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Pronatalism (Patreon)

Published:
2025-03-02 00:46:59
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2026-06
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Content

Gang back with a discussion of Liz's pronatalism piece in The Atlantic and Nathan Robinson's response in Current Affairs

Comments

TC

Nathan Robinson is such a weenie.

AllOutOfPlans

Nathan Robinson: "If, in the very long run, our species goes extinct, I do not think that is a matter of moral concern." Just sort of sad. Does he think of a certain bird goes extinct that is not a matter of moral concern?

AllOutOfPlans

Nathan Robinson: "We do not claim that parenthood is good—that would imply that childlessness is bad." Someone failed basic logic. If being a teacher is good, does that "imply" that not being a teacher is bad? If X = Good, then must Not X = Not Good? Multiple subjects can have the same quality non-exclusively,

Folks,,
>>166406792

I noticed this too and thought it was like a weird milquetoast stance. "We should take care of people, but if there are no people than that's ok too." I guess nothing wrong with that technically, but when applied to the real world it doesn't make any goddamn sense.

Jonny

On Elon's kids, I think his first child who died of SIDS was naturally conceived and the rest were through IVF.

thebruenigs
>>166404931

haha this is perfect set up for the bell curve meme, with both tails saying 'having babies is good :)' and the middle going nuts

AllOutOfPlans

Yes, bring Ross D on! Looking forward to Ross vs Matt.

Ian H

Not trying to be dismissive, this is inquiry more than anything, but I kinda feel like the abstracted debate on this question is missing the point. Like, at the 35-minute mark, based on my (extremely surface level) understanding of the situation in South Korea, the single childless adults being referenced didn't "do what they wanted to do", there's in fact immense frustration at the social alienation, extremely demanding employers, and lack of family welfare supports that keep people from forming families. And in a country like the United States with basically zero general child welfare, where having a child or additional children is *only*, heavily, financially disincentivised, simply providing basic material supports for children that allowed people to reach their desired family size without finances as a barrier would undoubtedly result in an increase in total fertility. So if both sides of the Bruenig-Robinson debate agree that we shouldn't have a society like the US or South Korea which is, in it's overall effect, punishingly anti-natal, and should instead adopt a welfare state that would have a pro-natal effect, then what's the point in arguing the eventual goal after a social transformation which we are nowhere near achieving? Isn't this kinda like wishcasting your job after the revolution? Like, isn't it pretty futile to argue about whether or not we should feel bad or neutral about the idea of humanity dying out peacefully in the distant future when, absent a major change to our mode of production and social organization, we're like 2 generations away from rendering most of the planet uninhabitable? It just feels like this isn't a question we need to answer right now, and by the time it became relevant we'd have transformed society to such a degree that we can't know what we'd say then.

Corndog

gang back 👶

madeline krane

read it. really was not vitriolic toward liz

Ian H
>>166425582

I will acknowledge they kind of get to this point at 52+

Otto Laakso

Oh no! How dare someone take a swipe at the Atlantic, the website that publishes lines like "it is possible to kill children legally" in an article titled 'The UN’s Gaza Statistics Make No Sense'. Is nothing sacred?

Norman X. Picklestein

Seems like the arguments Matt and Liz are making are compatible with slightly below replacement (not South Korea) levels of fertility. Those precious sports stadiums are still going to be filled if you're at, like, 1.8 TFR or something. More generally, not sure that "neighborhood character" type arguments are particularly strong ones; do people have a right to unchanging circumstances throughout the generations? Couldn't those sad South Korean kids with no soccer team just merge with the few schools of adjacent neighborhoods?

Otto Laakso
>>166426815

Liz seems to think you can't criticize someone you are friendly with, so when Nathan - someone she has had a friendly relationship with - criticizes her arguments in public, it must be treated as an act of betrayal and a personal attack.

Gabe

Bring in Boss Ross, Liz!

Jacob

As someone who likes NJR’s writing and thinks he is smart, I feel like his downfall is that one of his first principles is, “I am a leftist, whatever that looks like,” rather than coming to the left through moral and political commitments that are prior to identifying with a political tendency. It’s how he sometimes ends up confidently defending bizarre, poorly thought out positions.

Gabe Stanton

Definitely talk to Ross about his new book!

Ian H
>>166406783

Pretty good and thorough piece, but I feel like there's a bit of hand waving toward the end that doesn't quite make sense. Like, the author says that a) Americans consistently say they want more children than they do and b) America currently provides little to no material support to make that possible so c) if the U.S. adopted broad child welfare policies it stands to reason we'd get more births. All of that makes sense, but then he refutes it by saying that Danes and Finns have fewer kids than we do so whoops, doesn't work, without answering the question of whether Scandinavians expressed the same desire for larger families prior to the implementation of family welfare.

