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Pronatalism, a Conversation with Nandita Bajaj and Michele Goodwin

Nandita Bajaj, Michele Goodwin, and Shoshanna Ehrlich

The following conversation took place through SquadCast in December 2025. An edited transcript is below.

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Shoshanna Ehrlich: I’m delighted to be here with the two of you and looking forward to a really exciting conversation. We have lots to talk about. All of our listeners may not be familiar with pronatalism, and we’re going to get into a lot of detail as our conversation progresses. Let’s just lay the foundation: how would you characterize or define what pronatalism is? Nandita, why don’t we start with you? 

Nandita Bajaj: Thank you, Shoshanna. And I must start by saying that it’s an honor to be in this conversation with both of you. Thanks for having me. So to start, pronatalism is a set of cultural and institutional pressures placed on people, primarily women, to have children and large families for other agendas. It is the proverbial water that we’re swimming in. It’s everywhere. It comprises pressures from family for grandchildren and messages in media that romanticize marriage, pregnancy, and motherhood while stigmatizing those who are single or child-free. It includes religious messages to be fruitful and multiply, and nationalist and economic state-sanctioned restrictions, or bans on contraceptives and abortions, or tax credits and baby bonuses. I see pronatalism as the oldest form of reproductive control and as patriarchy’s most successful project, and I’ll explain that a bit more later. 

SE: Terrific. You planted the seeds for many of the themes that I think we will elaborate on. Michele, let’s turn it over to you to see how you would frame a basic definition of pronatalism. 

Michele Goodwin: I don’t have disagreement at all; I embrace what we’ve just heard. And in fact, it’s universal, so it’s not confined to one specific country. It’s strategically as old as humans have roamed the earth in some instances and cases. I think in modern times, the ways in which we’ve seen it has been quite coercive.  

If we took, let’s say, as a slice, the US because the US has been a focal point in the news with questions of birthright citizenship, with the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. It raises significant questions about a political agenda that we can see right in front of us, a political and legal agenda. 

This notion [among pronatalists] that there are certain communities that seem to be dying out: Now, that’s not actually the case, but that is the hyperbole. This is the concern. And in the United States, you see this as being very much racialized, being packaged in white nationalism, unfortunately. You can see roots of that as dating back to a pre-Reconstruction era or the era of Reconstruction, where you see narratives that are linked to today.  

For example, during the period of abolitionist movement leading to the Civil War and the reconstructed Constitution, there was a narrative about “replacement theory,” this idea that if slavery were to come to an end, that Black people would overwhelm the United States. That it would no longer be what had come about through colonialism. And you see the very vestiges of that argumentation today, the very same type of language. 

It connects to anti-immigration policies that are contemporary but were actually in existence around that very same period of time. If you think about the Page Act, which sought to make sure that women of Chinese descent would not be able to come into the United States to join their partners who were laboring in the United States. That is a different version of a pronatalism. One could say a pronatalism would be “let’s encourage them to come and let’s encourage them to get married and let’s encourage them to have children.” But that was not the case because of a white nationalist agenda that posited that the US can have laborers who are Indigenous, Black, of Asian descent, but these people shall not be citizens of this country. And so the political aspect of this pronatalism is very important in and around what we do in the United States.  

But the United States is not the only country that practices a pronatalism, and it can also have its linkages to “who do we want to have reproduce?” Right? We had a period of eugenics in the United States. We didn’t want poor white people to have children, thus practices that forced their sterilization. And we have in other nations in the world a sense that there should be more boys, let’s say, than girls, right? So pronatalism can also have its various nuances. 

SE: You’ve both set out, looking backwards in time and projecting forward, some of the powerful impetuses behind pronatalism, making clear, as we now will delve in to more, that it’s not simply about having babies. That it encompasses very profound and deeply problematic political and structural agendas.  

So let me ask this question of you: In 2023, what is generally regarded as the first pronatalism conference in the US [the Natal Conference] was held in Austin, Texas. It bills itself very openly–it’s right on the landing page–as a gathering of “the brightest minds in the world.” The claim was to find a politically neutral solution to what they call a global fertility crisis. And it’s argued that this crisis, as women are having fewer babies, is going to lead to an older population. It’ll have greater drain on social welfare systems. It’ll lead to a slowdown in economic growth and productivity, resulting in, as Elon Musk apocalyptically declared, the end of civilization.  

