It’s well known that childcare has become extraordinarily expensive, costing many families nearly a quarter of their income. The fertility rate, as we've covered previously on The Excerpt, remains at a historic low. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is floating a range of ideas to encourage people to have more children while encouraging women to stay home to care for them. Have these trends paved the way for the pronatalism movement to gain traction? Karen Guzzo, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, joins The Excerpt to share her expertise on the movement.Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to [email protected] Transcript available hereSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is the pronatalism movement?
So pronatalism is really about raising birth rates at the country level, at the macro level. It's interested in and worried about, are birth rates too low? Do they need to be higher? And there's a lot of debate over what it means for fertility rates to be too low and what might be the best ways to address it. That's really focused on getting the whole country to have more births.
It's costly to choose to have a child, let alone several. Is that just one of the reasons why people are having fewer kids today? What has your research shown on family trends?
Chapter 2: Why are fertility rates declining?
Well, one of the things that's actually driving low fertility rates in the United States is something that's a good news story, which is that there are fewer teen and unintended births. And so births to people who are in their teens and early 20s typically are births to people that are unintended, so that people themselves would say, this is not really the right time for me.
And so we spent a lot of time and a lot of money in the United States trying to discourage people from having first, when they were not really ready. So when they were too young, and I sort of, too young in quotes, too young, or they weren't stably employed or didn't have a good income or a stable relationship. And so we've made a lot of progress in that realm.
But then the flip side of it is people are supposed to wait until they have these things. You know, they're supposed to have enough money and a stable relationship and a good house. And you're right that it's really hard to be able to afford those things. The number one concern over people as to whether they should have kids and how many to have and when to have them is can I afford it?
On a societal level, what kinds of challenges do a low birth rate present?
Chapter 3: What challenges do low birth rates present?
are different potential concerns. I mean, the biggest one really is that the population starts to age on the aggregate when you have fewer young people born, and then it ends up being skewed towards older adults. And older adults need more care, both physical care, but also they take financial resources.
And so in many countries, and not just in the United States, the question is, how do we care for the older adults when the population is aging? And so in the United States, we have a social security system that's built on current workers paying in to support people who are currently drawing from Social Security. And so that's a big concern is how do we actually care for the elderly?
Then there are also labor market concerns. So who's going to be working to pay into Social Security, but also to fuel the economy? And we need workers because we also need people to have incomes to become consumers. And so we do worry about the potential ramifications of low birth rates, although there's other solutions besides potentially low birth rates to fix some of these problems.
And what might those be?
Well, one of the biggest ones would actually be a change in how we structure Social Security. So the way Social Security works is that there's a cap on income. And so you pay up until, I think it's roughly around $175,000 for single people on your payroll taxes. So up until that, you pay Social Security. Any money you earn above that for a single earner is not taxed for Social Security.
And we could raise that cap, or we could eliminate entirely, and that would be a way to increase the monies available we have to fund Social Security. That seems to me more plausible than trying to have this massive behavioral change that would require people to have more births.
We could also change the income who is able to draw from Social Security, so we could limit it to people who have lower incomes. We could change the Social Security age at retirement. There are things we could do that would adjust our need for Social Security.
In terms of the labor market, one of the biggest and most obvious solutions, and to be frank, one we've relied on in the United States for a long time, is immigration. Immigrants play a large role in our labor market. They work in a lot of different fields. They are major contributors.
In fact, even undocumented immigrants often pay Social Security taxes, so they're not even drawing out in the system, but they're contributing to it.
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Chapter 4: How does immigration relate to labor market concerns?
Yes. So trad wives are really having a moment over the past few years. It's really taken off due to social media, where young, conventionally attractive women, often white, thin and attractive and middle class, are making a life for themselves or presenting a life in which they are staying home with their children. They are sort of in charge solely of home.
They are working perhaps to have home farms. They are feeding their kids organic food. They are sewing clothes. They are really sort of embracing domesticity. And that's really what the Tradwife moment is about, having clear gender roles where women are in charge of the home and men are in charge of the money and they're the provider and they go out into the world.
And so it does dovetail a lot with this pronatalist movement because most tradwives sort of espouse or align with sort of what we might consider as more conservative ideals.
And so one of the things that's interesting about the pronatalist movement is there's a lot of critique about feminists and working mothers and working women, and that women are spending too much time getting educational, increasing their educational attainment, spending too much time in the labor force.
that they're becoming too picky about the potential partners for whom they would marry and have children with. And so part of the trad wife moment seems to be pushing very specific gender roles and that once women are home, of course, then they would want to have more children and that would increase the birth rate.
There's some current concerns about this, though, is that when people are women are embracing this lifestyle, there's nothing wrong with this lifestyle per se, but it does increase their dependency on their partners, their economic dependency. And so if relationships are not don't work out, this really leaves women financially in trouble. It's especially the case.
