Michelle Oberman (Santa Clara University – School of Law) has posted The Pronatalist Problem on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Drawing on lessons from population policies worldwide, this Article spotlights the emerging U.S. pronatalist agenda, and offers an evidence-based explanation of why it will fail to raise birthrates. Part One uncovers a pronatal movement driven by an alliance of convenience between scions of the tech industry, hoping to boost fertility, and far-right religious conservatives, hoping to increase marriage rates and family size. The alliance employs twin strategies to boost birth rates. First, it uses tech platforms to glorify traditional family structures while undercutting public trust in hormonal contraception. Second, it leverages influence over the second Trump administration to dismantle contraceptive access. Despite its pro-family rhetoric, the pronatalist agenda to date amounts to little more than an endeavor to drive down contraceptive prevalence through cultural stigmatization, increased costs, and legal restrictions.
Part Two situates this emerging U.S. pronatalist agenda in the context of population policies. Drawing on historical parallels—including the coercive demographic interventions of Nazi Germany and Ceaușescu’s Romania—it reveals a recurring pattern: population planning policies are rooted in an existential anxiety over cultural identity that, in turn, comes to justify coercive policies. More critically, the historical record demonstrates that coercive pronatalist policies consistently fail to produce sustained increases in birth rates because they ignore the underlying socioeconomic, structural, and cultural forces that drive individual family-planning decisions.
Part Three examines the emerging U.S. pronatalist agenda against this backdrop, noting the familiar animating concerns and cataloging the coercive strategies already in play. Drawing on the lessons from Part Two, this section offers an evidence-based evaluation of how the unfolding U.S. pronatalist agenda will impose catastrophic costs on the most marginalized members of our society, while failing to yield a sustained increase in birthrates.
Finally, Part Four identifies population policies that successfully stabilize declining fertility. After documenting examples of successful “positive pronatalist” strategies from Scandinavia and Europe, I conclude by identifying key lessons to be learned from policies that reject coercion and instead address the systemic factors contributing to below-replacement fertility rates.
Recommended!
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