Can you speak to the claim that we are in an era of dangerously low birth rates, which will destabilize the world as we know it? Because that really is what the claim was behind the Pronatalist Conference. It started in 2023 and has been held every year since. And I believe in 2025, it was the largest such gathering in the world. They simply claim they’re trying to protect our future from these dire consequences. So why don’t we start with that question now? And either one of you, let’s hear what you have to say. 

NB: I’ll be happy to start since my entire career is founded on demographic projections and demography and reproductive rights. And Shoshanna, since we will be touching on the real motivations behind the Natal Conference shortly, I’ll address the claim about the so-called fertility crisis that is prevalent across the political spectrum, not just the far Right, even though a lot of the architects of the Natal Conference are affiliated with nationalist, religious, and far-Right alliances. For example, writers at North American media outlets that are considered culturally liberal, such as the New York Times, The Atlantic, Jacobin, Vox— they are increasingly joining this pronatalist chorus that we need to boost birth rates. In fact, this is the title of a recent New York Times article: “The Feminist Case for Spending Billions to Boost the Birthrate: Fertility decline is a devilish problem. What if the only solution is to treat parenting as a public service worth paying for?”  

So let’s be clear, there is no feminist case to use women’s reproduction as a public service. That is and has always been the goal of patriarchy. So pronatalism and feminism are mutually exclusive. And just to give a little bit of a historical background around this fertility decline narrative—Why is it so prevalent? Why is it happening now? And why is it so ruthless?  

In terms of history, humans have been around for 300,000 years, and for most of that history, our population did not exceed 10 million. Just for context, Toronto, Canada, where I am, the population is 6 million in just the city of Toronto. And that was around the population of the entire world for most of our history. Fast forward, you know, a number of thousands of years: About 5,000 years ago, we saw the rise of civilizations. This is when empires and nation-states were starting to build. And part of their mission to strengthen state power was a focus on population, because you needed people to strengthen the state, the empires, but you also needed people to protect the state. You needed soldiers, you needed slave labor, you needed to create social hierarchies in order to be able to control people. One of the social hierarchies that came about in lockstep with the rise of civilization was patriarchy, which is when women were compelled and pushed into reproductive roles and men were pushed into military roles to protect the state. And even though, as Michele said, pronatalism in some way or form has probably been around for most of human history, the institutionalization of pronatalism started 5,000 years ago with the rise of patriarchy. Believe it or not, prior to that, people were living in largely egalitarian societies, lacking these social hierarchies of racism and sexism and pronatalism and misogyny that we see today, where women actually enjoyed much greater reproductive and personal liberties and autonomy. I just want to be clear that pronatalism within the larger historical context is a much more recent phenomenon.  

And starting with patriarchy, our population has been growing from a few million to today over 8 billion and counting. Despite fears of the so-called population collapse from the likes of the Musks and Trumps, we are expected to add another 2.3 billion this century. And this is the largest population we’ve ever had in the history of Homo sapiens. So there is no scientific reason to call what we are seeing a demographic crisis. In terms of fertility rates, they have been declining for the last seventy years. About seventy years ago, women were having on average five or more children for their lifetime. Today, the average fertility rate is 2.3. This is one of the greatest positive trends in human history; it is really an increase in gender equality and reproductive autonomy, where women especially are able to determine for themselves if, when, and how many children they want.  

And it’s being described as a crisis. And you have to ask, why and who would call this a crisis? It’s the people who have relied for millennia on women’s reproductive labor to produce laborers, consumers, taxpayers, soldiers, religious followers. So I think there are real issues for an economy and for nation-states that are built on this Ponzi scheme of growth. We have really built our entire globe on this notion of growth. Now that growth is showing signs of slowing down and eventually stopping, all of these architects are freaking out because they will not be able to exploit women, primarily, but also all of the social hierarchies that have emerged, that have allowed for cheap laborers that Michele spoke about, that have allowed for the exploitation of resources from the Global South, etc. These will stop happening. We will have to look at other ways of reorienting our economies and nation-states that don’t rely on growth.  

SE: Okay. So what’s being decried, at least in part, as a crisis reflects—not for all people who have the capacity to become pregnant, but for many—increasing ability to control one’s fertility rather than this dramatic crisis.  