And sometimes we see this notion of stay at home girlfriends where there isn't even sort of a legal tie between partners. And that makes it especially precarious for women to engage in.
You've shared that there are three segments of the pronatalism movement. Can you detail those and how does that break down with the way people reproduce, including the use of in vitro fertilization?
So there's the Elon Musk tech bro sort of approach to pronatalism. So Elon Musk has said that low fertility is sort of the biggest single threat human civilization is facing. And he seems to be on a personal mission to populate the earth. And this is about using technology to potentially have the best and brightest children
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Chapter 5: What is the role of trad wives in the pronatalism movement?
And then you have the more religious conservatives who are definitely against IVF and other forms of assistive reproductive technologies. And they are really focused on not only increasing birth rates, but increasing marriage so that most births should happen within marriage.
They would prefer people get married young and spend more time in sort of this traditional family type, particularly one in which the father or husband is the main breadwinner and the wife is in charge of the domestic sphere. And they would have married young and have many children and start doing so pretty early.
And then you have the third group of folks who are much more concerned about the racial makeup of the United States. So we've had a long history in the United States of wanting the right people to reproduce. So this does tie in with sort of those tech pro people.
But this is much more explicit about not wanting immigrants to reproduce or people from what this group might consider inferior races or inferior religions. And so this dates back decades in the United States, but it's really been a part of our kind of informal lexicon for a while.
So we see strains of this in what is the great replacement theory, which is that the wrong people are coming into the United States to quote unquote sort of outbreed true Americans. So there's some overlap in all these groups, but it's an uncomfortable alliance, I think.
You mentioned Elon Musk. He is, of course, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency and reportedly a father of 14 by multiple women who said that low birth rates are a, quote, much bigger risk to civilization than global warming, unquote. What sort of influence does he have over this movement?
He has unfortunately quite a bit of influence. He has a huge microphone in terms of his Twitter presence and social media presence. He's in the White House. He has the ear of very important people. So he is bringing this conversation to the forefront. He is a smart man, but he's not a demographer. And so sometimes he gets some of the basic demography or demographic principles and theories wrong.
And one of the things that in particular is concerning is that people who are aligning themselves with Elon Musk will project out, you know, 100 years, 200 years, 300 years. And that is not typically something demographers will do because we know that things change really quickly.
And there could be great technological advances or other changes that would impact our ability to make population projections far out. But he is this huge microphone, and he clearly is very interested in increasing birth rates. But some of the things that he believes are a little off kilter, I would say.
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Chapter 6: What are the potential risks of embracing traditional gender roles?
So, for instance, he has said that births should happen through C-sections rather than sort of a natural delivery under the impression that a natural delivery somehow squeezes the brain. So that babies born via C-section have bigger brains and are therefore smarter. I mean, that's not actually remotely medically accurate, but he has this loud microphone and people are listening to him.
The Trump administration is looking at a $5,000 baby bonus to incentivize parents. Obviously, that's a drop in the bucket in comparison to the real costs of health care, child care, food and more. Could it really make a difference in incentivizing people to have more kids?
It probably won't make a big difference. I will say that I am all for giving families money. Families could always use extra money. That first year is really tough in particular after a baby is born because women often have to step back a little bit from work. And there are all these new expenses, including hospital bills and diapers and all those things. So that money would be great.
It would really help a lot of people. Is it likely to budge things in an appreciable, huge sense? Probably not. It might help some people on the margins who are like, all right, I was thinking about having another kid. Maybe now's a good time since I'm going to get this bonus. But it's not going to nudge people who were like, I'm not having kids and now I'm going to get this $5,000.
So it really might help people who are just not sure about the timing and they wanted to wait a little longer until they had maybe paid off the last set of hospital bills. But it's not going to make a huge difference.
I mean, what I find a little concerning is that or perhaps even disingenuous is that we had a really great program through the American Rescue Plan that gave families extra money every month and it reduced child poverty. It didn't reduce employment very much, and it really helped people a lot. And we got rid of that plan. And it was widely available to people.
And so the idea that we would not, you know, help people that we knew to be effective, but instead have this sort of scheme for this $5,000 one-time baby bonus, unfortunately to me is a little disingenuous.
And finally, what are the concerns that opponents of pronatalism raise?
Well, one of the biggest concerns is that it really does privilege a certain type of family. So the $5,000 baby bonus, for instance, some of the policy specifics I've seen are about we should only give these to married couples or we should only give these to people who make about a certain amount of income. We don't want to incentivize poor women to have children.
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Chapter 7: What are the three segments of the pronatalism movement?
Thank you for having me. This was great.
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Marie Green and Kaylee Monahan, for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts at usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.