You should have children and more of them, say the pro-natalists, a precarious coalition of visionaries and pragmatists. Some tech-industry titans promote and help fund pronatalist research and initiatives. Their efforts warrant scrutiny because they have power to steer the pronatalism lobby in directions the titans prefer.

To comprehend their place in pronatalism, we must zoom out and scan the varied terrain of pronatalist enterprise. Catherine Pakaluk, an economist at the Catholic University of America, supports some version of the cause but distances herself from the movement, which she calls “an unholy alliance.” Write her in for Team Pragmatist. She thinks that having children can increase personal happiness—and that having them could be made easier through legal and policy reforms and a shift in societal attitudes.

She shares in a broad consensus joined by policymakers and political leaders in scores of nations, including Japan, Australia, and much of the European Union. Their governments implement pronatalist policies out of national economic self-interest, which aligns with personal self-interest insofar as the policies are supports, not prods, and take the form of generous provisions for daycare, parental leave, and other services and benefits that ease the burden of childrearing for those who choose to have kids. For those who haven’t so chosen, or who have chosen to limit the size of their family, some governments offer financial incentives in the form of tax credits and baby bonuses, cash payments to parents of newborns, although evidence is weak that bribes to have children are effective. God bless the policymakers and their green eyeshades.

As for Team Visionary, it’s a diverse and colorful mix. The convention is to divide it into two camps, religious traditionalists and techno-futurists. In the West, religious traditionalists invoke the Bible as the authority to be fruitful and multiply, as God instructs the first humans he created to inhabit the earth (Gen. 1:28). He adds that they should subdue it and exercise dominion over its creatures, a command that chimes with Catholic integralism and Protestant Dominionism, a political theology according to which Christians should endeavor to occupy seats of power from which they can rule the government and institutions of the nation-state.

Besides being a divine mandate, pronatalism can be of service to the objectives of Christian nationalism—the nationalism more clearly than the Christianity (more about that soon)—if the message that humans have a duty to procreate fails to move secularists (who seem to have fewer receptors for it) but lands with the religiously fervent who dream of throne and altar and a new Christendom. The meek will inherit the earth, but Christian nationalists who aspire to seize it in the meantime have reason to seek eventual strength by increasing their numbers.

Jews and Christians whose inspiration for pronatalist advocacy flows from their respective religions find common ground in specific verses and the general thrust of the Hebrew Bible. The Quiver-full movement, found mostly among Protestants and Evangelicals in the Anglosphere, takes its name from Psalm 127. The New Testament offers less material on which to base a religious celebration of robust fecundity or even ordinary family formation. “There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:12). Examples of the Gospel’s ambivalence toward human reproduction are well-known and would be multiplied here if space permitted. Each in its own way, the Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches preserve the value of celibacy in Christian tradition, although they also either ban or restrict the use of contraception and espouse natural-law principles that lend themselves to marriage and large families. Whichever of the two paths you take, they imply, take it all the way.

In any case, a preacher can proselytize only so many souls. When the preaching has achieved its natural yield of converts and begun to run dry, one obvious recourse is to stop chasing the dwindling supply of persuadable persons and instead to grow that supply by ensuring that the already faithful procreate. The strategy has been understood by clans, tribes, and nations since antiquity, as well as by religions, including techno-futurism, which is as ancient as any of them. History (e.g., circumcision and uncircumcision) and literature both ancient (Pygmalion) and modern (Frankenstein) provide abundant precedent for the utopian belief (which often proves dystopian when it comes to fruition) that technological manipulation to improve on human biology is both the proof of our being the image and likeness of God and the key that will unlock the door to the New Jerusalem, the eschaton after which our species lives not just happily ever after (a middling outcome acceptable perhaps to the meek) but triumphantly, roaming the cosmos and colonizing distant planets.

Like their spiritual forefathers, the Futurists who lit up the sky briefly before flaming out after the First World War, the present-day tech pioneers funding the movement to grow the human population and engineer its genome to suit certain eugenicist ideals often speak of going fast and tearing through feeble old barriers of timeworn convention, to boldly go where no man has gone before, with special oomph on the word man. “We have been up all night, my friends and I,” wrote Filippo Tomasso Marinetti in 1909, in the Futurist Manifesto.

As we listened to the last faint prayer of the old canal and the crumbling of the bones of the moribund palaces with their green growth of beard, suddenly the hungry auto-mobiles roared beneath our windows. . . .

