CPC Director Karen Benjamin Guzzo says most people in the U.S. want kids but lack societal support to meet their ideal parenting vision
The following episode of Consider This from National Public Radio originally aired on April 7, 2025. You can hear the original recording at npr.org. The transcript of the episode is below.
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ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Elon Musk is not shy about declaring when he feels civilization is at risk. Last month, he said the fate of civilization depended on the outcome of an election for one seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
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ELON MUSK: I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.
SHAPIRO: Another existential risk, according to Musk – artificial intelligence.
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MUSK: Only 20% chance of annihilation.
JOE ROGAN: That’s a lot better than I thought.
SHAPIRO: That’s him on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast earlier this year. But Musk has said the biggest danger civilization faces by far is falling birth rates. In a recent Fox News interview, he said it keeps him up at night.
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MUSK: The birth rate is very low in almost every country. And it’s something – unless that changes, civilization will disappear.
SHAPIRO: And Musk isn’t the only one in the Trump administration focused on this issue.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Please help me welcome your vice president of the United States, JD Vance.
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SHAPIRO: In one of his earliest speeches as vice president, JD Vance addressed the March for Life, the annual anti-abortion rights rally in Washington.
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JD VANCE: So let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America.
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SHAPIRO: Musk and Vance are two of the most high-profile Americans pushing this point of view, but they’re not alone. The birth rate decline and its potential economic consequences are a growing policy concern on the political right and the left. And on the right, some of the people worried about this have coalesced around an ideological movement called pronatalism. Some of its advocates recently gathered at a conference organized by a man named Kevin Dolan, and NPR was there.
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KEVIN DOLAN: And we have the powerful opportunity, this year in particular, to have conversations that can become the executive orders, the white papers, the grant proposals that can change the course of nations in the 2030s.
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SHAPIRO: CONSIDER THIS – pronatalists think they have a friendly audience in the White House. How do they want to use it?
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SHAPIRO: From NPR, I’m Ari Shapiro.
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SHAPIRO: It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. This moment feels ripe with opportunity for people who want Americans to have more kids. In Elon Musk and JD Vance, they see key White House figures interested in their cause. That was the backdrop for their gathering in Austin, Texas. It’s called Natal Con. NPR’s Lisa Hagen was there and has this story of what she found.
LISA HAGEN, BYLINE: Simone Collins, in her thick-rimmed, round glasses, is one of the more visible faces of pronatalism – on purpose.
SIMONE COLLINS: My whole entire, like, Etsy getup right now, it’s intentionally cringe.
HAGEN: She’s here at Natal Con in her signature look, which she describes as techno-puritan.
COLLINS: There should obviously be more cybernetics in my outfit, but we are combining, like, chunky hipster glasses and a lot of modern equipment with a bonnet and linen clothing and…
HAGEN: Think Thanksgiving pilgrim in a school play with a baby strapped to her back.
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COLLINS: You’ll get to do that soon.
HAGEN: That’s 1-year-old Industry Americus. Indy’s (ph) three older siblings are home with neighbors in Pennsylvania. Simone and her husband, Malcolm, are expecting a fifth child this year, and she’s said that she’s willing to die in childbirth to have as many kids as possible.
COLLINS: I would rather not do that, but historically, women died in childbirth at roughly similar rates to the rates at which men died protecting their land or country.
HAGEN: The Collinses have made themselves available for profiles in pretty much every major news outlet you can think of.
COLLINS: The No. 1 goal we have is to make everyone universally aware of demographic collapse as a catastrophic issue. Our big focus is primarily on just signaling that this is a culture that values family and kids and, secondarily, taking a regulatory foot off the neck of parents.
HAGEN: Simone and her husband are big fans of Elon Musk. He’s famous, he’s got 13 kids and he also tends to talk about falling birth rates in catastrophic terms.
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MUSK: Nothing seems to be turning that around. Humanity is dying.
HAGEN: That’s him on Fox News recently. Musk and the Collinses are seen as members of the tech camp of pronatalist advocacy. Venture capitalism, technology like IVF and AI are key parts of their recipe for maximizing human potential via more babies. The Collinses are also very interested in genetic engineering. Another pronatalist camp includes the more religiously motivated and believers in strict gender norms. It’s referred to as the trads, as in traditional.
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CHARLES HAYWOOD: And generally, women should not have careers. They should be socially stigmatized if they have careers.
