"Humanity is dying," billionaire Elon Musk told Fox News anchor Bret Baier recently when asked what keeps him up at night. "The birth rate is very low in almost every country. And so unless that changes, civilization will disappear." Through interviews, social media posts, funding for population research and his own example as the parent of at least 14 children, Musk has become one of the most visible beacons of anxiety about falling birth rates.
While discussions about the economic challenges of falling birth rates exist across the political spectrum, the right has increasingly taken up the cause under the banner of "pronatalism" to promote higher birth rates. The Trump White House is reportedly soliciting suggestions to boost births from married couples, even as it continues drastic reductions to social services and public health funding.
In recent years, a revitalized pronatalist movement has brought together parts of the religious right, tech types and dedicated "new right" anti-feminists. These camps have some disagreements over government policy, technologies like in vitro fertilization, genetic engineering and the rehabilitation of eugenics. But most are united in the belief that modern culture has failed to adequately prioritize the value of nuclear families and making lots of babies.
Last month in Austin, Texas, many proponents of pronatalism met up at the second Natal Conference, known informally as Natal Con, where the mood was exuberant. Many there see this moment as a chance to advance their agenda through perceived allies in the Trump administration, including Musk and Vice President Vance.
The "techno-puritans"
Outside the Trump administration, Simone Collins has purposefully made herself into one of the more visible faces of pronatalism.
"My whole entire, like, Etsy getup right now — it's intentionally cringe," Collins told NPR between other press interviews at Natal Con. She describes her signature look as "techno-puritan."
"There should obviously be more cybernetics in my outfit. But we are combining, like, chunky hipster glasses and a lot of modern equipment with a bonnet and linen clothing and weird puritan stuff," said Collins, who had her 1-year-old daughter, Industry Americus Collins, strapped to her back.
Collins and her husband, Malcolm Collins, have courted press coverage by being "intentionally cringe." It has worked: Over the last few years, they've been profiled by many news outlets, including The Telegraph, The Washington Post and The Guardian. The couple tells journalists they've curated their family's image based on data. They chose their kids' names (Industry Americus, Titan Invictus, Octavian George, Torsten Savage) in hopes of launching them toward impressive careers. Simone, rather than Malcolm, ran (unsuccessfully) for state office in Pennsylvania because they felt a woman would be more electable.
Techno-puritan isn't just a fashion choice for the Collinses. It's a religion they've invented in part to maximize fertility, mental health and social good. Malcolm once slapped their 2-year-old son in front of a reporter, likening it to the behavior of tigers in the wild.
"We constantly court controversy in order to get our message out because we know that's what gets clicks," Simone told NPR.
"The number one goal we have is to make everyone universally aware of demographic collapse as a catastrophic issue," she said. "Our big focus is primarily on just signaling that this is a culture that values family and kids and, secondarily, taking a regulatory foot off the neck of parents."
The Collinses are seen by fellow pronatalists as members of the movement's "tech" camp. The couple uses and advocates for in vitro fertilization and claims the embryos of their four children were screened for illnesses, mental health issues and potential intelligence. At a penthouse cocktail party in Austin the night before Natal Con began, the Collinses invited journalists to mingle with founders of gene editing and genetic engineering companies.
The couple's network also includes right-wing tech elites and Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Simone worked for PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and Malcolm's brother works for Musk's ad hoc Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team.
"Generally, women should not have careers"
Another pronatalist camp includes the more religiously motivated and believers in strict gender norms. In the movement, they're referred to as the "trads," as in "traditional."
The first Natal Con, in 2023, included a presentation by far-right businessman Charles Haywood on the importance of men-only spaces. Haywood, who founded a shampoo company and aspires to be a self-described "warlord," told the audience that workplaces should revert to privileging men with families and being segregated by sex. "And generally, women should not have careers. They should be socially stigmatized if they have careers," Haywood said at Natal Con that year. He sponsored this year's conference but didn't speak.
He blames birth rate declines on feminism and democratic changes overturning what he sees as natural hierarchies of gender and race.