We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. . . .

We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

And contempt for woman. That such contempt characterizes also the tech-bro faction of the pronatalist movement of the twenty-first century would be hard to prove in a court of law, since the bros usually choose their words on the issue carefully when they go on record at all, but let no one accuse you of bias for noticing that they wave and plant some red flags. The movement’s most high-profile event in the United States is the Natal Conference, where the tech and the traditionalist factions meet, joined by the random pragmatist such as Pakaluk. The two times it’s been held, in December 2023 and March 2025, men outnumbered women—by a lot, according to media accounts—and dominated the roster of speakers as well as the approximately one or two hundred attendees. The organizer, Kevin Dolan, a data scientist who left his job after he was exposed as the author of a Twitter account specializing in race science, has described “love between men and women as a ‘relationship between superior and inferior,’” according to NPR. According to Emma Goldberg in The New York Times, he says he was inspired to stage the event, “after watching a Tucker Carlson documentary about falling testosterone levels.”

“Generally, women should not have careers,” Charles Haywood, a sham-poo tycoon and fellow traveler with the techno-futurist side of the coalition, told his audience at the 2023 conference. He elaborated that employers should disadvantage women and unmarried men and that workplaces should be segregated by sex.

Peter Thiel, who frowns on “the extension of the franchise to women” in an article that included the phrase “the higher one’s IQ,” is a former employer of Simone Collins. She and her husband, Malcolm, whose brother worked for DOGE, the government organization established de facto by Elon Musk, have made themselves the movement’s media stars by inviting journalists to their quiver-full of a home outside Philadelphia and by cultivating a look they call “techno-puritan” and “intentionally cringe”—thick-framed eyeglasses, a bonnet for Simone. They gain media coverage by courting “controversy,” because they “know that’s what get clicks.”

The Collinses describe their politics in contrarian terms, presenting them-selves as a youthful middle-aged couple on the far side of hip, where they affiliate with right-wing activists and embrace an eclectic ideology—this from column Blue, that from column Red—that defies easy categorization and verges on the incoherent, as if their plan is to advance a disturbing hard-right agenda by gesturing at progressive vibes and values and thereby confusing and disarming their prospective critics. They “staunchly” support Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Musk, according to a profile in the Guardian two days before the 2024 election, in which Simone ran as the Republican nominee for her district in the Pennsylvania state legislature.

Unless the population increases, “the only cultural groups that survive will be the ones that don’t give women a choice,” Malcolm told Jenny Kleeman, a reporter for the Guardian, in May 2025. Does he mean the population of Earth or only of the United States, or of rich countries but not poor ones? If he means the global population, he’s wrong, because that’s increasing. So is that of the United States, thanks to immigration.

And what is the choice that he thinks “cultural groups” should give wom-en? The right to abortion, or the right to in vitro fertilization? He and his wife support both. She can conceive only through IVF. The Collinses have had “the genomes of their frozen embryos tested and are selecting which ones to implant according to how well they score on intelligence and future health,” Kleeman wrote. “They don’t just want a big family: they want an optimal one.”

Where IVF is banned, Malcolm seems to be saying, the population will de-cline, leading to tighter restrictions on abortion and vasectomies. That leads to more decline, he argues, citing Romania, where a ban on abortion in most cases beginning in 1967 was followed by a brief spike in births and then a “quick fall.” Abortion “makes being a parent lower-class, in the eyes of society,” he says. The Romania model, which in his view amounts to slow national suicide, is also an example of “the only cultural groups [that] will survive” if birthrates fall: Ponder the paradox.

Noor Siddiqui, a recipient of a Thiel Fellowship in 2012, is the CEO of Orchid, which she founded in 2020. It serves patients seeking in vitro fertilization by offering genetic testing of more than 99 percent of an embryo’s genome, screening for predispositions to a host of diseases and conditions, including Alzheimer’s, autism, schizophrenia, and intellectual disability. As Ross Douthat noted in his interview with her in August 2025, while most Americans accept the moral cost of the procedure for couples who have been unable to conceive and want to have children, discarding embryos because they fail to meet parents’ exacting standards raises the moral stakes of IVF.

“Unfortunately, I think a lot of people don’t understand biology,” she told Douthat.

So what happens the old-fashioned way, when you and your partner have sex at home, a lot of embryos are discarded through that process. Nature is extremely brutal. A lot of people don’t know that even people in their 20s have about a 20 percent chance of getting pregnant every month.