Pronatalism, as both of you have suggested quite clearly, is linked to a number of far-Right ideologies, including white nationalism, eugenics, and antifeminism. And I’m sure there’s more. But those, I would say, are the three most prominent tropes. For example, Kevin Dolan–he’s considered the brain behind this Natal Conference–responded to the concern that “we can’t have natalism, we have too many stupid people.” What Dolan said, directly in keeping with the idea that it was the gathering of the “brightest minds in the world,” was that no one needs to worry because “the only people who are going to respond to … our natalism conferences … are going to be at the higher end of the distribution.” And then he further announced that the pronatalist and the eugenic positions are very much not in opposition. So, Michele, if you would speak to the eugenic, the white nationalist, the anti-immigrant strands, historical roots of pronatalism, that would be terrific.  

MG: Let me start by further expanding our nuance as to what pronatalism can look like and its political motivations. During the antebellum period in the United States, or in any part of the world where you have a class of people [whose] labor is exploited, then you also see vestiges of pronatalism. So Thomas Jefferson, who wrote to other politicians that he preferred to stock his plantation with girls and women because he said they turn a profit every year or two. The expansion of that enterprise was a version of a pronatalism, but not the way in which we see it today. But that is something: Let me exploit labor. Let me extricate as much and squeeze as much as I possibly can out of individuals that are perceived as expendable, fungible, with no citizenship, with no rights.  

I sometimes ask audiences, “What story does a mother tell her child the night before the slave auction, when either one will be sold off and never see the other again?” And I really want audiences to rest on that question because if we look at this… And again, not to US naval gaze, but I think the US serves as an important case study right now. If we think about that and think about what that institution [slavery] truly meant, one that was not just simply picking puffy balls of cotton in bucolic green fields, but sexual exploitation and rape, such that girls as young as eight years old were not spared from this type of capital-seeking enterprise, where advertisements across the country advertised for “breeding wenches.” And I then ask a question about what is a “breeding wench”? What makes you a “breeding wench” at eight or nine years old? So that we can address in a more honest way what that enterprise looked like, an enterprise that demanded the reproductive capacities extracted from girls and from women in order to satisfy the hunger of what became the United States. And that’s all factual.  

A system like that then has other laws that buttress it. Those are laws that make it such that you may not learn to read and write, that it is against the law to teach people who had this being extracted from them to learn how to read, to learn how to write. The earliest laws are this. These earliest laws also instantiate something else in terms of one’s positionality within a state. We have, dating to the 1600s in the United States, in Virginia, laws that made it clear that children born of enslaved women would take on the status of their mother. Now, this becomes very important in a system that is seeking to extract, seeking to multiply, seeking to make these demands, but it seeks to make these demands such that those offspring do not inherit what the Constitution provides. Now, those children do not inherit the plantations, the estates. They do not inherit America. And we don’t see that change, federally, until after a civil war, until after our 14th Amendment, which then gives us birthright citizenship.  

Now, why is this important with the question that you ask? It’s because these are systems that morph and shift. So on one hand, you want many, many people to engage in this labor that helps to fuel the hungry beast of the system that never seeks to invite them into citizenship–in fact, slams the door on their personhood, that relegates them to the status of a cow, mule, or goat. Which is why I asked the question, “what story does a mother tell?” because it takes so much in a society that says, by federal law, by state law, by custom, that you are no higher than a goat or a mule in the field.  

So then what does that mean when the system then shifts, right? Because we have to pay attention to the political shifts. And to your question about eugenics: We have in 1927, after there has been a reconstructed Constitution, after there’s equality under law, all of these amazing things of this reconstructed Constitution. In 1927, we have coming into manifestation what W.E.B. Du Bois was writing about in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, in The Souls of Black Folks. And what W.E.B. Du Bois spoke about is that there is going to come a time in which this country will be confronted with questions about poor white people. At the time, if you think about this as only about Black and white or Indigenous, you’re missing out. Because W.E.B. Du Bois was raising a flag to a country that lacked its moral compass. 

