JD Vance has repeatedly said that Americans aren’t having enough children. Other right-wing figures agree with him. Elon Musk, broadening the complaint, has said that “population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”
Because population decline is widely seen as a conservative issue, many progressives don’t seem to worry about it. But they should. If left unchecked, population decline could worsen many of the problems that progressives care about, including economic inequality and the vulnerability of marginalized social groups.
This doesn’t mean adopting the conservative case wholesale. Progressives need to develop their own version of pronatalism. It should stress the need for government benefits and social services like paid parental leave and subsidized child care while defending the right to abortion and rejecting the traditionalism and nativism that too often characterize the position on the right.
Skepticism about pronatalism is understandable, since the position frequently comes packaged with regressive ideas about race and gender. Prominent pronatalists like Tucker Carlson have spoken of the need to resist the “great replacement,” in which white people will be displaced by people of other races. Some proposals for increasing fertility rates call for outlawing abortion and restoring a culture in which women marry young and stay out of the work force, “freeing” them to have veritable broods of children.
In addition, some of the causes of population decline — higher levels of education and more career opportunities for women, greater reproductive freedom and lower rates of teen pregnancy — should be celebrated.
But right-wing packaging should not obscure the genuine perils to which pronatalism is a response. When populations decline, the average age of people in the population increases. This has several harmful consequences. Eventually, there are not enough young people to care for older people and to economically support them through contributions to social programs; to fuel economic growth, technological innovation and cultural progress; and to fund government services.
These developments disproportionately harm poor people, sick people and other socially vulnerable groups. Japan and South Korea are already experiencing some of these problems, but the trend is widespread. Fertility rates in the United States are below the level necessary for population replacement, and they are declining almost everywhere else. Contrary to the alarmism you sometimes hear about exponential population growth, experts say that the number of humans on Earth will peak before the end of this century and fall afterward.
Nonetheless, many progressives still object to the idea of promoting population growth, citing environmental concerns or contending that immigration is an alternative solution. Both arguments are unconvincing.
It might seem that humans are inflicting so much harm through climate change that everyone and everything on Earth would be better off with fewer inhabitants. But climate change will remain a problem even if we allow the population to decline. We have to change our patterns of consumption and reduce carbon dioxide emissions — no matter how big or small our population.
As for immigration, it’s true that in the short term, wealthier countries with lower fertility rates can take in people from poorer countries to stave off the problems of population decline. As long as those immigrants are younger than the average age of a country’s current residents, they help to balance the lopsided demography. But immigration is only a temporary solution. Eventually, newcomers tend to assimilate into the local culture and have fewer children.
Ultimately, there is no escaping the need for people to have more children.
A progressive response to this fact would acknowledge that raising children has increasingly become a financial burden. For the average American family with small children, day care now costs more than rent. Governments should step in to relieve that burden by creating or expanding paid parental leave and subsidized child care, as well as offering better access to reproductive health care.
But social services alone won’t solve the problem. Even countries like Sweden that offer expanded parental leave and heavily subsidized child care have fertility rates below what’s needed to replace the population — and no higher than fertility rates in countries like the United States that lack such offerings.
What’s a progressive pronatalist to do? Fortunately, some countries have shown that there are other ways to increase birthrates. France, for example, has not experienced the severe decline in fertility observed in neighboring countries. One of the main reasons seems to be national policies that provide parents with financial benefits like tax breaks that scale up with the number of children in a family. That’s an approach that the United States could readily adopt, for example, by restoring and expanding the child tax credit.
More research — and ethical reflection — needs to be done to understand how best to reverse declines in fertility rates without sacrificing moral or social progress. This is an urgent cause for all humankind. Which is why right-wing thinkers like Mr. Vance shouldn’t dominate the conversation.
Victor Kumar (@victorckumar) is an associate professor of philosophy at Boston University and the author, with Richmond Campbell, of “A Better Ape: The Evolution of the Moral Mind and How It Made Us Human.”
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