JD Vance’s demeaning remarks don’t help this valid cause

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When former president Donald Trump picked him as his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) became the most prominent “pronatalist” in U.S. politics – to use the awkward label for people who wish we had more children – and the most divisive. He has been on the defensive for repeatedly claiming that “childless cat ladies” have too much influence in our country.

Making the modern world more welcoming to children is a tall order. And, as he is demonstrating, some advocates of that cause are making it taller.

A concern about declining birth rates doesn’t have to come with hostility toward those without children. And the concern is justified. Both the global and the national birth rates have been falling for decades. Americans, like the people of most developed countries, are now having fewer children than needed to keep the population steady. That’s a problem for Social Security and Medicare, for economic dynamism, and even for our military strength. Immigration can keep our population growing – but falling birth rates tend to reduce support for it and, anyway, more and more countries are seeing the same decline, so eventually the supply of potential immigrants will fall, too.

But pronatalism comes with baggage. It has been historically associated with aggressive nationalism and racial eugenics. (That, plus partisan brain rot, helps explain why Vance has been accused of wanting more White children in particular even though his own kids are mixed-race.) In an individualistic country such as ours, it also risks coming across as bossy, or just plain weird – which is what Democrats have started saying about the Republican ticket since Vance was chosen.

Pronatalists can leave that impression even when they are not trying to give offense. They tend, naturally enough, to have and to valorize families that most Americans would consider very large, with six or more children. Elon Musk, another well-known pronatalist, has 12. These parents often make excellent points about the negative judgments to which contemporary culture subjects their families. Even in a higher-fertility future, though, families that big are bound to remain outliers. Their numbers might increase in a more child-friendly society. But any realistic increase in U.S. birth rates would be much more a matter of two-children parents deciding to have one more.

The good news for pronatalists, in a manner of speaking, is that birth rates are also lower than American women say they want. Surveys find a sizable gap between the average number of children they have and the average number they would have liked to have. Success, then, is more a matter of helping people achieve their preferences than of changing them – of identifying the obstacles to having more children and removing them.

Some on the left and the right, including Vance, have suggested reducing restrictions on home-building as a way to lower housing costs, which would help families. Vance has also proposed reforms to make childbirth free. Others say that government help in paying for child care would do a lot to make adults more willing to have children.

All of these ideas invite further debate and questions. What about the many homeowners who like restrictions on building because they preserve their home values? Should parents who provide child care themselves, often forgoing opportunities to earn income in the process, receive assistance, too? If the government provides such assistance, where should it get the money?

Ross Douthat, a pronatalist New York Times columnist, thinks the scale of the problem demands a much more ambitious, even “revolutionary,” agenda, that pronatalists can’t flinch from seeming weird by proposing, say, that parents be allowed to vote on behalf of their children. On the other hand, as he would probably agree, there are a lot of small improvements we haven’t tried yet. The value of the tax credit for children keeps falling.

What should be clear, especially after the past few weeks, is that for both moral and political reasons, pronatalists have to stay far away from demeaning adults who have not had children. It turns people who might otherwise be neutral, or even supportive, toward pronatalist initiatives into enemies. It does nothing to win converts – which means that it’s no way to be fruitful and multiply.