And that’s 1927 in the case Buck v. Bell, which goes up before the United States Supreme Court, where the United States Supreme Court upholds a Virginia eugenics law that provides for the compulsory sterilization of individuals that are considered to be unfit. Now, what makes one unfit? Essentially, in the United States, that was poverty. Being poor and white—and this was not at that time enforced against Black people. It was not with Indigenous people in mind. It was this bizarre thinking among an industrial class, among the wealthy elites, that somehow the shadows of whiteness that they wanted to distance themselves from could be eradicated by just simply imposing forced sterilization. The Chief Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the most revered jurists on the United States Supreme Court, opens the case by saying, Carrie Buck is a poor white girl from Virginia. We get it straight from the Supreme Court what is really taking shape here. And the Court says that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Now, there is nothing that records that there was anything mentally impaired about Carrie, but she was poor. The court further says that better than “let[ting] them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” If we break that down, and we need to, all that we know [is that she is poor and white], and that she’s had a baby out of wedlock, and yet she’s considered manifestly unfit. Imagine that, and we don’t talk about it. Poverty, whiteness, baby out of wedlock, manifestly unfit. So this pronatalism has its ways of weaving–because if we were truly committed to pronatalism, let all of the Carrie Bucks in the world have all the babies that they want. But instead, there is this sense about who it is that we want, under our nationalist lens, to reproduce.  

And let me just stitch this question to a close with the following, which is that we are woefully unprepared for a discussion about how the United States is implicated in one of the gravest travesties of the twentieth century, and that’s the Holocaust. It is after 1927 that the Third Reich comes to visit the United States. After that 1927 case, then dozens of states in the United States passed eugenics laws, they went into effect. It was so popular that in the coming attractions in movie theaters were advertisements about how many successful sterilizations were taking place all across the country. There were “fitter family” contests in the United States, before the Nazis got to it, that were looking for the bluest eyed and the blondest hair, and people were being given medals for what their babies looked like. And it is after the Third Reich comes to visit the United States—I mean, they adopt almost verbatim the law that the United States Supreme Court upholds.  

Eighty years ago, we have the Nuremberg trials. And there’s a doctor’s trial. The prosecutors in the case, one was Justice [Robert H.] Jackson, who left the United States Supreme Court to lead the prosecutions in Germany. And the Nazi doctors start off their defense with, “How dare you come here? We did what you did.” Now, of course, they took it to extremes that the US had not, but this point of adopting US law and US practices of ghettoization and all of that was not untrue. When we think about pronatalism, we have to understand these political throughlines in terms of what that means. 

SE: So I just want to pull together a few threads, and then I definitely want to talk about this in the context of antifeminism. One of the things that I was struck by, Michele, in what you were saying is, if I have the quote from you correctly, from Buck v. Bell, this history of eugenics was to prevent the manifestly unfit from reproducing themselves. Which is exactly what Kevin Dolan said to the sort of person who was afraid that the Natalist Conference would encourage those who were too stupid to reproduce. So I think we see a direct through line. 

 I do want to talk about, in a little greater detail, the antifeminist component of pronatalism. I just want to start with a quote from one of the speakers from the Natal Conference. Her name is Peachy Keenan, and she’s the author of this book called Domestic Extremism. And as she made clear that pronatalism is, as she pretty much proclaims, proudly antifeminist. Here’s one of her quotes: “We really don’t want to market natalism to the progressive feminists. The people maxing out their fertility should be people ideally who won’t raise their children to be gender-neutral furries who want to join Antifa one day.” If you would speak either on the US stage or the global stage, the connection between pronatalism and antifeminism, that would be terrific.  

NB:  One of the things I look at in a graduate course that I teach on Pronatalism, Population, and the Planet is the failure, actually, of feminism to have totally and correctly critiqued pronatalism within a feminist framework. So I didn’t think there would be a universe where I would agree with Peachy Keenan, but her claim that pronatalism is proudly antifeminist is correct. But I will go a step further and say, I wish that feminism had actually owned that narrative as it has so many other areas of reproductive rights and women’s rights. The reason I said earlier that pronatalism is one of the most successful projects, or maybe the most successful project of patriarchy, is because it has weaved its way into not just the anti-rights narrative of the far Right but also because it is very much present within progressive discourse, this notion that all women want to and should become mothers. Even including neoliberal feminism, where there is this notion that women can have it all—it really failed to look at the roots of pronatalism and its ties to, as Michele has already spoken about, racist, eugenicist, nationalist, political and economic agendas that have always seen women’s reproduction as a tool for continuing on or strengthening these institutions.  

