Take a look at my eight children, and you’d assume I’m pronatalist. On one level, that assumption is true: I favor measures to facilitate women having the number of children they would like to have. Experts tell us women are having fewer children than they want, and given the exceedingly low birth rate of most nations, that’s an issue worth the attention of policymakers.
And yet I’m increasingly troubled by some of the loudest voices in the pronatalist camp, where there’s a strand of pronatalism that feels quite misogynist.
On the far right, some worn tropes are enjoying an ugly renaissance. The reason for the decline in the birth rate, according to these voices, is that women were given too many choices, and therefore, those choices must be withdrawn. Draconian abortion laws with no exceptions for rape or incest are part of this conversation. The darkest corners of the manosphere seethe with ideas about how to turn back the clock on women’s rights, even the right to vote. And for some, the resurgence of a patriarchal society is seen as the remedy for what ails the birth rate.
The newer ugliness is also found among libertarians, even those more identified with the elite left. The bloom is definitely off the left’s rose where women are concerned now. The Biden administration’s Title IX reinterpretation, for example, was viewed by many women as a betrayal, and the political push to decriminalize prostitution comes from the left, not the right.
Recently, we’ve seen a school of pronatalism emerge in the libertarian wing, with Elon Musk the most prominent example. Though recently aligned with President Donald Trump until their dramatic break, Musk is no conservative. He represents, if you will, the libertarian elite of the world of technology.
Musk’s pronatalism is clear: He has sired 14 children, whom he reportedly called a “legion,” and has averred that, “I think for most countries, they should view the birthrate as the single biggest problem they need to solve. If you don’t make new humans, there’s no humanity, and all the policies in the world don’t matter.”
It’s instructive, however, to consider how Musk is building his legion. He reportedly has paid some of the mothers of his children, but he does not live with the families he is creating. According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, he offered Ashley St. Clair a flat $15 million, plus $100,000 per month, to not identify him as the father of her child.
However, he also had alternatives in mind: In one text to St. Clair, he commented that, “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse, we will need to use surrogates,” and some of his 14 children already have been born of surrogates. The use of surrogacy among the libertarian-technological left is increasingly common now, with clear overtures toward ectogenesis and eugenics.
It is hard not to feel that St. Clair and others who have borne children for Musk are, in a sense, engaged in a form of well-paid surrogacy. Clearly, as Musk often expresses the sentiment, the mother of his child is an “NPC,“ or non-player character, in his life.
Indeed, Musk has just rolled out a pornified anime female AI character, Ani, with whom his followers can create a digital relationship. How, exactly, does encouraging men to form an intimate relationship with an AI bot lead to a rise in the birth rate, one wonders?
Kellie-Jay Keen puts it best: “’Have more babies,’ says the man selling synthetic girlfriends ... (women) will not sit quietly while the tech elite builds digital replicas of us, trains boys to degrade them, and then demands we repopulate the species. You cannot demand more babies while engineering a world where intimacy is dead and women are obsolete. ... If the richest man in the world is allowed to redefine women as programmable sexual companions while outsourcing childbirth to labs and surrogates, then we are witnessing the dismantling of female humanity in real time. ... We are the bedrock of human life. And we will not be replaced by your silicon fantasies, Elon.”
Both these misogynistic strands of pronatalism are detestable. You cannot value babies and devalue their mothers. How you treat their mothers will be reflected in their children, both physically and psychologically, and there is increasing empirical evidence to back up that claim.
The far-right wing of pronatalism would strip women of their hard-won rights and force them back to a time when they were second-class citizens. The tech-bro libertarian wing of pronatalism would turn mothers into prostituted surrogates on the open market. I’m reminded of feminist Andrea Dworkin’s famous quote: “To right wing men, we are private property. To left wing men, we are public property.” The problem with both worldviews is that women aren’t property at all, and mothers are definitely not NPCs in the game of human life.
What we are seeing, then, with the collapse of birth rates, is just desserts. A culture in which men offer women the choice of subordination or prostitution is a culture that deserves to die out.
I happily had eight kids because I was given a far better choice: a loving, faithful, present husband and father of my children who treats me as an equal. That culture deserves to continue, and I felt honored to do my part in preserving it.
Frankly, it’s time to call out the misogynist wing of pronatalism for what it is: incoherent, counterproductive and at times villainous. The only way back from collapsing birth rates is a reformation of how men and women relate. A Musk-like figure who would fight for such a reformation, including fighting against porn and prostitution and surrogacy, would do far more to save humankind than one who gives us pornified AI bots and a colony on Mars.
No, I’m not holding my breath.