Have children, save the world? The right's push for the right kind of babies

Have children, save the world? The right's push for the right kind of babies
Pro-natalist politics meet nativist illiberalism on the right

By ALAN ELROD
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 10, 2023 5:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) “Having children is saving the world,” Hungarian President Katalin Novák recently declared before a crowd at Brigham Young University. The first woman president of Hungary traveled to Utah to warn Americans of the “demographic ice age” threatening the West. Aging populations and declining fertility rates, she said, are signs “we are about to give up on our future.”

Novák’s speech came on the heels of an address at the United Nations General Assembly and meetings with Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Elon Musk. During her U.S. tour, she has been touting Hungary’s family policies and urging others to follow suit–all while somewhat burying the lede that this once-promising post-Soviet democracy has become a bastion of nativism and anti-LGBTQ reactionism under the leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orban

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During a 2022 Dr. Phil discussion on procreation, on which I was a panelist, things quickly turned in the direction of hard-right policies around family planning. One of the most extreme co-panelists, Jesse Lee Peterson, exclaimed that “we definitely need white babies!” For my part, I stressed that there are really two big tools that countries have for fighting population decline and aging: incentivizing birth and increasing immigration. What I find worrying is when advocates opt only for the former and totally abandon the latter. Unfortunately, this combination is increasingly common, and Peterson’s politics can no longer be said to be strictly fringe. Just last week, Donald Trump expressed similarly ethno-nationalist anti-immigrant views in the most noxious terms possible, telling an interviewer that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

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And, as I noted at the outset, here in the U.S., the fall of Roe and the rise of more aggressively pro-natalist rhetoric has put a decidedly nativist style of politics at the center of our own debates about population growth and aging. The staunchly anti-immigration Tucker Carlson has leaned heavily into the far-right Great Replacement Theory precisely because he sees America’s demographic changes combined with low native-born fertility rates as a plot to “replace the current electorate.” 2022 Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters flirted with backing bans on contraceptives as he and other hardliners looked to seize on the Dobbs decision. Masters, of course, argued for immigration restrictions and accused Democrats of seeking to “import” voters via refugees and illegal immigrants. ...........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2023/10/10/have-children-save-the-world-the-rights-push-for-the-right-kind-of-babies/