Challenging pronatalism doesn’t challenge procreation or motherhood, and we need to separate those two. Incredible feminist work has looked at pronatalism as an institution, or motherhood as an institution, and motherhood as a relationship. We need to be clear that when we talk about pronatalism, it is only seen through the lens of institutional strength. I see really no universe in which pronatalism can be justified through a feminist lens, because at the very heart of pronatalism is a desire to raise birth rates for external agendas that we’ve spoken about at length. If we were to speak about the tenets of reproductive justice, [the central one] is to truly give people, especially women, the power to decide if they want to parent, when they want to parent, if they do not want to become parents, and the ability to raise children in environments that are ecologically, materially, and emotionally secure. I would say that, you know, if we were true to that, pronatalism will never even enter the discourse. There is no room for it within that discourse. And I want to congratulate you all for considering this conversation as a feminist conversation, because in my work looking at population and the link to pronatalism, there is so much negation of population as an issue, of looking at the environmental crisis as an issue, because there have been so many cases, as Michele laid out, where even the population narrative was used as a means to control women’s reproduction, whether through forced sterilizations or through coerced family planning programs, etc.  

But, if we get to the very, very heart of why population ever became an issue, it was because of patriarchal control over women’s reproduction to grow the numbers of people for external agendas. For me, population is a major feminist concern because at the root of it is the growth that has happened on the backs of the most marginalized girls and women. To state some stats, 640 million girls and women alive today were married as child brides. That’s why population has grown, for the most part. Half of all pregnancies around the world are unplanned. That’s 121 million pregnancies globally. And with your work, Shoshanna, around narratives about abortion, narratives around family planning and contraceptives. These are the real barriers that are preventing people, primarily women, from accessing reproductive health services–not because they’re not physically available but because the religious and political and economic motivators are keeping them from psychologically crossing that barrier to their own liberation. So to me, there is no room for pronatalism within progressive feminist discourse. 

SE: Okay, that was terrific. Thank you. Because as you noted earlier, there has been in some of the sort of mainstream liberal press an attempt to kind of link pronatalism with what’s been a longtime feminist agenda, which is to provide family supports for those who want to have children. And I think you’ve done a really nice job of decoupling those and saying that that linkage doesn’t hold water.  

I want to ask if you can link what’s happening here –the focus has been on the US in terms of the Natal Conferences, the Trump administration, some of the proponents of this movement. Is this a US phenomenon solely, or can you link this to the global stage?  

NB: Very quickly, it is definitely a global phenomenon. Not just the fertility decline crisis, but pronatalism. Pronatalism at the very heart is a global phenomenon. As I said, it’s not being driven by the same motivations in every place. In the US currently, it’s very, very rooted in religious white nationalist propaganda. But white nationalism may not be at play in India or in other Global South countries where there are other motivators pushing women to bear children. Often, it is ethno-nationalism, the drive to produce more children of a certain kind. So in Hungary, for example, the so-called fertility crisis is being dealt with by having women pay no taxes if they produce four or more children. In Russia, Putin is giving mothers who produce ten or more children a motherhood medal with some money. 

SE: If I may interrupt for one second, I believe that is where this idea of the national motherhood medal that’s been floated in the Trump administration comes from. 

NB: Exactly, and it has its roots in the Stalin government. That’s where Russia is kind of recapturing it. In other places in the world, in a lot of global South countries within, let’s say, Africa—there are so many religious narratives that are preventing people, specifically women, from being able to access contraceptives. Notions that contraceptives will make you permanently infertile, or that you are committing a sin, or that you are being promiscuous by using contraceptives. So there’re all of these myths that are preventing people, especially women, from actually becoming liberated.  

And what we are seeing, and this is a trend across the globe, is in every place around the world, regardless of education level, regardless of political ideology or religious alliance, wherever and whenever women gain access to reproductive freedom through education and fertility and reproductive health care, we see fertility rates decline. And that’s a global phenomenon. That is partly why there is such a strong response to this, because no amount of bribery or coercion is able to reverse that trend, is because women are refusing to comply as they have been forced to for thousands of years. Once you gain freedom, no amount of coercion will make you give that back. 

SE: I think we’re going to end there. I think that you both have brought incredible richness and depth to this conversation and have helped to illuminate how pronatalism isn’t just kind of this pro-family, pro-baby initiative and really unpacking the structural, historical, global implications of a doctrine that is deeply pernicious opposed to ideas of bodily autonomy, decision making, owning one’s labor. So I thank you both for really bringing a needed depth to this conversation. Thank you. 

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