“NatalCon” and the Contradictions of the Pronatalist Right
Last month’s gathering of pronatalists in Austin, Texas, revealed a right-wing milieu riven by internal contradictions — and without a plausible plan to significantly increase birth rates.
Ambitious and efficacious pronatalist policy will likely have to be achieved through legislative means. (Suzanne Kreiter / the Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Widespread concern about falling birth rates has prompted some to politically organize around reversing their decline. Representatives of this pronatalist movement — ostensibly united by little more than a belief that more babies should be brought into the world than are currently — descended upon Austin, Texas, in late March to network, organize, and propagate their views.
The second Natal Conference, or “NatalCon” for short, was the successor to the original gathering in 2023. This year’s conference managed to attract around two hundred participants, at $1,000 dollars a ticket, to the AT&T Hotel & Conference Center. At least judged by the amount of media coverage it received, the meeting seems to have been a success, with one participant writing that he had “never been to an event where the ratio of national and international media members to attendees was so high.”
There were some notable hiccups, however. One failing noted by attendees was the dearth of women at the conference. According to the ubiquitous Simone Collins, a prominent participant in the proceedings, at least six female speakers withdrew because of their own pregnancies. And a conference matchmaking event flopped due to the skewed gender ratio. “There’s a lot of lads here,” one nineteen-year-old attendee bemoaned. “There’s not that many ladies.”
Few Women, But Plenty of Right-Wingers
Many observers had objections to NatalCon that went beyond the lack of female participation. Reporting leading up to the conference highlighted that some of the planned speakers had trafficked in promoting eugenics and otherwise dubious race science. In response, a small contingent of local activists organized a “Nazis are not welcome in Austin” protest.
The political tenor of the conference was undoubtedly right-wing, with many involved representing the Right’s extreme fringes. The conference organizer, Kevin Dolan, left his data science job in 2021 after he was discovered to be running a white supremacist Twitter/X account. Among the listed speakers was Razib Khan, who the New York Times terminated after it learned of his involvement with racist publications. Another speaker, Charles Cornish-Dale, runs a popular X account dedicated to a combination of fitness advice and far-right propaganda, such as promoting the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Similarly minded speakers could be found on the program in spades.
Many speakers at NatalCon departed from fertility-related themes to indulge in more general rightist grandstanding. Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec thundered in his conference speech about a “war for civilization” in which the attendees were urged to enlist. Meanwhile Gamergate veteran Carl Benjamin opined that “the marginal people need to go back to the margins.” (To be fair, these “paranoid, rambling, and misanthropic” diatribes were considered something of an embarrassment by at least one more circumspect attendee.)
Apparently only media outlets that were expected to cover NatalCon in a favorable light were allowed in to report on the conference. A Mother Jones reporter’s application for attendance was rejected, and conference organizer Dolan mocked her on X: “You want me to buy you dinner & pay for your booze because you can’t afford to come harsh the vibes & slander my friends on your own dime.”
Pronatalism’s Disunity
The modest attendance at NatalCon suggests that pronatalism has a long way to go before it could claim to be a mass movement. This alliance of conservative religionists, ideologically predisposed technologists, and flamboyant far-right personalities will inevitably face difficulty in winning over other demographics.
The problems in attracting women to a cause associated to a great degree with reasserting traditional gender roles were demonstrated by the conference. Insofar as pronatalists propose to increase the birth rate by exhorting women to give up economic self-sufficiency and return to the domestic sphere (as “tradwife” influencers do), it makes sense that many women would balk at joining the movement. And the paucity of nonwhite attendees plausibly has something to do with the adjacency of many conference personalities to racist ideologies of one sort or another.
Even some attendees objected to association with pronatalism per se. For instance, Catherine Pakaluk, a professor at Catholic University, rejects the pronatalist label because of its discrediting associations: “I think there probably are some people who are just pure eugenicists or white supremacists. . . . I find it disgusting and reprehensible and I have no interest in ever being aligned with people like that.” Nevertheless she was a speaker at NatalCon.
The factions that make up what now exists of a pronatalist movement are deeply split on a number of issues. The religious right tends to look askance at methods that more modernist elements of the coalition see as ways to raise the birth rate, from in-vitro fertilization and selecting embryos on the basis of supposed intelligence quotient (IQ) scores to gay parenthood. Pronatalism’s highest-profile promoter is Elon Musk, whose “harem drama” with multiple mothers of his children does not exactly serve as a glowing advertisement for the traditional family values that the religious right purportedly champions.
Pronatalists are further divided over whether to emphasize increasing the population per se or increasing the quality of the future population. On its face, pronatalism would seem to be about the former; however, enthusiasts of eugenics represent a persistent strain of the pronatalist coalition. Association with this faction continues to discredit the movement.
The pronatalists also face opposition from more centrist elements of the Right. Some have pointed out that, unlike the Collins couple, most potential or actual parents are unwilling to increase the number of kids they produce merely for the sake of a supposed benefit to the economy. Furthermore, the only plausible policy package that has been proposed as a necessary (but probably not sufficient) method for significantly lifting the birth rate is a social democratic agenda to support parents and children, including generous public investment in housing, childcare, family leave, and so forth. Conservatives who prioritize slashing state expenditure may therefore view any kind of state-sponsored pronatalism programs as “Trojan horses for socialism.” Indeed, this is roughly the vein in which the rare left-wing support for pronatalism is expressed.
Pronatalism in Government
Despite their meager and fractious numbers, some of pronatalism’s adherents have attained positions of significant influence. Indeed, this influence now reaches to the White House, with US vice president J. D. Vance and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) mastermind Musk being notable exponents of pronatalism.
Unfortunately for the pronatalists, effective pronatalism can’t be carried out by the executive branch of government alone. Unlike, say, tariff rates, the birth rate is not something that the president can simply issue a decree to change. The idea that millions of women across the country who were planning otherwise will start having more children at Donald Trump’s behest is spectacularly fanciful.
Even though Trump is not an ideological adherent of pronatalism like Vance and Musk, he has issued an executive order that bears upon fertility issues. His February 18 executive order that calls for exploring ways to reduce IVF costs could be considered a pronatalist victory of sorts. Currently IVF is responsible for only 2 percent of US births, has less than a 50 percent success rate, and potentially costs tens of thousands of dollars per cycle. That is to say, the vast majority of births remain non-IVF. It remains to be seen if and how whatever recommendations are implemented as a result of the executive order will change the current situation.
Perhaps the greatest triumph of pronatalists in the current administration was Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s memo recommending that resources of his department flow to “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” But it is hard to imagine a mechanism by which changes in federal transportation spending — which will presumably remain meager under Trump, given the administration’s overall orientation toward austerity — will have an upward effect on birth rates.
Ambitious and efficacious pronatalist policy will likely have to be achieved through legislative means, which poses a problem for the two reasons mentioned above. First, policy aimed at increasing the birth rate as such, whatever that might look like, lacks a natural mass constituency. Second, the expansive social programs that would have to be enacted to (potentially) significantly increase birth rates are popular, but unlikely to be championed by a government reluctant to expand the welfare state in any event.
This fact speaks to the core dilemma for the nascent pronatalist movement. The one promising policy route to increasing birth rates is expanding the welfare state, and yet the ideological skew of the movement’s members makes them reluctant to endorse that as a solution. If pronatalism does not want to be a self-defeating movement, its members will have to make a fateful choice between their stated objectives and their anti-social-democratic commitments. Failing that, the pronatalists will be reduced to relying on their own — admittedly often prodigious — childbearing to push fertility rates up.