Pro-natalism

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Pro-natalism or pronatalism is a movement which encourages people to have more children. Environmentalists would criticize this because clearly the population of the Earth cannot grow forever and it is not clear that the current population and standard of living are sustainable. Anti-natalists would criticize this because life is suffering. And many decent people can't help noticing that actually existing pro-natalists often want educated white people to have more children, but poor black people to have fewer. Historically, concerns about the birthrate of educated white people were tied to patriarchy (need those women busy with Kinder, Küche, Kirche, not getting jobs and renting a room of their own), nationalism (need more conscripts and coal miners), eugenics (need the 'right kind' of babies), and white supremacy (can't let darkie outnumber us).

The basic argument

Almost every rich country has a fertility rate below 2.1, so their populations will decline without immigration.^[2] Many people say they want more children, act like they want more children, or behave in strange ways that seem connected to their lack of children or care responsibilities. Some of the barriers to having children, such as expensive housing, cultures of overwork, social isolation, and pessimism about the near future, seem bad. Fertility rates fell abruptly in eastern Europe during the economic depression after the collapse of the USSR, and rose in the North Atlantic in the prosperous years after World War Two.^[3] Rapid population decline, such as in South Korea, would both cause practical problems (someone has to take care of the old) and destabilize the financial system (such as by causing the price of housing to fall or cutting tax revenues from young workers while increasing expenses on pensions and healthcare for the old). Most rich countries outside of Asia rely on high immigration to grow their population, but as fertility is in decline across most of the world, this cannot be continued forever. Some countries with low fertility, such as South Korea or Ukraine, share land borders with hostile countries, and rapid population decline would make it difficult to defend them.

Government policies to increase the fertility rate have rarely had much effect, whereas countries such as China and Iran have successfully reduced their fertility.^[4] Once a population begins to decline, it is hard to reverse. Pro-natalists have proposed a wide range of policies, from changing culture to be more family-friendly in California, to banning contraception and abortion in Communist Romania (which had disastrous consequences).

Most secular arguments for pro-natalism are practical, whereas anti-natalism is more theoretical and philosophical. However, there are religious and nationalist arguments for pro-natalism.

Criticism

Australian economist John Quiggin has criticized panic about aging populations, arguing that they often assume a world where people start working at 15 and stop at 64.^[5] As there are fewer physically demanding jobs that require little formal education, and since older people with quality healthcare are healthier, people are taking longer to enter the workforce and delaying retirement. Desk jobs in the information economy or even driving a combine don't require young, fit bodies. Small technical changes to pension policy can prevent modest population aging from destabilizing government finances.

Because many of the countries with fertility rates above 2.1 are in Africa or the Islamic world, criticisms of high immigration as a solution to low fertility often sound a lot like criticisms of letting black people and Muslims exist in rich countries. Pro-natalist discussions often feature the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the idea that governments in rich temperate countries want to replace current populations with immigrants from poor hot countries. While we can't know if pro-natalists would have argued for contraception 100 years ago when European populations were exploding, many argue that explosive population growth in Europe in the past is a fait accomplit that must never be reversed, but explosive population growth in Africa today is a problem.

By the end of the current century, the population of sub-Saharan Africa alone is expected to triple. The problems this creates may eventually be mitigated by important efforts to supply contraception to poor women. But telling people in developed countries who are well-placed to have children to refrain from doing so is misguided. If anything, they should reproduce more, not less.^[6]

The Natal Conference described itself as pro-natalist, but just happened to be heavily promoted in hereditarian circles and attended by a range of shady people fascinated by race or the idea that rich people might just have good genes and poor people might have bad genes. Even Old Media reporters noticed that Daniel Hess, presented as a "mainly uncontroversial" pro-natalist, praises people like Viktor Orban, Kevin Dolan, and Razib Khan.^[7][8] A book review both presents a sympathetic view of pro-natalism for upper-middle-class people in the USA, and casually drops in hereditarian arguments and suggests that the book's (male) author is the kind of Catholic who disapproves of contraception but decided not to say that part out loud.^[9] Some of the people intrigued by pro-natalism are not polite secular intellectuals who just wish their friends would stop talking themselves out of having kids or would like better public transit so they don't have to act as the family chauffeur.

There are some benefits to an aging population, such as less physical violence and warfare.

Because humans have culture, most of the things we care about are passed on by teaching and modelling not by spawning. South Korea and Japan are very influential in world culture even though their populations are shrinking; Egypt has a growing population but little influence on world culture. Christianity is collapsing across the global north because older generations could not convince their children to remain in the church, not because Christians stopped having children. If you are worried about preserving values or identities, focusing on spreading them might be more effective than having more children.

As recently as the 1960s, pop culture was full of fears of population growth and overpopulation. Demographic trends reversed and the Green Revolution prevented mass deaths from starvation. The current fears about population decline could be invalidated by events in the same way.

See also

• Bryan Caplan
• Simone and Malcolm Collins
• Hereticon

References