In a column published during Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, The New York Times’s Ross Douthat observed that American conservatism had evolved into a surprising alliance between traditionalists looking back fondly to simpler times and technologists racing with glee into a wild future in which man’s only limit is his amount of compute. One of the key points of agreement bringing together this seemingly paradoxical “tech-trad alliance,” Douthat noted, is a shared concern with the demographic trends often ignored by other political factions.
In 2024, the US fertility rate had a near-record low of 1.6 births per woman, compared to a replacement rate of 2.1—just one instance of a global trend that is even more pronounced abroad. Just about the only people who seem to be concerned with this momentous shift are a subset of people from either side of the new conservative-technologist coalition.
Actually addressing the problem would require broadening the appeal of this cause, which for the moment remains somewhat fringe. Attempting to do just that is one of the missions of the Natal Conference, the second edition of which I attended in Austin in March. NatalCon, which describes itself as a gathering of “the brightest minds in the world in search of new solutions,” didn’t seem to find many converts in the mainstream media, whose coverage of NatalCon was universally hostile. This is unsurprising, given that many participants and attendees were openly enthusiastic about the new Trump administration, and the prospects of using natalist agenda to “outbreed the left.” For his part, President Trump had made his own contribution to the fertility narrative just days before this year’s gathering began, declaring that he hoped to “be known as the fertilization president.”
“For some attendees I spoke to, natalism’s conservative valence was regrettable.”
For some attendees I spoke to, natalism’s conservative valence was regrettable, because everyone should be concerned about the birth dearth. Nonetheless, a liberal public primed by years of warnings about a Handmaid’s Tale takeover will look askance at any movement with even a whiff of the conviction that women may need to choose between family and career, or that public policy should push one choice over the other. Coverage of NatalCon has noted the movement’s difficulty in getting women—an important variable in the baby-making equation—on board, feeding suspicions that natalism is anti-woman and therefore right wing (or vice versa).
Meanwhile, the tech faction of natalism’s enthusiasm for new technologies is raising another specter: that of eugenics. The designer baby startup Orchid had a representative at NatalCon eager to offer a sales pitch and predictions about our near future. One speaker told me that the eugenicist connotation is the primary reason so many are squeamish about the natalist label.
However, although the word “eugenics” scares people, if Americans were actually opposed to the thing itself, we wouldn’t be witnessing a massive increase in the use of surrogacy—which the limited polling suggests enjoys strong public support—and the corresponding shopping around for, well, “good genes.” We also wouldn’t see the selection of babies with the preferred sex, or without traits such as Down syndrome. But we do see these things; we are already deciding which babies we want and which we don’t, so the objections to “eugenics” may be little more than a vestigial linguistic tic. In this regard, the tech natalists are just ahead of the curve.
Just weeks into his second term, President Trump issued an executive order calling for policy ideas to make IVF cheaper and more accessible. This action followed through on last year’s GOP platform, which promised to support “policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF.” And of course, right wing natalist icon Elon Musk has fathered his 14 children (at minimum) through four women, many with the help of reproductive technologies.
In other words, for all the hype—or hope—over Trump’s turning back the clock a few decades, the American right continues to liberalize with the rest of the country. Even many NatalCon attendees I met who had conservative views on, say, immigration, saw nothing too objectionable about any reproductive technologies. The tech natalists may keep getting along fine with the trads simply for lack of any particularly strong opposition to technologically augmented fertility.
Nevertheless, if the movement wants itself, let alone the population, to grow, it is going to have to expand beyond its dual bases and find a more mainstream appeal. Perhaps the natalists could instead base their pitch on a widely held sentiment: our sense of social decay and loneliness. For all the cheery talk about how wonderful babies are, everyone at NatalCon shared the conviction that for a civilization to stop perpetuating itself, something has to have gone deeply, deeply wrong. Given where babies come from—a cause that typically doesn’t require much advocacy—how else could we have arrived at this situation?
Natalist proposed policies—attempts to pull the right macroeconomic levers or build new family friendly communities—can look like a Rube Goldberg machine, all just to get people having unprotected sex again. But addressing the deeper causes of demographic collapse would mean speaking to the pervasive sense that the modern social fabric is in tatters.
Paradoxically, this might be a way to bring more people into the natalist fold. Beyond the longed-for trad revival, or the schemes for Matrix-style birthing pods, is something more mundane and fundamental: the solitary struggle to find the right person, encapsulated in NatalCon’s off-the-record interview sessions with singles. Nearly everyone wants a companion to go through life with; perhaps that, rather than plans to breed a colony of 6-foot-2, Republican-voting geniuses, could form a basis for welcoming human civilization into the future.