Abortion was always slated to be a top issue in the 2024 presidential election. But virtually no one predicted that politicians would be openly blasting those ambivalent about having children.

“We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too,” J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, said in a now-famous statement in 2021. “It’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”

That wasn’t all on the subject from Vance. He also argued in 2021 that parents should get additional votes on their children’s behalf. People without kids “should face the consequences and the reality,” he said.

Other conservative voices have joined in. Speaking in Vance’s defense last week, Blake Masters, the former Arizona Senate candidate, said bluntly that people without children shouldn’t lead in politics: “If you aren’t running or can’t run a household of your own, how can you relate to a constituency of families, or govern wisely with respect to future generations?” he asked.

Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO, weighed in to call Harris an “extinctionist” because she noted some young people cite climate anxiety as a reason not to have kids. “The natural extension of her philosophy would be a de facto holocaust for all of humanity!” Musk concluded.

One starting place to understand where all this is coming from is pronatalism: a broad ideological movement driven by concern that the world is not producing enough children and that society should work to change that.

Not all pronatalists are politically conservative, and not all conservatives are particularly pronatalist. People with different backgrounds and ideologies are concerned about what a shrinking population will mean for future generations, though the movement does include anti-abortion advocates like Vance and Masters who have been more vocal. Still other card-carrying pronatalists staunchly oppose coercing women into having children they don’t want.

Those worried about declining birth rates paint a scary picture of the future. As the number of babies dwindles, the number of workers will shrink, too. There will be fewer people paying taxes to support welfare systems, which will still be supporting large elderly populations. The result, they warn, will be economic stagnation and political strife: higher unemployment, more acute labor shortages, diminished investment, fewer innovations, and greater poverty.

There is some reason to be wary of these grim predictions. Past population panics have fueled some of the world’s most horrific chapters. Back when leaders thought the world was producing too many humans, governments around the globe pushed mass sterilization campaigns, forced abortions, and gruesome eugenic regimes.

Others see the increased focus on birth rates as a way to scapegoat individuals — primarily women — for societal issues that politicians could otherwise address, such as improving care for the elderly or taxing the rich more aggressively.

That there’s a “proximate economic problem … doesn’t necessarily mean increasing birth rates is the solution,” said Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The concerns about fertility aren’t taking place in a political vacuum, in the US or anywhere else.

Around the world, far-right leaders have campaigned on platforms to roll back abortion rights, restrict immigration, and boost the number of native-born children. In China, government officials recently scrapped gender equality as a priority and advised women “to establish a correct outlook on marriage and love, childbirth, and family.” In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has promoted a policy of “procreation not immigration.”

Even talking about population decline as an issue can feel risky. Though not all pronatalists are against reproductive rights, a louder conversation that frames falling birth rates as a major problem inevitably boosts the issue’s salience, creating space for potentially more reactionary ideas.

Still, those who want to voluntarily increase the number of children say we must have a real conversation, no matter how uneasy it makes us. Some are hopeful about emerging technologies — like artificial wombs and lab-grown eggs — to one day bring more humans to life. Others warn that sexist, racist, and ethnonationalist forces will fill the void if liberal leaders fail to solve the problem themselves.

“If we wait, the less inclusive, less compassionate, less calm elements within our society and many societies worldwide may someday call depopulation a crisis and exploit it to suit their agendas — of inequality, nationalism, exclusion or control,” warned Dean Spears, the director of the Population Wellbeing Initiative at UT Austin. “Paying attention now would create an opportunity to lay out a path that would preserve freedom, share burdens, advance gender equity, value care work and avoid the disasters that happen when governments try to impose their will on reproduction.”

Spears may be right, but it’s a gamble. Nobody really knows whether you can sustainably boost birth rates without coercing women into having kids or restricting the opportunities they might otherwise pursue. Efforts to substantially reverse declining fertility in other countries have so far failed, and right now, at least in the US, most adults without children say they just don’t want them.

All over the world, fewer children are being born, including in some of the most populous nations like China, India, the US, Brazil, and Mexico. Earlier this month, the UN announced it is likely the number of people on earth will peak in the next 75 years — a big change from even a decade ago, when demographers thought that moment was still well over a century away.

Concern about declining birth rates is not new, but until recently, it didn’t seem to have much domestic relevance for the United States.

By the turn of the 21st century, many countries were already grappling with plummeting fertility. In 2004, journalist Phil Longman published The Empty Cradle, outlining the political and economic risks of depopulation; he traveled all over the world encouraging leaders to take it more seriously.

At the time, there was a major exception: the United States. Even as the US provided virtually no support for working parents, American birth rates stayed elevated. Experts attributed this primarily to higher birth rates among Latino immigrants, higher teen births, and potentially America’s religious culture.

