Our new series returns to our Welcome to Gilead campaign, exploring global restrictions on women’s reproductive rights. In this instalment, we revisit the chapter on the USA’s demography from our 2021 Welcome to Gilead report. Four years have passed, but many of the same patterns remain.

Preventing babies from being born is not medicine. That’s not constructive to our culture and our civilization. If we let our birth rate get down below the replacement rate we are a dying civilization.”

Former US Congressman Steve King

A nationalist agenda

There are many motivations fuelling American pronatalism. Nationalism and white supremacy are strong. The eugenics movement, which blossomed in the 1920s and 30s, coincided with a growing number of American women attending college, and wanted to push those women back into the home to outbreed the growing community of immigrants. American eugenicists successfully promoted a four-child norm – but only among native-born white, middle-class Americans.

The nationalist politicians of today’s America draw inspiration from European nationalists like Orbán and envy their grip on power, which would allow them to attack women’s rights even more than they already do. Republican congressman Steve King (who only recently lost his seat after twenty years in the House of Representatives) admires the right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders for understanding “that culture and demographics are our destiny” and civilization can’t be restored “with somebody else’s babies”.

King supports legislation that makes abortion illegal even in cases of pregnancy resulting from crime, stating that population growth has depended on rape and incest. And he opposes free birth control on the grounds that, “Preventing babies from being born is not medicine. That’s not constructive to our culture and our civilization. If we let our birth rate get down below the replacement rate we are a dying civilization”.

Great replacement rhetoric

Another nationalist lawmaker, Dennis Baxley of Florida’s state legislature, has also openly asserted that abortion restrictions are beneficial because they increase births among white women. Baxley has echoed the Great Replacement rhetoric, warning that abortion – alongside immigration – is a threat to white survival.

Author and rising conservative star JD Vance, who is currently running for a US Senate seat, regularly warns of the threat low fertility rates pose to nationalism. He recently suggested that childfree adults shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they have no stake in the country’s future. Lyman Stone, an ardent pronatalist economist whose research influences powerful members of Congress, further postulates that low birth rates are a national security risk because “You need warm bodies to fill the uniforms”.

Jonathan Last, The Weekly Standard’s digital editor, attempts to take a less egregious approach, claiming that women need to bear more children to protect democracy; otherwise authoritarian countries, with their higher fertility rates, will “inherit the earth”.

In the mainstream

This linkage is far from limited to the fringes of politics. In September 2021, the US’s former Vice President, Mike Pence, spoke at the Budapest Demographic Summit. His comments also reflected the increasingly apocalyptic tone of the discussion:

We see a crisis that brings us here today, a crisis that strikes at the very heart of civilization itself. The erosion of the nuclear family, marked by declining marriage rates, rising divorce, widespread abortion and plummeting birthrates.”

The ‘global population crash’ narrative has certainly been seized upon by US campaigners seeking to roll back progress on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), and abortion in particular. For them, amplifying concerns about declining birth rates and fostering associations between family planning, population ‘control’, coercion and colonialism are useful weapons in their assault on reproductive rights.

Loud and proud

Among organisations working in this field is the Population Research Institute, whose stated objectives are to “expose the myth of overpopulation, expose human rights abuses committed in population control programs and make the case that people are the world’s greatest resource”. Despite its name and “pop.org” URL, however, it appears to do no research on demography or population: founded by a Catholic priest in 1989, its website and social media make its anti-abortion agenda absolutely clear (while throwing in a generous mix of anti-vax, anti-communism, and climate change scepticism).

The New York-based Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), meanwhile, makes its anti-abortion purpose explicit, and addresses population issues in a dedicated section on its website, including articles about social strife in the US due to declining fertility and the wholly unfounded claim that the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) “impose[s] population control targets on countries all around the world”. Should anyone imagine these voices to be marginal, C-Fam has special consultative status at the United Nations and the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops carries an article entitled “the myth of overpopulation and the folks who brought it to you” by its president.

Religious nationalists

Connections between the religious nationalists of America and Europe are strong, thanks in part to the World Congress of Families (WCF), which was founded by right-wing American Christians in collaboration with equally conservative Russians in the late 1990s. The WCF regularly convenes large gatherings of its international followers, in which they lament the “demographic winter” and defend “natural” family values. Thanks to their efforts, these ideas are becoming more and more common.

Though white supremacy and nationalism are real forces in America’s pronatalism, economic concerns about a shrinking labour force and social security funding are a pervasive motivator among policymakers. Former Speaker of the House and father-of-three Paul Ryan told reporters, “This is going to be the new economic challenge for America: people…I did my part, but we need to have higher birth rates in this country…Baby boomers are retiring and we have fewer people following them in the workforce”.

Ryan was simultaneously working to cut spending on social safety nets, while promoting a tax bill that would drastically decrease taxes on corporations and rich Americans. Rather than encouraging women to have more children by providing desperately needed support for parents, Republican congressmen like Ryan choose the cheaper route: restricting access to SRHR.

A problem for capitalism

Lawmakers aren’t the only ones interested in higher birth rates: anti-abortion legislation has been supported by wealthy lobbyists like the Koch brothers, suggesting that the economic stakes are significant. Jenny Brown argues that “while lower birth rates are a phony crisis from the standpoint of workers, for the establishment the problem is real. Their profits, and capitalist economic growth in general, rely on a continually expanding workforce replenished with ever-larger cohorts of young people to labor and consume and pay taxes and serve in the military, and to provide for retired workers, either individually through family ties or collectively through Social Security.”

While some American policymakers turn to immigration or increased government spending to address the economic effects of low birth rates, others – conservative Republicans – oppose immigration and spending on what they call entitlement programmes. So instead, they interfere with reproductive rights. This isn’t new – historically, fertility rate declines have often been followed by new SRHR restrictions.

The Trump administration did away with the mandatory contraception coverage introduced by Obama, leaving many poor Americans unable to afford birth control. Republican politicians have consistently attacked and attempted to defund Planned Parenthood, even though it legally cannot use federal funding to provide abortions. Individual states have imposed draconian restrictions on abortion.

The situation in 2021

So far in 2021, there have already been 561 abortion restrictions introduced – making it likely to be the worst year for abortion legislation. Texas’ new law makes abortion illegal after just six weeks – when women often don’t even realise they’re pregnant. In a Supreme Court brief, the legislation’s author wrote that women don’t need abortion to control their reproductive lives; they can merely abstain from sex.

Alabama’s law, which criminalises abortion even in cases of rape and incest, is more restrictive than the abortion laws of ten Middle Eastern countries, including conservative Saudi Arabia. And Mississippi’s law, while less severe, directly challenges the legality of abortion under Roe v. Wade, setting up a crucial Supreme Court case in December. The anti-abortion movement is growing: in 2000, four states were hostile to abortion rights. By 2019, 21 states were either hostile or very hostile.

America’s pronatalist nationalists must be pleased with the fruits of their labour: the US has the highest unintended pregnancy rate in the developed world. After Texas closed 82 family planning centres, the birth rate in those areas increased by 27%. For conservative lawmakers, this is a fantastic deal: they save money on healthcare costs and reap the economic benefits of future taxpayers, while women shoulder the costs of bearing and raising children.