The depopulation bomb
Thoughts on natalism and nihilism.
A few weeks ago, I went to a “demographic collapse pregame party” at Sovereign House. The premise, I suppose, was that the steady decline in birthrates has made population decline inevitable—it’s coming for us no matter what we do, how many immigrants we let in, or how many babies we have—so we might as well enjoy what’s left of humanity before then. I had first met the hosts, Malcolm and Simone Collins, at the Natalist Conference in Austin in December. If the Collinses sound familiar, it’s probably because they went viral last year after a profile dubbed them “the elite couple breeding to save mankind.” They're true believers; they’re trying to ward off what they believe is certain doom. To do their part for the movement, they’ve pledged to have seven kids.
When I met the Collinses back in December, Simone was pregnant with their fourth child. Given the couple’s personal commitment to preventing demographic decline—and the fact that they were speaking at a conference dedicated to boosting the US’s fertility rate—I was fairly shocked by their prognosis. They think we’re too far gone. “As we often say, we’re on the Titanic right now. It’s going to hit the iceberg no matter what at this rate,” Malcolm told me. “Our goal is to ready as many lifeboats as possible and get as diverse a population on those lifeboats as we can. That’s it.”
They may have a point. The US fertility rate was 1.62 in 2023—the lowest it’s been in over a century, and well below the replacement rate of 2.1. There are a few reasons for this, the most salient of which is that younger people aren’t having as many kids as they used to. The fertility rate measures the number of live births for every 1,000 women aged 15 to 44. Since teen pregnancy has been steadily declining for more than two decades (excluding, for some reason, from 2006 to 2007) and the data show most women are now having kids in their 30s rather than their 20s, delayed fertility looks a lot like decreased fertility. This can amount to a decline in overall births: if your window of fertility is narrower, then fewer children can be born in that timeframe.
The reasons behind delayed fertility are somewhat harder to pin down. There are the obvious explanations: birth control and abortion have made it easier to prevent unwanted pregnancy, a luxury many women in the past didn’t have. (It’s worth noting that approximately 61 percent of women who had abortions in 2021 had at least one child; i.e., most people who abort their pregnancies are already parents.) But I think we’re also likely seeing a decline—or at least a delay—in child rearing among people who do want kids. Depending on who you ask, this is either due to economic factors beyond our control (inflation, ballooning student loan debt, the rising cost of housing, etc etc etc) or unprecedented, endemic selfishness among millennials and zoomers.1
I think the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, especially in expensive coastal cities where a certain class of people—myself included, to be clear—seem to exist in a perpetual state of arrested development. If someone who grew up in the nebulous “middle class” can’t afford the traditional markers of adulthood, like a home they own rather than rent, they’re going to take their small pleasures where they can get them: a $6 latte, a $17 martini. People who want kids feel like they can’t afford to have them, or at least can’t afford to raise their hypothetical progeny with the same level of comfort they themselves experienced as children. The same is true for the investment banker manchildren and lonely girlbosses who can afford a house but have yet to find someone with whom to make it a home. Given these factors, I was fairly surprised to learn that the Collinses aren’t particularly interested in combating the phenomenon of “unplanned childlessness.” As I write in my report from NatalCon, which was published yesterday in Politico Magazine, their goal is to encourage people who already have larger than average families to have even more kids.
“Some people matter less than other people in getting fertility rates up,” Malcolm says. “Helping somebody who has four kids but wants eight is more important than helping someone who has none but wants one.”
From a purely mathematical standpoint, I guess this makes sense. The Collinses consider themselves pragmatists (they have a whole book series called “The Pragmatist’s Guide to…”). If their primary interest is raising birth rates, then focusing on people who already have a lot of kids is a logical way of doing so. But this isn’t an argument I find particularly compelling. I think people are generally good; I think life is worth living. And because I believe these things, I’d like us to make it easier for people who want kids to have them, even if their relatively small family sizes won’t significantly boost the fertility rate.
I was far more interested in Kevin Dolan’s pitch for having kids. Politically, Dolan and I have little in common. As I write in the piece, he’s a conservative Mormon and former Booz Allen Hamilton data scientist who
resigned from his job in 2021 after a group of self-proclaimed anti-fascist Mormon activists exposed his anonymous Twitter account, which tied him to the far-right Deseret Nationalist movement …. Dolan came up with the idea for NatalCon after watching “The End of Men,” Tucker Carlson’s documentary about “collapsing testosterone levels” in the West.
On his podcast and elsewhere, Dolan offers a critique of economic factors that can lead to delayed fertility. Though he arrives at different conclusions than I would—like, for example, reorienting our culture back towards single-income households, which would obviously be headed by men. Despite his conference’s focus on the abstract notion of birthrates, Dolan lays out a non-utilitarian argument for starting a family, which I think is far more persuasive than telling people they should have kids to prevent population collapse. “I’m not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare,” Dolan tells the audience. “We’re here because we agree that people are beautiful, that life is beautiful, and that it should go on.” I agree with this, which is why I was so fascinated by the glee with which other speakers boasted about their political opponents’ low fertility rates. Among them was Peachy Keenan, a writer affiliated with the Claremont Institute who bragged that “the other side is not reproducing; the anti-natalists are sterilizing themselves.” Keenan was conflating a lot of things here: birth control, abortion, low birth rates among Americans of all political orientations, some liberals’ proclamations that they won’t have kids because “the earth is on fire,” and the existence of trans people.
