The Bad Faith Of Pro-Natalism Is Uglier Than You Know

An economy understander might tell me there are legitimate reasons to fret about plunging worldwide birth rates since it looks like we're going to need a trillion working age people to support generations that are going to live to 120 with the power of protein and avoidance of seed oils.

And maybe that's right. Human beings probably weren't meant to live as long as they do today, and certainly not as long as the'll live in the future, when everyone in the middle and upper classes of developed nations will be drowning in the fountain of youth, and, of course, avoiding seed oils at all costs. So maybe there is something to the well-meaning folks who have had years-long panic attacks over declining birth rates in every part of the world (these conversations usually make sure to look away from the inhumanity of capitalism).

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The main driver of birth rate fretting has always been white supremacy though. To deny that is to grant the presumption of good faith to all the far-right billionaires and shady online influencers and quack doctors who have had public freak outs about low birth rates over the past decade. Some of them have made declining birth rates their entire personality, even their profession.

The Incredibly Gross Bad Faith of Birth Rate Worries

Let’s call the birth rate worries what they are: Fretting that the white supremacist hierarchy could one day be toppled through sheer numbers

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Elon Musk goes around handing out vials of his semen to women because he's so worried about falling birth rates "in the west," which is and always has been fascist shorthand for "among white people." Musk's birth rate worries, as I wrote about in September 2023, are probably the most obvious to decipher as a bad-faith effort to promote an increase of white birth rates and only white birth rates. That almost every major "pro-natalist" influencer on the internet is white – and that all of them are complete freaks – should give away the game.

If you somehow remain skeptical, consider Dr. Oz's recent comments about one in three American families being "underbabied" – a phrase that splashes a little cuteness onto the otherwise hideous white supremacist ideological aims at the center of the right's birth rate obsession.

Yet there remain writers and commentators on the left who join the right in saying something must be done about the lack of babies around here. Liberal and left-wing panic about falling birth rates can take an existential form (if every family doesn't have seven kids the human race will die out in our lifetimes) or an economic form (the never-ending expansion that defines capital needs more humans to be born and fed into its machine). Folks on the left lending legitimacy to such an ugly ideology that has been shaped by thrumming white supremacist anxiety is, in one blogger's estimation, a mistake, an unforced error, even if these liberal/left types mean well.

That doesn't really matter when you're joining Elon Musk's thinly-veiled cause to secure the existence of the white race and push women – always pregnant, always pumping out babies for Musk and his ilk – out of the public sphere and far away from power in politics, academia, and business.

It's not that those with liberal/left politics aren't allowed to fret and write and talk about birth rates crashing in developed countries all over the world. There needs to be a distinction though, one that separates left-wing birth rate concerns with the more popular and well-known right-wing worries, based entirely on the nightmare of a world in which white people do not sit atop the hierarchy of oppression.

Tressie McMillan Cottom, a professor, sociologist, and New York Times columnist, laid out the bad-faith case against birth rate concerns during a recent public forum in which she ripped the MAHA movement's hyper-focus on birth rate statistics. McMillan Cottom was asked for her thoughts on the left's involvement with pro-natalist messaging, and her answer exposed the whole ugly project.

Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd.bsky.social)

An audience member asked me about leftist pronatalism.

Bluesky SocialTressie McMillan Cottom

"Despite having a great amount of upward social mobility in my life" both academically and professionally, she said, "I have never, ever, ever, ever had anyone encourage me to have children. And as long as that is the case – that our concern about birth rates is a conversation only being had with white women, or women with proximity to whiteness in the case of some ethnic minorities, I would say that anytime someone wants to have a conversation about pro-natalism, they really want to have a conversation with you about white supremacy."

"No one," McMillan Cottom added, "is encouraging Black women to have more babies."

The entire pro-natalist world revolves around surgically-altered white people urging families of unspecified races to have more kids. Almost none of this baby-crazy discourse – unless I've missed something – revolves around Latino and Black and Asian women. If the white supremacist wing of the pro-natalist crowd could be honest about their anxieties and their goals, I would think they might support unfettered abortion access for women of color and total abortion bans for white ladies. That would get the job done.

The anxiety of the pro-natalist radicals screaming at you from your social media timelines every day is not unfounded. In 2025, for the first time ever, white births made up less than 50 percent of births in the United States (49.6 percent, to be precise). This is the nightmare of generations of white supremacists in the US and abroad, and it's what brings them together as an international fascist force.

All of the fascist Eastern European strongmen, including the recently-ousted Viktor Orban, are obsessed with the continued dominance of the white race across the developed world (Orban offered lavish benefits for Hungarian women to have more babies, all for naught). The monsters running under the banner of the UK's Reform Party talk incessantly about juicing birth rates. Same goes for the far-right parties in Germany, as their leaders make fast friends with Musk and Trump regime officials. Every fascist leader who seized power in the 20th century wouldn't shut the fuck up about women having more babies. Pro-natalism is their thing: It binds the far right together through history and across the world.

“The way that emotion gets engaged in the right wing today is almost always around questions of fertility,” Paola Bacchetta, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told The New York Times in 2023 during an interview about the far right's birth rate obsession. “It’s about their anxieties about their male others. They fear that they will overproduce them and eliminate them.”

Those on the left who have good-natured concern about declining birth rates should be careful in boosting this messaging and making the pro-natalist movement appear normal and even bipartisan or apolitical. No one, as McMillan Cottom said, is asking Black women to have more kids. Until this changes – until birth rate concerns are rooted in something other than bone-shaking white fear – the pro-natalist movement has to be granted the presumption of bad faith.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.