Pronatalism: good on "why more babies", not so much on "how" and "who"

More BABIES? Why? Aren't we too many?

(PSA: to know why you got two posts in two days, read the very last paragraphs)

"Aren't we too many?" is a trick question if there ever was one, which I will not answer. Not here and now for sure. This article is only about a specific proposal to solve the unquestionable issue that in very few decades (two or three maximum) in many parts of the planet there will be way too many "old" people, compared to the "young" ones, for societies to keep working anything similar to how they're doing, or pretending to do today.

Hence, pronatalism. According to Yahoo News (web archive) and the Telegraph (web archive) pronatalism is "a secular, paradoxically unorthodox reconstruction of arguably the most traditional view on earth, driven by alarm about a looming population catastrophe". Here, I look at its good and dark sides, how they are both interconnected with the preponderance of (primarily digital) technology in our societies, and what this means for the rest of us.

What I like in pronatalism

The motivation in what here, for convenience, I call "main definition" of pronatalism gives me a positive feeling: pronatalism is about "encouraging people who are responsible and smart and conscientious to have children, because they're going to make the future better".

When I first read it, that "make the future better" thing automatically brought to my mind these points of Robin Hanson's "Be a Dad":

• "Most thoughtful traditions say to focus more on meaning that happiness. Meaning is how you evaluate your whole life, while happiness is how you feel about now. And I agree: happiness is overrated"

• "Having kids is actually the best-proven way to have a long term influence"

• "Human cultural mechanisms to influence the future seem tentative, unreliable, and unproven, except when closely tied to having and raising kids"

For what it's worth, those bullets also match my own fatherhood experience. The same experience tells me that nobody should have kids just to make someone else feel right, but everybody, whatever their personal choices in these matters are, should spend some time on deeper analysis of that whole definition, as I do in the second part of this article.

Moving on, I do like that pronatalism "welcomes immigration and wants a pluralistic, multicultural society in which all groups are free to raise their children in their own way of life."

I also appreciate, as an extension of that point, that pronatalism has an apparently much better grasp of the real risks of fertility declining worldwide as quickly as it is than, e.g. the "Voluntary Human Extinction" folks:

• "as fertility declines it will not be some racial Other who outbreeds everyone else but each culture's equivalent of the neo-Nazis"

• if fertility collapses, "we are literally heading towards global Nazism, but they all hate each other"

• pronatalists want to "rebuild the high-trust networks that existed before the industrial revolution, [because] raising children takes a village, and we’re trying to create that village"

Finally, and please take what follows as the exclusively "technical" opinion that it is, pronatalism may be more intrinsically stable than other proposals, for the simple reason that it is more family-centered.

I am not going to discuss what "family" means or should mean, because it’s irrelevant here. Someone I know said that no community can be stable if it doesn't include at least three generations, tied to each other, and I am pretty sure that this is all we need to know about "family", as far as this article is concerned. Pronatalism has its dark sides (more on this below), but if I got it right, at least it is not yet another "solution" to population aging that just ignores, as I read elsewhere "the social and cultural peril that awaits societies that are no longer organized around the age-old task of uniting men and women, bringing children into the world, and raising them".

What concerns me in pronatalism

My first concern is in the goal of the "main definition", now split in two for convenience:

1. encouraging people who are responsible and smart and conscientious to have children... (the goal)

2. because they're going to make the future better (the motivation)

I already explained what Point 2 evokes in my brain, and why I like it. Point 1 needs much more thinking though. Let’s be honest here: at least as first reaction, or as a thought exercise if you will, nobody including you, me and pretty much every authoritarian of every political color and kind since the dawn of time would dislike "encouraging people who are responsible and smart and conscientious to have children"... as long as they, and nobody else, got to define exactly who is "responsible and smart and conscientious".

It is impossible to ignore that "pronatalism inherently requires making some judgment on which cultures should prosper in future, and therefore, potentially, which genomes". And as long as the majority of its adherents will be people "obsessed with data enough, and wealthy enough, to be looking at things" that won't exactly comfort me either.

