral furries who want to join Antifa one day.
HAGEN: That's a speech from the first Natal Con. It's a writer who goes by the pseudonym Peachy Keenan. Her work is published by a company that sells books arguing Black people are inherently more criminal and less intelligent than white people. That publisher, Passage Press, sponsored Natal Con this year, and its founder was a featured speaker.
These are some of the elements united under the banner of pronatalism. They don't all agree on how to boost birth rates, but two years after the first Natal Con, this is a movement that's much closer to power than it used to be. Lisa Hagen, NPR News.
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