Why Donald Trump, Elon Musk and JD Vance want to 'Make America procreate again' through pronatalism

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6 days ago

Simone Collins is making pizza, sourdough and banana bread while juggling a toddler on her back when a fight breaks out between two of her three older children that inevitably ends in tears.
"Every night is the Hunger Games," she jokes.
"Every night is chaos, battle royale, flat-out disaster zone."
With four kids under six and a fifth on the way, you'd think her and husband Malcolm Collins just love children but Malcolm says it's not really about that at all.
"Kids do not exist for our pleasure, right? If you want that, get a pet. Kids, we have to pay to the future the debt we owe the past," he says.
The Collinses — who ultimately want at least seven children and preferably up to 12 — have become the poster couple for the pronatalist movement, which promotes having more babies to address falling birth rates.
Malcolm believes it is an existential issue that could have an impact on the future of the human race.
"Our greatest threat is fertility collapse," he says, while his youngest daughter Industry Americus squirms in his lap.
"If fertility collapse does lead to a collapse of human civilisation, eventually all of life dies, because humans are the only life form on this planet that can take life to the stars before the sun eventually and inevitably consumes our planet."
Pronatalism is a cause they believe is so grave that Simone is prepared to die for it.
After complications with her first birth, she's getting ready to have her fifth C-section, a potentially life-threatening procedure.
"Before I met Malcolm, I would do things like base jumping and skydiving, and that also was a pretty risky thing to do, but it didn't make the world a better place or create a new life," she says.
The former Silicon Valley couple use their tech connections to grow their family, testing and selecting embryos based on intelligence and future health to have not just a big family, but an optimal one.
That's drawn accusations of eugenics, which Malcolm strenuously denies.
"When we do polygenic selection or gene modification, everyone's like, 'Oh, people are going to use that to get rid of groups that are seen as disabled, like autistic people'," he says.
"And it's like 'bro, my wife is autistic, my two older kids are autistic and we could have selected against it, and we didn't'.
"Because with polygenics, rather than the government deciding what are good genes and bad genes, the people who experience those genes get to decide."
The couple admits they deliberately troll the left, with controversial statements and Simone's outfit of choice — a pilgrim-style dress topped off with a bonnet and Handmaid's Tale hat.
"It's funny because the only way we can avoid a Handmaid's Tale future, is for feminists to have more kids," she says.
"Our primary means of raising awareness about demographic collapse has involved making people angry, making people outraged, because that's the only way they're gonna take this issue seriously.
"We don't care if we become the punching bags of the movement, if at least people are aware of the fact that this is a major issue."
But their willingness to become human clickbait for the cause has taken a toll, with death threats and doxxing a semi-regular occurrence.
Simone proudly shows off an AR-15 assault rifle and Beretta mounted on the walls of their 18th century home, in part to protect against the growing threats they face.
"We have guns for the death threats but also we have guns because we love guns," she says.
The pronatalist movement is spearheaded by someone even more polarising and controversial than the Collinses — billionaire Elon Musk.
Fox News asked him what was the biggest thing that keeps him up at night in March.
"The birth rate is very low in almost every country and unless that changes, civilisation will disappear," Mr Musk said.
Earlier this year — when the father of 14 brought his four-year-old son to a White House meeting with US President Donald Trump — Mr Musk's nose-picking, face-pulling child stole the show.
The number of progeny Mr Musk has produced is a source of pride for him.
"You've got to walk the talk, so I do have a lot of kids and I encourage others to have lots of kids," he said in 2024.
Even though the two men have since spectacularly fallen out, pronatalism is having a moment under the Trump administration.
Mr Trump has declared himself the 'fertilisation president', vowing to make IVF more accessible.
When campaigning for the presidency, he declared: "I want a baby boom. Oh, you men are so lucky out there, you're so lucky."
Earlier this year Vice-president JD Vance told a crowd, "Let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America."
Mr Trump's recently passed Big Beautiful Bill included a $US1,000 baby bonus and the Trump administration is reportedly considering several other measures to encourage a baby boom.
They include a 'motherhood medal' for women with six or more children and government-funded programs to teach women about their menstrual cycles, so they can work out when they're ovulating and try to conceive.
Experts like Associate Professor Catherine Pakaluk from the Catholic University of America are sceptical those measures will make any difference.
"I think a fair reading of all of the countries that have looked at this problem squarely, including Australia, is that you can get a little bit of lift by sending out cash to people — baby bonuses, tax credits, subsidies — but that lift in the birthrate seems to be mostly temporary and short-lived," she says.
The researcher and author also has a deeply personal connection to the issue — as the mother of eight children herself.
Unlike the Collinses, her Catholic faith played a big part in her decision to have a big family and she believes it's religious communities who may hold the key to boosting birthrates.
"If you want to encourage child-bearing, have a hard look at the way in which your policies affect or don't affect living church communities," she says.
The movement has seen an unlikely convergence of trad (traditional) wives and tech bros — religious groups who oppose things like IVF and abortion and tech advocates like the Collinses, calling for genetic selection, surrogacy and artificial wombs to grow their families.
"At the end of the day, the traditional family form folks are not going to be able to get in bed, proverbially, with the tech-genetic-selection-surrogate birth situation," Ms Pakaluk says.
"So I don't know what it spells about the future, but I don't expect there to be tight alliances between these really deeply intellectually different positions."
Other experts are sceptical that population collapse is even a legitimate concern.
Demographer Philip Cohen from the University of Maryland doesn't believe population decline is a real risk for the US or other developed societies, but that aging populations are.
"As birth rates fall, the number of old people in society increases and that's expensive," Dr Cohen says.
"We have to address that, but what we don't need to be worrying about is population decline as something that must be fixed by more births now or else we're going to be in trouble.
"That's just not the case.
"At some point in the future, if birth rates don't rise, our populations would decline if we don't reinforce them with immigration, which of course is something we can do if we want to."
He believes there are a number of factors behind the current pronatalist push and why its proponents are reluctant to embrace immigration as a solution.
"On the political right, the motivations are a combination of nationalism — 'if we don't breed faster, our competitors will outbreed us'," he says of the mentality.
"[There is a] sort of a chauvinism or racism, that is a certain kind of people — the wrong kind of people — are having all the children these days so we will be replaced by new populations of people who have higher birth rates, people who aren't as good or desirable for some basically racist reason.
"And then there's also a gender component, which is sort of a nostalgia for a patriarchal past."
Simone Collins disputes that there's an element of racism within the movement.
"There are racist groups that call themselves pronatalists, but they're not, they're white nationalists," she says.
"A pronatalist just believes that the future is bright, humanity is good, and everyone should, if they want to, have children."
She argues the movement is actually about preserving diversity, not just Western cultures.
"A lot of ethnicities, groups, cultures are going go extinct because they're reproducing below repopulation rate," Simone says.
When asked why Australians should care about the pronatalist movement, Malcolm Collins is clear.
"We will replace you," he says.
"The game of who wins human civilisation has entirely changed.
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