Back to the main definition, according to the sources it comes by a person who is a consultant for an embryo-selection start-up. Another big supporter of the pronatalist movement is the co-founder of "an AI matchmaking service... which aims to address the fertility crisis fueled by a marriage crisis, by helping clients find the other parent of their future children".

There is no reason whatsoever to doubt the good faith and personal integrity of those people. But it does not matter, because the problem is not people. The problem is that there is a lot of money behind every fertility-increasing policy (especially tech-based ones), and money unchecked is hardly the best driver of ethically sound decisions.

At another level…, in the future things may change, of course. But right now, the poster parent of pronatalism seems to me the same kind of person who may consider pure features, not bugs at all, the parts of fertility techniques like IVG that (source) don't look exactly pluralistic to me, namely:

• "IVG fertility will exacerbate inequalities: will be not covered by many insurance plans"

• "the parents using IVG fertility treatments will be the same parents who send their kids to private schools, piano and ballet lessons" (see “overparenting” below)

• "IVG may result in more screening for desided genetic traits"

Speaking of screening and pluralism, I read that when screening their own embryos, the founders of the Pronatalist.org campaign did not worry about traits such as autism or ADHD (good. Seriously). They "just" preferred embryos with "higher estimated risks of traits such as obesity, migraines and anxiety". Excuse me for feeling a bit anxious here.

On the same note, I have nothing against autism and ADHD, and am happy that both conditions are understood, accepted and supported much better now, than even just 10/15 years ago. Still, I can't help noticing that the non-worrying traits are the same some called "entrepreneur's superpower", or argue may be more common in "Big Tech" circles than elsewhere.

All pronatalists are good people but some pronatalists are more equal than others?

If what I read is a complete, correct picture of pronatalism, it does seem to me more realistic, more scalable, and more likely to produce stable, serene societies that may actually last, than most other solutions for the same issues that I have seen so far.

But if what I read is a complete, correct picture of pronatalism, it also seems to me too startuppy, too techno-solutionist and too elitist to endorse. Regardless of its good faith. This thing has "move fast and break things, but for ourselves only" written all over the place. Voluntarily or not, it also seem too reliant on expensive tech from, and for, the few data-obsessed but wealthy people who could afford it for themselves.

Pronatalism is much better, and socially healthier, than any physically unfeasible "let's help me and my pals restart on Mars" sociopathic fantasy (yes, that's a really low bar to pass). But if it stays as it is, it's still about building a federation of Noah's Arks that stay afloat together, while everybody else drowns.

What then?

Fair question. Let’s start from the obvious, non-negotiable parts of any acceptable and really pluralistic solution to these problems: nobody should be forced to have or not have children, and we must absolutely avoid any "hostility between the childless and those with children".

Parent or childless, joking is OK. Mutual hostility NEVER is. Easy

Pronatalism gives a better than average diagnosis and prognosis, but prescribes too much (bad) business-as-usual treatment. If pluralism is a value, it may be much better, and more effective too in the long run, to spend as much money, Artificial Intelligence and human energies as possible on solutions that “make the future better” for EVERYBODY, not just for some. Solutions, that is, for the root causes of anti-fertility phenomena like:

• politics, education, mindsets, you name it... that make men abandon ship alone, that is demand individual vasectomies now rather than public reforms tomorrow, the moment they hear certain court rulings

• pollution that seriously reduces sperm count, possibly at extinction levels

• socioeconomic policies and workplaces that break relations between the sexes

• parenting-friendly housing that is unaffordable for too many reasons, from mere oversizing of homes to money laundering and, tragicomically:scarcity of decent schools for children

• normalization and commercial exploitation of both overparenting (sometimes to seriously orwellian levels) and underparenting that leave no alternatives and make ANY parenting look unbearable

• what else? Add your ones in the comments!

PS: Why two posts in two days, after two in one months, you ask? Easy: I have lots of pieces in the pipeline, but until I get paid subscribers, they must always give way to whatever else pays some bill. If you can, please upgrade!