HAGEN: That’s Charles Haywood at the first Natal Con a couple years ago. This year, he’s behind the scenes as a sponsor. He made his money as a shampoo magnate. Haywood blames birth rate declines on feminism and the overturning of what he sees as natural hierarchies of gender and race.
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HAYWOOD: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its progeny are probably the single most destructive set of laws in American history, and all should be wiped forever from the history of this nation.
HAGEN: So it may seem like a challenge to square a Charles Haywood with a Simone Collins – she’s an entrepreneurial woman with a master’s degree from Cambridge – but they share a commitment to spaces like Natal Con because they both believe modern culture has stopped prioritizing nuclear families and having kids, which is not really how most demographers describe what’s happening. Katherine (ph) Benjamin Guzzo is a University of North Carolina sociologist who runs the Carolina Population Center.
KAREN BENJAMIN GUZZO: The United States has low fertility right now. Up until the Great Recession, we were sort of humming along, you know, right around two kids per person.
HAGEN: Then birth rates began to fall, partly because the U.S. succeeded in reducing teen and unintended births. America was actually a couple decades late to the declining fertility trend. It’s something that’s been happening at different rates all over the world.
GUZZO: And this is true in, you know, Italy and it’s true in Japan and it’s true in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. India has a below-replacement fertility rate in some parts.
HAGEN: The theories about why this is happening are pretty complicated. But there’s also another trend emerging. We’re used to thinking of richer, more educated people having fewer children than the poor and working class. Recent research shows that tendency has actually started to reverse in many countries, including the U.S. Guzzo says surveys show most people want kids, but nowadays, in this very competitive world, they have a vision of what being a good parent means – a stable home, income, a partner, hope about the future.
GUZZO: People are not being irrational and selfish when they’re deciding not to have children. People are making a series of decisions to not have a child now. Maybe in the future. And then that keeps happening because we aren’t giving people the societal supports to meet their visions of having a good parent.
HAGEN: For her, that should include things like more government funding for health care, affordable housing, schools, child care, addressing climate change. But many pronatalists, including Natal Con’s organizer Kevin Dolan, see their biggest allies as the folks in the White House right now. Here’s Dolan speaking at the conference over lunch.
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DOLAN: But the topic of demographic decline clearly matters to Elon Musk, JD Vance and many others in the Trump administration, which means that the great ideas developed here can get a hearing that would not have been possible last year.
HAGEN: Dolan left his data science job in 2021 after his anonymous Twitter account was exposed. Among other things, he’d used it to promote the racist notion that white men are superior to other races and women. After getting doxxed, Dolan continued sharing his thoughts about how society should be ordered on his podcast.
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DOLAN: We’re expected to lie about the existence of these hierarchies all of the time. And if our goal is to rehabilitate hierarchies of nature, then the best place to start is the most fundamental natural hierarchies, which are found in the family. And that brings us back to where we started with selective breeding.
HAGEN: Matthew McManus is a lecturer at the University of Michigan and an expert on the modern hard-right writers Dolan takes inspiration from.
MATTHEW MCMANUS: The idea is essentially that our society has become excessively effeminate, weak, compassionate. And what they want to do is breed or elevate an aristocratic class that’s going to be masculine, violent, not necessarily motivated by, let’s call it, empathy.
HAGEN: For these thinkers, restoring this masculine culture means feminism and multicultural democracy need to be rooted out.
MCMANUS: Woman are to be subordinated to men, largely going to be responsible for managing the household, although with no real particular authority. And, of course, they’re going to have an awful lot of children.
HAGEN: It’s not explicit on the Natal Con stage, but part of Dolan’s vision for the conference is to help build this world, where men like him can’t be doxxed because they’ll be in power. Dolan says his conference is nonpartisan, and he invites speakers who say stuff like this.
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PEACHY KEENAN: We don’t really 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.
HAGEN: That’s a speech from the first Natal Con. It’s a writer who goes by the pseudonym Peachy Keenan. Her work is published by a company that sells books arguing Black people are inherently more criminal and less intelligent than white people. That publisher, Passage Press, sponsored Natal Con this year, and its founder was a featured speaker. These are some of the elements united under the banner of pronatalism. They don’t all agree on how to boost birth rates, but two years after the first Natal Con, this is a movement that’s much closer to power than it used to be.
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SHAPIRO: That was NPR’s Lisa Hagen. This episode was produced by Audrey Nguyen and Connor Donevan, with audio engineering by Zoe vanGinhoven. It was edited by Brett Neely and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
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SHAPIRO: It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I’m Ari Shapiro.