MAGA natalism is a dead end

Republicans are going to try to respond to their panic about lowering birthrates with policies that are a proven failure, at least in part they care more about traditional gender hierarchies than they do about increasing birthrates:

Coercing women into having children should always be anathema, but we should aim to create a society where people generally feel optimistic enough about the future to want children and secure enough to have them. Fertility rates in most developed countries may never again reach what demographers call “replacement level,” in which the average couple has 2.1 children, enough to keep a population stable. But there is a big difference between countries where the fertility rate is falling gradually, as in France, and those where it’s collapsing in a way that threatens society’s future, as in South Korea, whose work force could shrink by 50 percent over the next four decades.

There’s a common factor in countries where birthrates are cratering: They are almost always places that are both modern and highly patriarchal. Last year, the Nobel Prize-winning Harvard economist Claudia Goldin published a paper called “Babies and the Macroeconomy,” aiming to understand the difference between developed countries with moderately low birthrates, like Sweden, France and Britain, and those with very low ones, like South Korea, Japan and Italy. The lowest-fertility countries, Goldin found, modernized so recently and rapidly that social norms around gender equality didn’t have time to catch up. That left women with far more economic opportunity but not much more help from their husbands at home. Between 2009 and 2019, for example, the average woman in Japan spent 3.1 more hours a day on domestic work than men. The average Swedish woman spent 0.8 more hours than men.

In the most unequal countries in Goldin’s analysis, men wanted to have more children than women did. That makes intuitive sense, given that women would have to shoulder most of the burden of child care. “If fathers and husbands can credibly commit to providing the time and the resources, the difference in the fertility desires between the genders would disappear,” wrote Goldin.

Many women, it appears, simply don’t want to get stuck with all the domestic drudgery that comes with raising children, and there’s little evidence that state subsidies can make traditional social arrangements more appealing. Hungary spends more than 5 percent of its G.D.P. on its family policies, a greater percentage than America spends on defense. But while the fertility rate rose a bit in the years after the new policy was instituted in 2019 — when the total fertility rate was 1.55 children per woman — it has since sunk to 1.38.

According to a Pew poll last year, 57 percent of American young men say they want children someday, compared to only 45 percent of young women. Unfortunately, these men are getting the wrong message from our leaders about how to make themselves attractive prospects as fathers. The administration is led by an old-fashioned sexist who has bragged that he has never changed a diaper. “I’ll supply funds, and she’ll take care of the kids,” Trump once boasted to a radio host. Elon Musk has taken this notion to grotesque lengths; a Wall Street Journal exposé describes him hitting up women on the internet to incubate the legion of children he hopes to breed in advance of a coming apocalypse. While he has 14 known children, The Journal reports, the real number could be much higher.

Meanwhile, the anti-feminist influencers who form the White House’s informal brain trust and echo chamber tell their listeners that spending too much time with one’s own children is effeminate. “Everyone should look at their father like a superhero,” said Andrew Tate, a high-profile misogynist with powerful allies in the administration. “It’s hard to be a superhero if you’re home every day arguing with your wife changing diapers. That’s not what a man should do.”

One thing we learned from Ron DeSantis’s incredibly creepy faceplant of a presidential campaign is that MAGA really does see Elon as some kind of masculine ideal, and ewwwwwww.

As Jessica Valenti observes:

First of all, it’s telling that this administration will do anything other than what families really need. If the Trump administration was actually interested in supporting parents, they’d be pushing for paid parental leave, subsidized childcare, and an end to laws that make it deadly for people to give birth.

But Republicans don’t care about making the world better, safer, or healthier for American families and children—they just want women to have more babies. What happens after that? They couldn’t care less.

Actually, scratch that—because the administration’s “baby boom” push isn’t just about boosting the birthrate. It’s about reasserting a rigid, traditional vision of American family life: one where parents are straight, women are submissive, and the bro-natalists in charge get to pretend it’s all for the good of the nation.