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The Faces of US Pronatalism And the War on Women’s Rights – Part Two

Donald Trump is only five days into his second term, but he’s already making an impression with a flurry of executive orders. Read part two of our deep dive into the new administration, as we look at those pronatalists closest to Trump.

Read The Faces of US Pronatalism And the War on Women’s Rights – Part One here.

JD Vance

Vice President JD Vance identifies himself as a “pro-family” politician.  

However, Vance’s “pro-family” views might be better understood as “big family” values, with a fixed pronatalist outlook to encourage Americans to have more babies. Both through positive incentives such as tax credits, as well as by force, through restricting women’s access to abortion and for penalising child-free individuals.  

US Flags

Vance has stated that the votes of people with children should count for more than those of nonparents. He has also suggested people without children should pay higher taxes than those who have children. Vance went viral last year for his comments criticising ‘childless cat ladies’. And he has claimed that people without children ‘do not have a stake in the future’.  

Previously, Vance has also expressed support for a total national abortion ban. 

Vance has been credited with popularising pronatalism into the mainstream US discourse. He has aligned himself with other pronatalist politicians such as the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, with his drive to raise Hungary’s birth rate.  

Elon Musk 

Since at least 2017, Elon Musk has been using Twitter/X to promote misinformation about population, including the idea of an impending ‘population collapse.’ In 2022, Musk posted on X, that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” 

A wholly inaccurate statement that has been disproved by demographers and climate scientists alike. However, it’s clear that Musk has significant influence not only amongst his millions of followers but also in receiving widespread media attention.  

Musk frequently makes headlines with his statements about low birth rates. But he isn’t just commenting on the issue, he has also funded research to support his inaccurate claims. 

Musk’s Research

A Bloomberg investigation revealed that in 2021, he donated $10 million to the Population Wellbeing Initiative (PWI), an organisation dedicated to researching solutions to combat low birth rates. Some of the PWI’s research was published in an opinion piece in the New York Times last year. The article features a graphic, which depicts a falsely alarming steep population drop-off after a peak of 10 billion in 2085. Whilst current UN projections do predict that the human population will peak before the end of this century, it’s expected to plateau and then gradually decline.  

Musk, who’s fathered at least 12 children, has called UN projections of population growth “utter nonsense” in the past. He has positioned himself within President Trump’s inner circle, therefore it’s concerning how far Musk will use his influence to continue to spread misinformation about population.  

For billionaires like Elon Musk, their support for the pronatalist movement encompasses the push for infinite growth. For Musk, more people mean more future workers, more wealth, more space exploration, and a continuation of the business-as-usual economic model that favours the rich. 

Last year, Population Matters conducted a project examining alternative economic models to explore how we could break out of this growth-focused paradigm, to find economic models that work better for people and the planet.  

Final Thoughts  

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency and rise of other pronatalist figures to prominent positions of power is a cause for concern that we must all be vigilant to, especially as it poses a fundamental threat to women’s reproductive rights.  

Population Matters will be working hard with our partners over the next four years to support communities worldwide to ensure continued access to family planning and to protect reproductive rights through legally binding measures immune to the whims of hostile forces. As always, we appreciate your continued support for our cause.

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This is part two of The Faces of US Pronatalism And the War on Women’s Rights.

You can read part one here.

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