Technocratic pro-natalists often desire to create a certain kind of a child: a healthy child, a smart child, or a “wanted” child. Indeed, with the expansion of embryonic genetic selection technology and the potential of artificial wombs or in vitro gametogenesis—an experimental procedure that genetically modifies anyone’s DNA into viable gametes—parents may use technology to customize their future children. This “Silicon Valley” style of pro-natalism exploits a parent’s desire to raise healthy and happy children by offering them a false promise of control.
My husband and I have one little girl and we are expecting our second child at the end of this year, six weeks before our third wedding anniversary. We represent a growing minority among Generation Z. In 1965, five in six adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four were, or had been, married. Since 1970, however, the marriage rate has fallen by sixty percent. Today, approximately one-third of Gen Z is on track never to marry, with many preferring to remain in unstable cohabitating arrangements.
What began as a marriage recession has turned into a full-blown birth dearth. In 2023, the birthrate fell to its lowest point of 1.62 births per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. The future of the United States, along with that of every developed nation except Israel, is threatened by demographic decline. Our economy, Social Security, military readiness, eldercare, education, and more depend on new generations of children. On an individual level, this decline reflects a much darker reality. Happy, hopeful people have babies. If we are not having babies, what does that say about the health of our nation?
The causes of this birth dearth are varied: rising infertility among men and women, the atomizing force of technology, the high cost of living and raising children, and the decline in marriage and church attendance. Abortions have increased since the Dobbs ruling—perhaps due to the increased availability of medical abortion—as have intentional sterilizations, especially among younger men and women. Each of these factors, individually and in concert, has resulted in what Tim Carney calls a “family unfriendly” culture where children are seen as impositions or, at best, luxury goods.
Pro-natalism, a movement against the decline in births, is making headlines as it draws prominent champions like Elon Musk. While we should be pleased by this development, we should distinguish between “mere pro-natalists,” who simply want to see more babies born, and those who prioritize family formation as the basis for increasing birth rates. Mere pro-natalists can serve as excellent allies against our anti-child culture, but the lack of concern for family formation risks perpetuating the very social pathologies that gave rise to the birth dearth in the first place.
By overlooking the prior decline in mother-father marriage rates, the fertility crisis is reduced to a national collective action problem for someone else to solve. Mere pro-natalism also tends to view children, and their mothers, as means to a greater end: saving the world, the nation, the economy, or finding meaning in one’s life. As the failure of China’s efforts to increase births shows, instrumentalizing motherhood in this way can actually discourage women from childbearing.