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Pronatalism: Just White Christian Nationalism in Disguise
Scratch just beneath the surface of the so-called pronatalism movement—a movement all over the pages of Project 2025 that’s based on the belief that people need to have more babies because declining birth rates are a threat to civilization—and you’ll find that it’s basically just white Christian nationalism in disguise. The movement is full of ideological contradictions that make it crystal clear: pronatalists’ desire for people to have more babies is in service to their primary goal of reenforcing a system of religious, racial, and gendered hierarchy that favors conservative white Christians.
One of the biggest tells that pronatalism is just a front for white Christian nationalism? The two movements sure seem to have a lot of beliefs (and believers) in common.
Access to Reproductive Health Care and Women’s Role in Society
Like white Christian nationalists, pronatalists hope to strip women of their bodily autonomy by criminalizing abortion and limiting access to contraception. Abortion and birth control are essential health care and are fundamental to our ability to control our bodies, our lives, and our futures. When people have access to the full range of health care services, including birth control and abortion, they are healthier and their families flourish. Yet many pronatalists oppose abortion and, to an increasing extent, birth control.
Pronatalists’ opposition to abortion and birth control isn’t just rooted in a desire to force women to become pregnant and to give birth, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s also rooted in a narrow set of hardline Christian religious beliefs about when life begins that they want to force onto everyone else, no matter that not everyone shares the same beliefs. If successful, they would redefine pregnancy and outlaw not just abortion—but also birth control and other types of health care. The other strain of opposition to women’s bodily autonomy at play here are dangerous beliefs about women’s role in the world. The same beliefs have led many pronatalists to criticize women who seek careers and subordinate women to the role of motherhood.
Forcing women to become mothers by denying their humanity, stripping them of access to abortion and birth control, and requiring them to sacrifice education and careers to do so reduces women to their reproductive capacity. These tactics don’t help to build healthy, sustainable families. They just build a system of control over women.
Opposition To IVF and Other Assisted Reproductive Technology (We Wish We Were Kidding)
The white Christian nationalist underpinnings of the pronatalist movement are also exposed by opposition to IVF among many of the movement’s most prominent members. You would think any movement that was genuinely concerned about overall birth rates would embrace IVF and other fertility treatments, given their potential to help more people have more babies. Right?
Not for pronatalists. A significant faction of their movement staunchly opposes IVF.
This opposition stems from the same extreme religious beliefs about when life begins that lead the white Christian nationalist movement to seek to ban abortion and birth control. White Christian nationalists also oppose IVF because it allows people to have children on their own terms, outside of the rigid family structure that white Christian nationalists want to force on everyone.
Restrictive Views on Who Should Get to Have Children
The white Christian nationalist ends of the pronatalist movement are also clear from the movement’s opposition to same-sex marriage and single parenthood. If pronatalism were really about addressing declining birth rates, the movement would embrace every family that wanted to bring children into the world. But many of the leaders in the pronatalism movement have pathologized LGBTQIA+ people and insisted that the only families deserving of protection are two-parent heterosexual families.
This world view aligns with the religious beliefs of the white Christan nationalist movement—that LGBTQIA+ people, single people, and unmarried people are a threat to society and unworthy of existing, much less procreating.
The Real Goals of the Pronatalist-White Christian Nationalist Movement
Pronatalists’ pearl-clutching panic over declining birth rates is really just an excuse to push for draconian measures that would enshrine certain extreme religious beliefs into our laws and wreck our multicultural pluralistic democracy as thoroughly as Trump just wrecked the East Wing.
More babies is not the primary goal of this movement. More control—over women, LGBTQIA+ people, immigrants, and anyone who doesn’t adhere to their narrow confines—is.
Pronatalism is about forcing one religious world view on the entire country. In that way, it’s nothing more than white Christian nationalism in disguise.
