A second American baby boom

Everybody wins if we have more children.

Written by Craig Willy.

The rise to power of J. D. Vance as vice president and Elon Musk as a right-wing mega-influencer has put natalism firmly in the middle of the American political agenda. The 2.0 Trump Administration is keenly aware that sustaining America’s growth, dynamism, and innovation depends in significant part on having more children. But just how realistic is this ambition?

Sub-replacement fertility (roughly defined as below 2.1 per woman) means a declining native labor force must increasingly be squeezed to support the ever-growing retirement and healthcare entitlement spending of the ballooning elderly population. This simple dynamic has crippled the economies of Japan and much of Europe, and has already started hitting China hard. With an official fertility rate of 1.09 in 2022, China’s population cohorts are being virtually halved every generation.

The governments of other nations are certainly realizing that demography accounts for a substantial part of national destiny. Last year, French President Emmanuel Macron said he would present a “great plan against infertility” as part of the nation’s “demographic rearmament.” The French have long been conscious of the political importance of population trends as the country historically experienced massive and abrupt geopolitical decline in the nineteenth century as a result of precocious fertility collapse, itself likely due to early secularization with the Enlightenment.

China and Russia are also taking action. After belatedly replacing China’s disastrous one-child policy with a two-child policy in 2015, Xi Jinping’s CCP quickly went on to establish a three-child policy in 2021. While local and regional governments have set up a wide range of measures in response to the center’s abrupt pivot towards natalism, these have so far failed to reverse China’s fertility collapse. The Chinese central government is doubling down, recently issuing a new directive to shift towards a “birth-friendly society” by improving parental leave, access to housing, and medical coverage for assisted reproductive technologies.

Russia has increasingly taken natalist measures of its own, particularly since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and an associated “illiberal” turn away from the West. Last November, President Vladimir Putin signed into law a ban on “childfree ideology” with fines of up to 5 million rubles (about $50,000) for individuals and businesses promoting childlessness. The law also enables deportation of foreigners promoting said ideology. Putin’s spokesman has called Russia’s total fertility rate of 1.4 “catastrophic” for the country’s future.

Time will tell which of these diverse pronatalist approaches will prove successful. The upshot is that if America can sustain a comparatively high fertility rate, she is unlikely to have any plausible peer-competitor in the second half of this century. A second American Century is perfectly plausible.

The varieties of pronatalism have often been controversial. In 2017, Representative Steve King (R-IA) caused an uproar when he linked natalism and opposition to immigration, saying: “You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else’s babies. You’ve got to keep your birth rate up, and that you need to teach your children your values.”

More recently, Musk has warned that population collapse due to low birth rate is “a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” While on its face the argument would seem to not make sense, one should consider that virtually all the innovative nations in the world, essentially in North America, Europe, and East Asia, are failing to reproduce.

The fact is, whether we are talking about tackling environmental challenges or existential threats such as a pandemic or an income meteor, the needed techno-scientific know-how is concentrated in the demographically collapsing Global North (including China). Musk has also alluded to dysgenic trends by sharing the opening of the film Idiocracy wherein conscientious high-IQ couples do not have children, unlike their less educated counterparts.

When Vance was nominated as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate last year, the media had a field day recalling his past comments about the country, and in particular the Democratic Party, being run by “childless cat ladies.” Vance later regretted the tone but not the substance of what he had said.

Suffice to say, natalist concerns are often perceived as incendiary, though I would argue the issue can also be framed as a unifying one.

In a previous era, the media’s weeks long attacks on Vance might have disqualified him as a candidate. But the times they have a’changed. As vice president, Vance made his debut speech at the March for Life rally in where he lamented a culture of excessive individualism and reiterated the case for raising children:

Our society has failed to recognize the obligation that one generation has to another is a core part of living in a society to begin with. So let me say, very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America. … We need a culture that celebrates life at all stages, one that recognizes and truly believes that the benchmark of national success is not a GDP number or our stock market, but whether people feel that they can raise thriving and healthy families, in our country.

But what can actually be done to raise the birth rate? The truth is no government in any developed countries has found the answer, with the significant exception of Israel.

