Malcolm and Simone Collins, the pro-natalist couple who are reportedly consulting the Donald Trump administration on how to encourage American women to have more babies, are something of a deliberate heel: they often seem to be attempting to provoke the ire of their audience. The couple espouse the pro-natalism that is sweeping the political right with an explicit eugenicist tilt (self-styled “elites,” the Collins scan their IVF-generated embryos before their pregnancies, in an effort to select for features like high IQ). They dress in the severe black outfits of German modernists, with an emphasis on the “German” part, and wear large, unusually shaped eyeglasses; Simone has also taken to wearing large bonnets that make her look likeMother Goose, or, in their less subtle versions, like an extra onThe Handmaid’s Tale.”The pair met on Reddit.
The founders of a pro-birth organization, the Collins’ assert that there is a crisis of declining birth rates in America. (In reality, the slight dip in America’s birth rate is almost entirely due to thedecline of teen pregnancies.) They aim to fix this in part by breeding as many of their own children as possible: they currently have four, blameless innocents they have cruelly burdened with names like “Industry Americus” and “Torsten Savage.” But they seem to be more adept at siring media profiles of themselves, of which there have been many. The couple insist upon their own genetic superiority, like a breeding-obsessed Boris and Natasha. They aim to advance a future of more babies and – by their own terms – better ones: what Simone calls “genetically selected humans”. They must be doing it on purpose: no one could become so off-putting by accident.
Because these people are styling themselves after the villains of a Saturday morning cartoon, they are of course now deeply influential in the Trump administration. A New York Timesreportfinds that the couple has been solicited by White House advisers to develop proposals to “persuade” American women to have more babies.
“Persuasion” may not be entirely the right word. After all, with the fall of Roe v Wade in 2022, more than half the states now have abortion bans in effect, meaning that many American women, unable to access legal care to end their pregnancies, are being not so much persuaded asforced to have children. But for the pro-natalists, this isn’t good enough. What the movement desires – and what they are hoping their partnership with the Trump administration will achieve – is not just a rise in the American birthrate but a wholesale revolution in American culture, with enforcement of rightwing social values and a profound transformation of women’s role in American life.
The actual proposals, such as they are, are not especially inventive. Pro-natalist activists who are working with the Trump administration have advised the creation of fertility awareness classes, supposedly to make women more alert to the times of the month when they are ovulating and more likely to conceive; they have proposed “baby bonuses” of up to $5,000 each time a woman gives birth.
One proposal by activists would limit a large proportion of the prestigious Fulbright grants to scholars with children – a criterion that would exclude many early career female researchers, who often find, as ambitious women in most fields do, that raising young children is incompatible with doing the kind of rigorous and demanding work that can earn them a fancy award. For their part, the Collins’ proposed that the federal government should award a “National Medal of Motherhood” to women who birth six or more children. The award reminds one of the “Ehrenkreuz der Deutschen Mutter,” or the Cross of Honor of the German Mother, a Nazi prize given to mothers of four or more children. That medal took the form of a blue cross with a swastika in the center.
Conspicuously absent from these proposals are any measures to address what actual American mothers describe as their urgent needs: namely paid family leave, affordable childcare or measures to address America’s skyrocketing maternal mortality rate. That’s because the pro-natalist movement, for all its proponent‘s insistence on the supposed demographic emergency facing the United States, is not really interested in making parenting easier or less burdensome for women. It is not interested in making children more affordable, or making them healthier.
It is not interested in making pregnancy safer, or in making childrearing less damaging to women’s careers. It is not interested in these because all of these pursuits are in fact antithetical to the movement’s real agenda, which is to encourage primarily white births, to enforce regressive, highly hierarchal and stratified social roles, to push women out of the public sphere and to narrow women’s prospects for social, professional and intellectual life to little more than pregnancy, childbirth, childrearing and housekeeping – or, as the Collins’ might put it, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche.”
Despite the extreme anti-woman bigotry and regressive gender politics of the pro-natalist movement, American liberals have been hesitant to combat the right’s embrace of pro-natalism on cultural grounds. Eager to overcorrect for the perceived excesses of the social movements of the 2010s – and seeing little downside in antagonizing an American feminist movement that has endured near-fatal blows in both politics and popularity over the past decade – several prominent liberals have chosen to join the pro-natalist chorus, using their platforms at outlets likeVox,the Atlantic,the New Yorker,the Point, and theUniversity of Chicagoto call for the left to join in the pro-breeding cause. Even the most pointed of the mainstream liberal critics tend to concede cultural ground, arguing that American women want babies (as, it is assumed, they should) but cannot afford them.
This is short sighted: it cedes the pro-natalist’s biggest point, which is in dictating what kind of life American women should want – and be enabled – to have.
In their rush to affirm that American women should be tricked or coerced into having more babies – or encouraged in doing so with an expanded welfare state – these thinkers are abandoning the crucial point: that women should be able, free and encouraged to live lives that do not conform to regressive notions of women’s proper roles as wives and mothers, that they should be free to invent themselves on their own terms – including as permanently childless adults. This is not, as the pro-natalists would have it, an abandonment of their biological duty – and it is not, as their liberal sympathizers would say, an example of cultural decadence.
It is instead a matter of personal liberty – something that some of us, at least, still believe in for women, too.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist.