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Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance has some thoughts about women and children (and cats), in case you haven’t heard. 

“We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too,” he said in a now-famous statement in 2021. 

Asked about those comments after a wave of backlash this month, he said it was just “sarcasm," and emphasized that he stands by the "substance" of his remarks. 

One way to understand this, my colleague Rachel Cohen explains in a new feature out today, is all coming from the pronatalism movement: “a broad ideological movement driven by concern that the world is not producing enough children — and society should work to change that.”

I talked with Rachel about how to understand not just Vance’s comments, but the broader pronatalism movement.

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Caroline Houck

It's not just Vance — we’ve seen a lot of high-profile conservatives talking about who’s having children, who’s not, and, in a lot of cases, why women need to be having more. Where’s this coming from?

Rachel Cohen

It has been jarring to see these kinds of comments from politicians and Elon Musk, and one way to think about them is to understand them as part of a more extreme wing of the so-called pronatalism movement.

Pronatalists are concerned about declining population levels, and specifically declining birth rates. Pronatalists are not just conservatives, and they’re not just opponents of abortion, though some certainly are. Many people across the spectrum share concerns about what a shrinking population will mean for society and future generations, but some of the more extreme, right-wing parts of this movement have been speaking out and gaining power recently.

Caroline 

I’m inherently a little skeptical of the motivations of a lot of the people I’ve seen in this movement, and outright repelled by the comments of some others. (We can get to why a little bit later). But let’s take the concerns of the broader movement seriously first — that declining populations pose potential risks to society, and even bigger ones to the economy. If you’re part of this movement, but not outright trying to tell me what to do with my body, what do you do? What’s the policy answer?

Rachel

Good question. It’s basically the key question to me. Is it possible to voluntarily increase birth rates, to reverse declining population trajectories, in a non-coercive way? In a way that respects women’s bodies and their other possible opportunities in life? Some liberal pronatalists say they're committed to protecting all those things, and we should really dedicate more time, energy and resources to thinking about what kind of incentives might be helpful, how to drive down overall costs of raising kids, how to make raising children easier.

Last year, my colleague Anna North reviewed examples of countries that were trying to reverse fertility declines. Germany increased investments in child care. Russia began offering lump-sum payments of about $7,000 to families with more than two kids. Hungary started offering newlyweds loans of $30,000, which Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said would be forgiven if the couple had three children. None of these interventions have been enough to fully reverse the population decline.

I think there is a fair argument that many of the incentives countries have tried thus far have been fairly modest, so there are certainly more things leaders could do on that front.

Yet it should be said that even in countries with more generous, expansive, and egalitarian welfare policies like Sweden and Finland, we’re seeing declining birth rates.

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Caroline 

We’ve seen some right-wing figures in the US embrace this kind of family-forward economic policy. But is this the extent of the movement?

Rachel

It’s not, and there are definitely parts of the movement that are even further right than what we're hearing lately from JD Vance. There’s no question that some individuals fretting about birth rates are also opposed to immigration and worried about the country becoming less white. (Some liberal pro-natalists say we need to talk more openly about population trajectories, lest the racist, sexist, ethnonationalist leaders fill that void.)

Elon Musk for example has claimed falling fertility rates is “the biggest danger civilization faces, by far.” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has blamed abortion rights for killing potential American workers, resulting in strained welfare systems today. “If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this,” he argued back in 2022. 

You’ll probably be shocked to hear that other more extreme pronatalist activists blame feminists.

Caroline

I’m shocked, I tell you. Given all that, how should we think about the elevation of pronatalism in the 2024 election? What are you watching in the next three months?

Rachel

I think this is worrying, and I also think for those who want to consider non-coercive ways to boost birth rates, the kind of rhetoric we're hearing from JD Vance and Musk and others is not helpful.

The thing is, if these politicians wanted to say normal things like, "we want to make it easier for parents to raise kids, we want to help relieve costs on families with kids" that would be very broadly supported. Instead they’re taking swipes at childless people, which comes off as cruel and intrusive, and I don’t think will actually help Republicans politically, since most voters believe the government should not be making reproductive health care decisions for them. 

I’m definitely going to watch how this continues to play out with the ongoing conversation around abortion rights. Historically anti-abortion leaders have avoided attacking women who choose to end their pregnancies, focusing more on providers and friends and politicians instead. But with these new attacks on people without kids, I think we could start to see a shift in rhetoric there, too.

To understand the pronatalism movement better, check out Rachel's entire feature here.

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Doug Emhoff, husband to Vice President Kamala Harris, is the Second Gentleman of the United States. He joins Preet Bharara to discuss the campaign challenges ahead, and his advocacy work around reproductive rights and antisemitism.

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Today's edition was produced and edited by Caroline Houck. We'll see you tomorrow!

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