“At that time it was possible to look at all these numbers and say the United States is immune to this,” Longman told me. “Our birth rates were still barely above replacement level, so people could be like, ‘Oh well that’s the European disease, that’s the South Korean culture, American exceptionalism will save us.”

Holding the US as an exception, the overarching consensus became that countries that were more successful at boosting birth rates were those that provided more support for women to balance their domestic life with jobs and other pursuits. Sweden’s egalitarian welfare policies were designed by intellectuals in the 1930s who specifically wanted to boost Swedish birth rates, and by the end of the century, Nordic countries with more expansive welfare systems seemed to be doing better on the birthrate front than more socially conservative countries like Italy and Japan.

“Feminism is the new natalism,” a Tory member of Parliament in the United Kingdom said in a 2003 report on the threat of low fertility in Europe. Over the last 10 years, though, even the Nordic countries have seen hastening drops in fertility. Declining birth rates finally hit the US starting in 2007 and have continued to fall ever since.

Why? There are several leading explanations advanced by different people:

The decline in birth rates since 2007 has been driven primarily by women in their 20s. Maybe people will have the same number of kids ultimately, but just later in life? Experts say that no longer seems very likely.

This may be because the decline is less about fewer large families with four or five kids and more about significantly fewer families having even one or two children compared to a generation ago. “The decline in the rate from zero kids to one kid is mostly driven by singleness,” said Lyman Stone, a demographer who identifies as a pronatalist.

The burning question in the pronatalism conversation is whether governments can do anything to restore a country to “replacement rate” (an average of 2.1 births per woman) without restricting women’s rights.

Some social conservatives have blamed falling birth rates in Western countries primarily on women’s career aspirations and the overall decline in marriage. But Spears, of UT Austin, says that can hardly explain why we’re seeing similar drops in nations like India, where marriage rates remain high and where most women don’t work in the formal labor market.

Can governments do anything to reverse this? Last year, my colleague Anna North reviewed examples of countries that were trying to reverse fertility declines. Germany increased investments in child care. Russia began offering lump-sum payments of about $7,000 to families with more than two kids. Hungary started offering newlyweds loans of $30,000, which Orbán said would be forgiven if the couple had three children. None of these interventions have been enough to fully reverse the population decline, and Spears tells me there isn’t anything he’s seen “with strong evidence of an effect.”

But some experts and advocates believe that it’s possible — if the incentives are large enough.

“A lot of the pronatalist policies have been worse than half-hearted,” Folbre, the economist, told me, pointing to examples like $4,000 in subsidies from governments in Italy and Singapore, which really amounts to just a couple months of child care aid.

“What’s actually being spent [by governments] is a very small percentage of the cost of raising children, and leaders should take as many steps as possible to socialize those costs and reduce costs of parents,” she said.

Stone, the demographer, is optimistic about the potential of policy to voluntarily boost birth rates, and he recently established a think tank — the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies — dedicated to researching these questions.

He pointed to some recent empirical reviews on the topic, like this one from 2021 that assessed family policies in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia since the 1970s, and found social reforms can increase fertility. Another review from 2022 looked specifically at maternity leave policies and concluded they “do in fact increase fertility when benefit increases are generous.”

Stone is motivated by surveys that suggest women are having fewer children than they really want, but he recognizes that most women don’t want very large families, either.

Boosting fertility, in Stone’s view, may ultimately come down to more muscular spending while reducing other costs, such as housing and student loans. While incentives with sticker prices upward of $200,000 per baby may seem initially eye-popping, Stone argues that it looks more reasonable when compared to annual Medicaid spending and other health interventions.

Not everyone concerned about falling birth rates is interested in gender equity or voluntary solutions.

Last December, a relatively fringe group gathered in Austin for the first-ever Natal Conference to discuss boosting babies, with some guest speakers decrying the liberal cultural forces they see as responsible for the world’s decline.

Peachy Keenan, a pseudonym for one conservative speaker, argued her fellow pronatalists need to make motherhood and large families a more hotly desired status symbol, but to avoid “market[ing] natalism” to progressive feminists.

Other speakers included right-wing blogger Charles Haywood, who lamented that “the actual meaning of masculinity has been destroyed by vampire feminists,” and Malcolm and Simone Collins, who were subjects of a viral Guardian profile earlier this year that revealed they smack their children.

This corner of “pronatalism” is composed mostly of tech enthusiasts and hyper-rationalist types, religious fundamentalists and some far-right activists worried about immigration and demographic change.

One of the most prominent members of this coalition is billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who claimed the falling fertility rate is “the biggest danger civilization faces, by far.” Musk recently led the push to get Vance nominated as Donald Trump’s vice president.

Some mainstream conservatives like Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney argue that focusing on more extreme voices within the pronatalist movement amounts to “nut-picking”: As he correctly notes, it’s not just far-right conservatives who worry about falling birth rates.