So yes, an egg can fertilize. Great. Now you have an embryo. But that doesn’t mean an embryo is going to implant. There’s been multiple really large-scale studies on this—lots of embryos are discarded at home. It’s just that I.V.F. makes that process visible that is currently invisible to people that’s happening at home.

Douthat: But that’s not true. The term “discard” implies agency. If you and your spouse ——

Siddiqui: I don’t think it implies agency.

Siddiqui conflates miscarriage with abortion or rather, in the case of IVF, its equivalent, the discarding of embryos that the mother, the father, their doctors at the laboratory, or some combination of them reject for reasons that many people would deem defensible but that others wouldn’t. She personifies nature, calling it “extremely brutal.” She says that it routinely discards embryos. But when pushed by Douthat, she denies that nature has agency or, to be more precise, that the discarding of an embryo implies that anything or anyone did the discarding. She insinuates, perhaps unwittingly, that the adults who make the decision act only as instruments of nature, doing what it would do in their circumstance, and in as many as 30 percent of pregnancies, or so some researchers estimate.

She adds that no one has to discard an embryo. The mother can forgo IVF medication after implantation and thereby come close to ensuring that the pregnancy will fail, and so the adults can delegate that morally troubling business to Mother Nature. Moral philosophers have much to say about the distinction between harming someone and letting someone be harmed. Their lines of argument should be familiar, or at least intelligible, to anyone engaging the right-to-life issues of abortion, assisted suicide, and even war. Many observant adherents of “peace churches” who refuse to take up arms will cooperate with war efforts by serving as medics or in other noncombat

roles, while others, stricter in their pacifism, will not. After a thousand and one iterations of the “trolley problem,” people still disagree about which has more moral weight, the consequence of a decision or the intention of the one who made it.

The moral problem posed by IVF is subtler. No one kills an embryo they’ve discarded. They let it die or, as Siddiqui might argue, they outsource its killing to Mother Nature. Between discarding an embryo and implanting it but withholding medication to support its viability in the womb, the distinction is clear enough, but what’s the difference? In the Baby Doe cases that Nat Hentoff reported on for the Village Voice in the 1980s, doctors and mothers withheld care from infants born with Down syndrome or spina bifida, enacting the modern equivalent of child exposure.

IVF is only the most well-known item on the menu of reproductive technologies embraced by pronatalists. Consider another item, artificial wombs. They’re the object of much ongoing development and experimentation and raise different questions. On the theory that the right to abortion is the right to expel the unborn child from the womb, not to kill it, artificial wombs could enable both a woman to end her pregnancy and the child to survive and mature. The question of who would care for and rear him would be quite the hot potato. So would the question of whether depriving him of a physical bond with his mother would be an injustice.

Pronatalism as pursued by right-wing progressives in Silicon Valley entails technological adventurism that’s amoral or morally questionable, but the larger movement doesn’t depend on it. Technology is only a means to the end of increasing population. Skepticism about that objective begins with the observation that the global population is increasing and that demographers estimate that it will continue to do so through most of this century before plateauing at about 11 billion. After that it will slowly decline, but for how long before it settles at a new, lower plateau or begins rising again is hard to predict from this far out.

Neither pronatalists nor their critics seem to give enough thought to what the optimum size of the human population is. Two, as in Adam and Eve, is the floor beneath which we cannot fall without going extinct as a species. A number too high could lead to the same outcome. As if to compound that danger, some of the techno-futurists who wish for a population boom also take an interest in achieving physical immortality through biomedicine. An explosion of a population whose members don’t die would be the phylogenetic version of cancer.

More people in regions in the Global South (where the birthrate exceeds replacement levels) seek to migrate to the Global North than vice versa.

Much of the Global North keeps them out while bemoaning that its own population is shrinking. Some of its reasons for rejecting the answer that is knocking on its door and sometimes sneaking through it are rational. A nation that needs a stable population to sustain itself economically may be unable to assimilate immigrants beyond a certain threshold.

Or the nation may be able but unwilling. Not all pronatalists subscribe to eugenics or race science, but a disproportionate amount of their movement’s energy comes from those tendencies, as well as from comic-book fantasies about dominance and hypermasculinity, the flip side of some dark emotions about women. A lot goes into that “unholy” in the unholy alliance that Catherine Pakaluk laments.

____________________________________________

Original Bio:

Nicholas Frankovich is a writer and book editor in Miami.