"The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever from the history of this nation," Haywood said in 2023, drawing applause from the Natal Con crowd.
Where "tech" and "trad" overlap
Simone Collins, an entrepreneurial woman with a master's degree from the University of Cambridge, told NPR she thinks Haywood's stances are "so dumb." But in addition to their commitment to spaces like Natal Con, the two share a contempt for contemporary culture.
In interviews, the Collinses frame their arguments as concerns about preserving diversity or LGBTQ+ communities. If tolerant progressives don't reproduce, they've argued, authoritarian solutions will assert themselves. Simone often refers to her upbringing in the San Francisco Bay Area by hippie parents as a symbol of her former left-wing bona fides. In an initial interview with NPR last year, Malcolm referred to himself as a "major thinker on the left."
On their podcast, however, the Collinses say reversing demographic collapse is not possible without addressing "wokeness" or "progressiveness," which Malcolm refers to as "the urban monoculture and its goal of cultural genocide." This "monoculture" survives only by creating popular culture or, as Malcolm has said, "by parasitizing children from nearby demographically healthy cultural groups."
A complex global trend
Many demographers frame the issue of birth rate declines differently than pronatalists do, including Karen Benjamin Guzzo, a University of North Carolina sociologist who runs the Carolina Population Center.
The United States, she explained, is actually a couple of decades late to a global declining fertility trend. Birth rates have already dropped in Italy, Japan, India, parts of Brazil and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
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"Up until the Great Recession, we were sort of humming along, you know, right around two kids per [woman]," said Guzzo. Birth rates then began to fall, partly because the U.S. succeeded in reducing teen and unintended births.
Many national governments facing birth rate declines have launched policies to try to raise fertility, with mixed results. None has succeeded in sustainably raising birth rates above "replacement rate" without also drastically increasing maternal mortality and the number of orphaned children, as was the case with Romania's total ban on contraception and abortion beginning in the 1960s.
In and outside pronatalist circles, Guzzo said, there has been a lingering notion that wealthy women have fewer children than their poor and working-class counterparts. But recent research shows that this tendency has actually started to reverse in many countries, including the United States.
"In the 1980s and '90s, college-educated women were less likely to have kids than other groups. That is not really the case anymore. They just have them later," said Guzzo.
Guzzo said surveys show roughly 80% of people want kids, but for many people, the right moment doesn't materialize.
In her research on Americans, she said, she has seen that "one of the biggest things people think about when they think about having kids is 'how does the future look?'" Respondents want stable housing, job security, health care, education and a good partner and worry about larger forces like politics and climate change.
These worries lead people to make a series of decisions to delay having children, with hopes of having them in the future. Guzzo said this pattern continues because "we aren't giving people the societal supports to meet their visions of [being] a good parent."
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For her, that support could look like more government funding for health care, affordable housing, education and child care and addressing student loan debt and climate change.
Some pronatalists agree and point to evidence that generous government policies raise birth rates. Still, they haven't always put their full support behind enacting those policies. As a U.S. senator, Vance suggested more than doubling the child tax credit to $5,000 a child, weeks after he skipped a vote on a bill to expand the benefit. Musk's DOGE has targeted funding for the Department of Health and Human Services and laid off employees who administer Head Start child care.
But many more pronatalists, including Natal Con's organizer, Kevin Dolan, see their biggest allies as those in the White House right now.
"Breeding" excellence
"The topic of demographic decline clearly matters to Elon Musk, JD Vance and many others in the Trump administration, which means that the great ideas developed here can get a hearing that would not have been possible last year," said Dolan in his welcome speech at this year's Natal Con.
Dolan left his data science job in 2021 after his anonymous Twitter and Substack accounts were exposed. Among other things, he'd used them to promote author Charles Murray, who has advanced discredited arguments that social inequalities exist because of supposed genetic differences between races rather than historical disadvantages and structural racism.