If the goal of the Natalist Conference is to increase birthrates, gloating about how libs aren’t reproducing isn’t a particularly productive way of doing so. But if the conference’s aim—or that of some of its speakers—is to encourage a certain kind of person to have kids, then these sentiments make more sense. I know it’s obvious, but it’s worth making this point explicitly. I believe in taking people at their word unless and until I have a reason not to. I went to the natalist conference expecting to hear conservative arguments for having children, but I didn’t expect to hear anyone brag about how libs aren’t having children. Ultimately, right-wing pronatalists are trying to have it both ways: they want their movement described as one that is primarily dedicated to the proliferation of the family, but they have no interest in encouraging family formation among people who don’t share their political beliefs. Anyone who points out this contradiction is accused of hating children, hating families, and hating “normal” people. Right-wing pro-natalists smear their critics as radicals who oppose one of the most ancient and enduring social systems: the family. There are indeed militant anti-natalists out there, but I’m not one of them.2 Right-wing pro-natalists obviously benefit from the belief that the only people who criticize them are the kind of people who call children “crotch goblins” or think the planet would be better off without humans on it. They can’t imagine—or simply don’t want to engage with—people who disagree with the notion that we must encourage certain people to reproduce while cheering the demise of others.
It’s an undoubtedly cynical worldview, one that relies on seeing children not as unique human beings with their own thoughts and beliefs, but rather as foot soldiers in an ideological war. I’m certain all the NatalCon speakers love their children; I’m sure many of them would bristle at my suggestion that they don’t regard their children as individuals. Recently, I saw a post on Twitter from a woman who was aghast that a pediatrician wanted to speak to her teenage daughter alone. The woman took particular issue with the fact that the doctor asked the girl to pee in a cup so she could run STI and pregnancy tests. The woman accused the doctor of being a groomer; in fact, as dozens of people pointed out, doctors ask to speak to children privately to determine whether they’re being abused—something many kids wouldn’t admit to in front of the people who are perpetrating or complicit in said abuse.
I don’t mean to imply that this woman, whose name I no longer remember, is an abuser. My issue is with the pervasive belief that all harm done to children comes from malevolent predators outside the home, when the data suggests otherwise. When conservatives talk about protecting children, they often mean shielding them from external forces like drag queen story hour or “wokeness” in the schools. They’re typically far less preoccupied with the ways children can be hurt by the people closest to them, by the people entrusted with their care and protection.
Conservatives often accuse liberals of being helicopter parents: they deride young people as having been raised on participation trophies and anti-bullying PSAs, of attempting to turn the world into a “safe space” where dissent and critique aren’t tolerated. At the same time, social conservatives attempt to shield their own children from external influence by any means necessary. If we take some of the NatalCon speakers at their word, one of their arguments for having children is that it’s a means of bringing more people into the world whose ideology you can shape—or control.
This strategy doesn’t always work. One of my best friends was raised in a deeply conservative Catholic family in the Midwest: her parents took her to anti-abortion rallies as a child and vote reliably Republican to this day. Some of her siblings are pro-life conservatives, but some aren’t; she herself is a Marxist. Years ago, as she and I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, I asked her how she turned out so different from her parents and her sisters. She told me there was no single definitive moment that turned her into a leftist, no single factor she could point to that differentiates her from her family. My friend’s parents raised her and her siblings with the same values, but those values didn’t translate to uniform political beliefs. For what it’s worth, my friend is an anomaly: most people pass on their religion and political beliefs to their children. But it’s not always the case. The recent obsession with wokeness at elite universities, for example, is not entirely unrelated to a few billionaires’ kids becoming leftists in college. Conservatives see this as indoctrination, an intentional plot to upend traditional ways of being. In truth, all it shows is that having more kids just to shape the culture isn’t foolproof. Even if it were possible to build a political movement by having more kids than your opponents, this strategy suggests a fundamental hatred for people who don’t share your beliefs. The beauty of humanity is in its contradictions and differences; if you only love a certain kind of person, then you don’t love people at all.
The concern about declining birthrates isn’t new. At the turn of the twentieth century, the sociologist Edward A. Ross coined the term “race suicide” to describe the decline in fertility among so-called “old-stock” Americans who could trace their ancestry to the colonial period. Like some of today’s conservative pro-natalists, Ross attributed the drop in fertility to the selfishness of young people. He complained that the “patent-leather life of some people makes them want a piece of bric-a-brac instead of a child.” Another writer from that time, journalist Lydia Commander, blamed young women in particular. “What kinship can you find between that fiery, Eastern nature-woman, furious at the denial of motherhood, and the soulless creature who turns coldly from a child to lavish caresses upon a pedigreed dog or cat? Instead of Rachel’s fierce insistence, ‘Give me children, or I die!"‘ you hear, in soft lisping tones, ‘Give me a Teddy-bear, or I’ll be out of fashion.’” (For more on twentieth century pro-natalism, I recommend Laura L. Lovett’s fantastic book, Conceiving the Future.
Anti-natalists haven’t really been a major force in American political life since the ‘70s. The last major anti-natalist movement was led by biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book The Population Bomb warned of massive famines that would ensue from overpopulation. Ehrlich called for a head tax on each child born after 1973, the imposition of luxury taxes on cribs and diapers, expanded access to birth control and abortion, and mass sterilization. Looking beyond our borders, Ehrlich suggested the U.S. eliminate food aid to any country that failed to get its population growth under control. The most famous anti-natalist thinker of the twenty-first century is South African philosopher David Benatar, whose 2006 book Better to Never Have Been hasn’t been particularly influential, aside from providing the inspiration for the first season of True Detective.