Danny

I wrote a blog post a while back laying out the issue similarly to how Matt does. It's a frustrating debate because people like to conflate these different questions and groups under the banner of natalism. Three groups: 1. people who want kids and the reasons why are easy to address, 2. people who want kids and the reasons why are hard to address and 3. people who don't want kids. Not sure there's any great way to address the second and third groups, but suspect there are more in the second group vs the third group. A culture that's nicer to parents and kids would help, though I have no idea how to achieve that. please delete if this self-promo is cringe: https://www.pluralityofwords.com/p/the-limits-of-natalism

a.j. archer

very very odd to choose ivf on purpose. not a pleasant process. if i could make a baby just by knocking boots with the one i love that would be the plan i think

Norman X. Picklestein
>>166406783

yeah i think the hand waving derives from the fact that no one really knows how to seriously increase the national fertility rate anywhere even if they wanted to, so there's no silver bullet atm one can recommend

thebruenigs
>>166432794

i mean they can merge with adjacent neighborhoods until those neighborhoods also have no children. when these five elementary schoolers grow up and three of them don't have children, what is that going to look like?

Norman X. Picklestein
>>166432794

Just keep doing the same thing. Surely you don't think humanity itself is endangered by current fertility rates? There's a many centuries long runway

Ian H
>>166406783

If you're talking about a multi-generational rise then yeah, no one really seems to know how to make that happen, but an immediate bump almost certainly would take place. This is born out by the Nordics, which had TFR increases in the mid 20th century after enacting child cash allowances against a postwar European trend of falling birthrates.

TL

On hyphens: I was recently looking into this and it appears that the consensus is: use a hyphen when the two parts of the word are each free-standing words unto themselves, but not in situations where one component does not stand on its own (e.g. pronatalist). Caveat to this is that the British apparently are much more liberal with hyphens.

Christian Hunt
>>166452378

One theory posited is that Musk's got his penis destroyed because of plastic surgery gone awry.

Christian Hunt

Whenever online left wingers engage with The Atlantic Monthly, they are quick to point out their disdain for people like Jeff Goldberg. It was actually via Will & Felix from Chapo that I learned Jeff was a concentration camp guard during his service with the IDF. I see why people do not like him however I still read articles in The Atlantic as it's one of the few places that still publishes interesting pieces, such as yours, Liz. Keep on keeping on, I say.

Sarah
>>166452378

aside from the aforementioned mangled dick theory above it could either be an impregnation fetish thing (i once watched a doc about a freelance sperm donor who was definitely getting off on it, they’re out there) or magical thinking relating to the death of his first and only non-ivf child (making the process scientific, devoid of human emotion makes its potential failure less devastating)

Taylor Borie

Not a fan of Ross, wouldn't want to hear from him

madeline krane

honest question does climate change ever factor into your more kids= good argument? is there a point where it's unsustainable? Can't have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources, right? genuinely curious

Josh B
>>166499163

Yeah I don't understand the clamoring to have him on. He seems like the archetypal kind of guy who dresses up his standard conservative politics with a Catholic veneer?

Jo To

1. Big Yes to Boss Ross 2.Liz's quips about Current Affairs being a blog and Mr. Robinson being The Riddler is peak content. Y'all do snark so well!

Josh B
>>166499163

I don't care if or whether they're personal friends. I'm not sure what exactly he'd contribute to the pod other than the standard conservative dreck that Matt and Liz generally mock. I'm similarly not interested in hearing Bari Weiss's Israeli propaganda just because she's friends with Liz

A.

It’s fascinating that they think “liberals memed people into not having kids” and their fix for that is doing (bad) memes about how great it is to have kids. That may work for, idk, convincing someone to take an international trip somewhere, but many people have direct experience with kids? Like, they have nieces and nephews and whatever. So the thing they do where they never mention the downsides of having kids and only talk about how awesome it is just makes them look deranged. Because clearly they’re leaving out the reality of it.

A.
>>166555105

(FWIW I overall liked Liz’s Atlantic article and would self describe as pronatalist)

haz

i really like the “is it good to be a doctor? yes. is it bad to not be a doctor? no.” reasoning

Ian H
>>166555105

Frankly it just comes off as political kayfabe. Neither side of the conservative-liberal divide is serious about doing the things that would make having more children attainable (child cash benefits, paid leave, free/low cost perinatal healthcare, etc.) so they're stuck arguing over vibes while total fertility continues on the downward trajectory every developed country in the era of neoliberalism has experienced.