Until comparatively recently, natalism was a non-issue for American political leaders. After all, the country experienced exponential population growth—driven by big families and, to a lesser and more varying extent, immigration—until the Great Depression. The U.S. fertility rate has only been consistently below replacement since 2008 and now is around 1.6. Today, American women of all levels of education have less children than they hoped, with the most educated missing their family-building goals the most (about 0.6 children less on average).

The great thinkers of the American political canon have long been aware of the importance of population to national power. In his highly perceptive and insufficiently consulted essay, “Observations on the Increase of Mankind,” Benjamin Franklin in 1751 already foresaw that the small colonies of Anglo-America would exponentially grow to become more populous than England herself within a century, resulting in “a glorious Market” and a tremendous “Accession of Power.”

Among the factors favoring colonial America’s high fertility, Franklin includes ease of family formation due to high wages and the cheapness of land, as well as the spread (in highly proto-Darwinian fashion) of high-fertility sects. He also argues that higher population growth in the North is enabled by the absence of slavery, which Franklin believes is debilitating to both black slaves and white masters.

Daniel Hess of MoreBirths has a solid roundup of possible measures to reverse America’s fertility decline. I would highlight a few major planks:

• Cheaper housing (hello YIMBY and deregulation)

• Higher wages (hello protectionism and immigration restriction)

• Shorter educational pathways (e.g., stop subsidizing university education, develop skills testing as an alternative to credentials)

• Enabling religious subcultures and stay-at-home lifestyles for those who want them

• Promoting a culture valuing children, which seems to be the secret sauce in Israel

• Reimbursement of in vitro fertilization (IVF), as in Israel, where such techno-natalism enables over 6% of births and helps weed out genetic diseases

More generally, there are signs America’s federalism and subcultural diversity—two eminently evolutionary mechanisms—may help overcome the fertility crisis. Families are fleeing overregulated and overpriced blue states like California, New York, and Illinois in favor of economically booming red and purple states. In addition, religious people and Trump-voting counties have significantly higher birth rate than their secular and liberal counterparts.

Selection among cultural groups also operates within the United States and the secular and liberal Americans are increasingly opting out of the future.

Support for IVF strikes me as a rare opportunity for bipartisan action. In a challenge to some religious conservatives, President Trump campaigned on reimbursing the procedure and even called himself “the father of IVF.” Many Democrats similarly want to increase access to IVF, as California Governor Gavin Newsom has recently done by mandating insurance companies reimburse the procedure.

The new Republican coalition certainly embraces different varieties of pronatalism which can be in tension. As the left-wing bioconservative Pete Shanks observed, religious conservatives often understand natalism in terms of fostering traditional families and restricting abortion, while the new Silicon Valley natalists do not sacralize the early-stage embryo and often embrace reproductive technologies and even genetic enhancement.

The Trump Administration is likely to take an ambivalent position on embryos, wanting to simultaneously get the support of its religious base, while not alienating voters more broadly. While regulating abortion is certainly a constitutional right of the people in the states, the examples of communist Romania and today’s Poland show that broad and harsh abortion restrictions are no way to sustainably foster families. People cannot be forced to raise happy families.

Everything I have seen so far suggests the Trump team will seek a pragmatic approach to fostering families while balancing the different components of their coalition.

More broadly, techno-populism may well be able to deliver an optimistic vision of America’s future as against the national self-hatred and systematized ressentiment of the woke left. Musk’s vision of colonizing Mars already serves as a powerful mobilizing political myth. Even if implausible for this generation and the next, the idea of colonizing Mars provides a new Frontier and an inspiring horizon for Americans, and indeed all humanity, to work towards.

Personally, I believe American variety of natalism must above all be founded on freedom. Individual freedom, religious freedom, and reproductive freedom, including in the use of new reprotechnologies. Freedom is both the chief end and means of the American regime, dedicated, as expressed in the Preamble to the Constitution, to securing “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

In this time of remarkable change, Americans can foster a life-affirming culture which gives every person the chance to raise the loving family they hope for. Let them seize the moment!

Craig Willy is an EU-US political writer, policy consultant, and author of the Evopolitics blog.

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