After his identity was revealed, Dolan continued sharing his thoughts about how society should be ordered on his podcast. For example, he described love between men and women as a "relationship between superior and inferior."
"We're expected to lie about the existence of these hierarchies all of the time. And if our goal is to rehabilitate hierarchies of nature, then the best place to start is the most fundamental natural hierarchies which are found in the family," he said. "And that brings us back to where we started with selective breeding."
Dolan was reviewing what he called "a fantastic book" by Costin Alamariu, an influential hard-right writer who has written: "I believe in Fascism or 'something worse.'" Figures on the right have noted that Alamariu, who goes by the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert, is a favorite among junior Trump staffers.
"The idea is essentially that our society has become excessively effeminate, weak, compassionate," said Matthew McManus, a lecturer at the University of Michigan, "and what they want to do is breed or elevate an aristocratic class that's going to be masculine, violent, not necessarily motivated by, let's call it empathy." Recently, Elon Musk echoed the sentiment on Joe Rogan's podcast, saying "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy."
McManus is an expert on the modern, hard-right thinkers whose ideas Dolan promotes. In these intellectual circles, McManus said, establishing a "masculine" culture means rooting out feminism and multicultural democracy.
"Women are to be subordinated to men. [They] largely are going to be responsible for managing the household, although with no real particular authority. And of course, they're going to have an awful lot of children," said McManus.
On his podcast, Dolan has said modern culture and government policies have created a "badly dysfunctional" "breeding system" in which excellence is devalued. Part of the vision for Natal Con, as Dolan describes it on his podcast, is for it to be a hub for like-minded people to breed a sustainable "aristocratic class" to resist those cultural forces.
A nonpartisan conference?
On the opening night of this year's conference, Natal Con attendees bound for the introductory dinner were greeted by a small group of student protesters from the adjoining University of Texas at Austin.
"Eugenicists! Off our campus! Racists! Off our campus! White supremacists! Off our campus! Neo-Nazis! Off our campus!" they chanted into a megaphone, as conference attendees entered the Bullock Texas State History Museum. It was a perplexing experience for speaker Bryan Caplan, a George Mason University economics professor and bestselling author.
"To go and start calling a whole crowd of people Nazis seemed a rather odd thing to do," he told NPR.
In addition to doubling the number of attendees to 200 since the inaugural conference in 2023, Dolan had succeeded in widening the range of speakers beyond the original lineup of hard-right influencers and promoters of scientific racism. Caplan was among the increased number of credentialed professors who accepted invitations to speak this year.
Dolan has said Natal Con is nonpartisan, and he told NPR that his goal is to find a solution to birth rate declines that works for everyone.
"I think it's a tragedy that [liberal] people are not raising children with their cultural obsessions and interests and skills and talents," Dolan said in an interview.
But he also invited pseudonymous writer Peachy Keenan. She also spoke at the first conference, where she said: "We don't really want to market natalism to the progressive feminists. The people maxing out their fertility should be people, ideally, who won't raise their children to be gender-neutral furries who want to join antifa one day."
Keenan is one of multiple Natal Con speakers published by Passage Publishing, commonly referred to as Passage Press, which sells books arguing Black people are inherently more criminal and less intelligent than white people. Passage Publishing's founder, Jonathan Keeperman, both spoke at and sponsored this year's Natal Con.
Dolan also featured speakers such as Jack Posobiec, a hard-right political operative who first gained notoriety after spreading the Pizzagate conspiracy theory during the first Trump term. Posobiec is close to the Trump administration and has used antisemitic memes on social media.
Speaking at the conference's welcome dinner this year, Posobiec referenced detractors of the pronatalist movement. "To the enemies of civilization, and call them whatever you want — the woke, the globalists, the nihilists — they don't just want to rewrite our history. They actually want to erase our future. They want to erase us, all of us, everyone in this room."
His speech at Natal Con focused on the defense of "Western civilization." In the past, Posobiec marched in and promoted demonstrations in Poland that included antisemitic, neo-fascist groups chanting support for "white Poland." Asked for comment, Posobiec has previously told NPR to "enjoy being defunded."