A.
>>166555105

Not saying I believe this, but their response I’ve seen to “just give cash” is “other countries have cash/other welfare state benefits and also declining TFR (total fertility rate)”

Josh B
>>166555105

The reason the “natalism” debate is so odious is because it distracts from actually important issues. The point of child and parent benefits is that they benefit actually existing children and parents. Maybe this will enable some people to achieve their otherwise higher desired fertility and increase birthrates, but maybe it won’t. The effect on birthrates isn’t the point - it’s the welfare of children. By bringing “natalism” args into the mix, you just activate people’s culture war heuristics and ruin any chance at building an overlapping consensus.

Josh B

All the media says is, “pro-natalism this, anti-natalism that.” I just wanna grill for God’s sake!

Kevin

what’s the Bruhead fertility rate

Joel Eisenberg

I'm not sure how much there would be to discuss, but I'm a little disappointed about dismissing the stance of being uninvested in the survival of the human species as "sad." It seems like from the perspective of life on our planet, the human species has been wildly destructive. Maybe it's time to give other species a chance to see if they can live more harmoniously. I find the thought of the human race disappearing slowly by having less and less children very comforting and peaceful.

Lauren Gallagher

I read that ukranian for “suit” is basically pronounced “costume”—can see how he would end up saying that

Nick Cee
>>166502647

Argument that convinced me: it's highly unlikely in a world with an inverted population period that the few young people working etc would make meaningful progress on climate while trying to support the large elderly population. You need a growing society with innovation etc to solve the problems climate change causes if you want to get out of it with modern standards of living intact. (This line of thinking goes similar for increasing the Earth's carrying capacity)

Leon
>>166608605

Yes, there's something comforting to some in Ecclesiastes: "One generation passes away, and another generation comes; But the earth abides forever."

victor recabarren
>>166608605

the end of humanity by less and less people would not be peaceful? it would be a slow drawn out suffering inflicted on possibly several generations. imagine for a moment what the final generation would experience and what kind of world they'd live in. not to mention the collapse of life expectancy as people who age into their elderly years have less and less supports and so meet their deaths much earlier. a nuke that ended everything instantly would be orders of magnitude more "peaceful" and yet i doubt any of you advocate for that, or are sympathetic to that, even as you lament how awful humanity has been to the earth

victor recabarren

what happens when the gap between desired and achieved fertility can't be closed by child benefits / other incentives? sounds like Matt would crank the dial past $5500 all the way to whatever level is adequate to close the gap, and Liz is more comfortable with "freedom isn't the highest good" side of things. imo *that* is where the debate between Nate and Liz really is, but it's a fictitious context -- a world where through child benefits we've maximized the actual fertility and yet it falls short of desired aggregate fertility -- in that world, then Nate's and Liz's opposing views on whether or not "freedom is the highest good" really would matter.

Ian H
>>166452378

Media agency masquerading as a family. Also Simone is like 37 already, if they're serious about hitting 8+ IVF is kinda necessary.

ja ak rtgr

Channel 5 (previously All Gas No Breaks) with Andrew Callahan mentioned in beginning.

Caitlin Still

I fw this. My current gripe is that I feel like I’m seeing ‘I choose my choice to be childfree’ takes on the daily these days—why are we still acting like this is actually countercultural, at least amongst the likely audience? Why are we still being asked to congratulate people on normalising what has pretty much been normalised now? Not unproblematically either.

haz
>>166452378

i disagree with their whole schtick a lot, but also — so-called eugenic pronatalists using IVF because they cannot or will not conceive naturally would surely be dysgenic from their point of view? isn’t the whole alleged point of eugenics implied to be maximum reproductive fitness? again whole thing is distasteful but also seems internally contradictory.

a.j. archer
>>166452378

meditated a lil and i think its just Billionaire Disease, they're getting expensive medical procedures for fun and status just because they can

madeline krane
>>166502647

I understand why keeping the population levels stable is ideal, but I don't get the sense that Liz has identified an upper limit of ideal procreation. Is there a point for her where the cons of overpopulation (deforestation, unsustainable CO2 emissions) would outweigh the pros of a pronatalist society is what I'm curious about

Patrick

Bring on Rational Believer Boss Ross!

Micheline

I observed the negative side effects of low density in my own life. My parents went to the same high school when there were hundreds of students. They had a really positive experience, made lots of lifelong friends, always stuff happening etc. When I went, there were less than 100 students. I left HS feeling like I was finally breaking out of a bad family dynamic. Too few ppl

Aron
>>166608605

Don’t have much to say here except that there would be no peace, calm, or joy in a world without the only beings that we know to be appreciative of those concepts

Chris Towler

this is more of a listener qa type of comment but if you were under the impression that the economy was going to collapse in the new gilded age, how would a person insulate themselves against that? Replace 401k allocations to bonds?