But extreme pronatalists also increasingly hold positions of power. Pronatalist intellectuals with influence in the Trump world have endorsed policies like limiting contraception and banning no-fault divorce. Trump has said he wants to see “a new baby boom.”

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has blamed Roe v. Wade for killing potential American workers, resulting in strained welfare systems today. “If we had all those able-bodied workers in the economy, we wouldn’t be going upside down and toppling over like this,” he said during a 2022 congressional hearing.

The presence of such perspectives in the movement is not something most women can afford to ignore.

“The Handmaid’s Tale is a very real risk,” Folbre said, referring to Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel in which a government weaponizes women’s fertility. “A lot of the energy behind Donald Trump is related to a panic about the consequences of women having more reproductive choice.”

Stone, the demographer, is against abortion, and I asked him how people concerned about rollbacks of reproductive rights should feel about him directing this new pronatalism think tank. He agreed he “would like to see all the babies born” but said “the key thing to understand” is that evidence showing abortion restrictions lead to higher birth rates is minimal, since in societies with good contraceptive access, people mostly just switch to that.

The data isn’t great, but Stone estimates that one prevented abortion “likely gets you .05 to .15 extra 18-year-olds 18 years later.”

Another study co-authored by Spears at UT Austin similarly found “no evidence of a significant association between abortion legality and birth rates” and that abortion bans can even lower total birth rates overall. (It’s worth noting too since Roe v. Wade was overturned, US abortion incidence has increased.)

Still, efforts to restrict abortion are getting more aggressive, and there’s no certainty that abortion incidence will stay elevated as leaders seek new ways to cut off access. Plus, it’s a less comforting fact about contraception when there are anti-abortion activists in the US working now to conflate abortion with birth control.

Stone argues that liberals will ultimately have to consider compromise with anti-abortion groups on policies where there’s common ground — like child care and affordable housing — even if they support the measures for different reasons.

“At the end of the day, every single political vote involves holding your nose to some extent,” he said. “And if your view is that you can’t support reducing child poverty by 40 percent through a child allowance because pro-life people are also supporting it, then maybe you hate kids.”

One of the top arguments pronatalists make to support their case is that research surveys tend to suggest women have not had as many children as they hoped.

As the United Nations wrote in its 2023 State of the World Population report, current evidence suggests that across Europe and the US, as well as throughout East Asia, women nearing or at the end of their reproductive years say they would have had more children than they actually did. “These data do ultimately point to an appreciable gap between desired and realized fertility across the globe,” the UN concluded.

Leslie Root, a demographer at the University of Colorado Boulder, focused her graduate studies on these types of “child-bearing intention” surveys but eventually stopped because she grew concerned with how the data was being interpreted.

She explained that some surveys lacked nuance, failed to consider how desires can change over time, and didn’t account for the context in which a survey is administered, including the presence of family members or partners.

“It’s not always clear what the surveys are asking, especially these retrospective surveys of women over 45,” Root told me. “They ask looking back at your life if you could have had more kids would you have done so but there is obviously a social stigma to saying you wish you had fewer.” (Stone, who also spent his graduate studies focused on the surveys, argues they still provide credible data.)

Root ultimately doesn’t think birth rates are that low, but even if they were, she thinks leaders should treat the problem as an economic one, not a demographic one.

The view that birth rates are “neutral” is shared by Emily Klancher Merchant, a historian and author of Building the Population Bomb, which traces the rise of overpopulation fears in the 20th century.

“If women say they haven’t had as many children as they want, then that’s the primary issue to focus on, not birth rates,” she told me. “And if the problem is with the economy or how to support the elderly, there are many more direct ways to deal with that than through population measures.”

Root and Merchant both say the conversation would be better focused on reproductive justice — a feminist movement focused on supporting one’s right to have children, to not have children, and to parent children in safe, healthy communities — than pronatalism.

Many policies supported by reproductive justice advocates are also supported by pronatalists, but feminists say building support for family-friendly measures like universal child care as a way to boost fertility risks gutting them later on if leaders conclude they’ve been insufficient to reverse population trends.

Spears, who believes in reproductive freedom but also thinks falling birth rates are a serious problem, compares this moment to decades ago when leaders realized they needed to address climate change.

In Spears’s view, there’s still time for leaders to reverse declines in population since we’re still years away from when the number of people on earth is set to peak. “Six decades ago there weren’t university majors in sustainability science, there wasn’t a journal called The Future of Climate Change,” he told me. His point is that we have never really brought our best resources to bear to tackle these questions, and if we seriously invest in doing so, we could potentially build more economically stable societies that better align with families’ reproductive desires.

“I think that if we truly change society’s commitment to taking care of one another, and to taking care of the people who take care of one another,” he said, “then we could invent new ways to live.”