Asked whether his curation of Natal Con speakers contradicts his professed nonpartisan goals, Dolan told NPR that he'd love to include more speakers from across the political spectrum. However, he said he thinks progressive people who are "frightened" by "dangerous" ideas "just may not be a fit for what we're trying to do right now."
"I would say this needs to be a very high openness, very exploratory, very intellectually curious environment," said Dolan. "It's been my experience that if you are unwilling to include people who have been labeled [racists], that is functionally a choice to exclude an incredible percentage of people who are thoughtful and interesting and have something new to say."
"Race suicide"
Not all the ideas that Natal Con speakers are interested in are new.
Around the early 1900s, another period of historically low birth rates, the eugenicist concept of "race suicide" was amplified by President Theodore Roosevelt.
It was "the idea that white, middle-class women were too busy going to college or getting ahead professionally — they were not having babies," explained Alexandra Stern, a University of California, Los Angeles history and English professor who has written books on the American history of eugenics and the contemporary far right.
Race suicide included fears that some people, like the poor, or new waves of Italian, Polish and Jewish immigrants, had too many babies, which led to widespread programs of sterilizing supposedly "unfit" groups in the United States. These and other American policies, like anti-miscegenation laws, went on to influence some of the "racial hygiene" programs of the Nazi party.
Today's pronatalists, Stern said, are largely aware of this history and often try to disassociate themselves from it.
"So by a very superficial gloss, [today's pronatalist movements] could appear to be, let's say, almost a libertarian approach to babymaking," she said. "But if you look at the underlying, driving ideologies, à la Charles Murray and others who have written about who should be having babies and who should not be having babies, it often comes down to ideologies of genetic determinism and who is more fit or less fit."
Stern said it's just as important to think of pronatalists' ideas within the context of what else is happening today, such as rising maternal mortality after the Supreme Court overturned a constitutional right to abortion or the nation's top health official claiming, inaccurately, that autistic people lead unfulfilling lives. President Trump has signed multiple executive orders targeting transgender people and funding for schools with trans-inclusive policies.
Stern also pointed to attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts and their ramifications for disabled people, women and people of color.
"The logic behind [targeting DEI] is that diversity and difference has been prized over excellence and human optimization and we have to get back to judging people by their merit and not try to pull everyone up to the same level because some people just naturally, biologically or God-given are not going to be at that level," said Stern.
Birth rate declines have also been prominent tropes for white supremacist mass shooters, including the shooter who killed 51 Muslim people and wounded 40 others at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019.
In a document titled "The Great Replacement," the shooter wrote, "If there is one thing I want you to remember from these writings, its [sic] that the birthrates must change."
The "great replacement" is a racist concept, promoted by at least one Natal Con speaker, that populations in majority-white nations are deliberately being "replaced" by nonwhite immigrants. Fears about the birth rates of white women are often a key component of the theory in extremist literature.
"In their eyes, this is the path to what they term white extinction," said Michael Feola, a political theorist at Lafayette College and the author of The Rage of Replacement: Far Right Politics and Demographic Fear.
Feola said it's also no surprise that proponents of scientific racism are helping fund events like Natal Con. There has been a deliberate investment by tech elites to rehabilitate these ideas.
"We're seeing a far more publicly sanitized set of big arguments being presented at the forefront and different sorts of speakers coming to the forefront as public faces of the movement," said Feola.
NPR asked Simone Collins to comment on whether her activism helps give cover for the more extreme elements of pronatalism. Her response was that white nationalism is "obviously evil" and "dumb." But, then, she also reframed some of their ideas.
"They're just trying to point out that 'Oh, wait. Different genetic groups have different general traits,'" said Collins.
She and her husband also have traded multiple podcast appearances with a promoter of racial pseudoscience and promoted his book. Malcolm Collins later apologized for recommending the book, but the couple's episodes with the author remain up.
NPR's Audrey Nguyen produced this story.
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