00:02:29.000So just briefly for a 10,000 foot level, I think the definition of pronatalism that we're going to be using for our purposes is that it is the belief in the advocacy that people should be having more children and that the birthing of more children should be encouraged both culturally and as a matter of public policy.
00:02:49.560Right. And this has kind of become a buzzword because of our good old friend of the show, J.D. Vance.
00:02:57.180So J.D. Vance has a tendency to say a lot of really creepy things about children and specifically to try and denigrate, disparage, humiliate adults and really women without children.
00:03:42.160So J.D. Vance's kind of most famous comment was disparaging Democrats as childless cat ladies on a Tucker Carlson interview that he gave in 2021.
00:03:53.380He said, this country is run by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they've made.1.00
00:03:59.920And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.0.98
00:04:04.020He then went on to cite AOC and Pete Buttigieg.
00:07:01.800No, not in vitro, artificial wombs, like completely divorced from the female body, right?0.97
00:07:07.800Right, that's what I was remembering. Yeah, exactly.0.88
00:07:09.540Like what we need to do is, Shulamith's Firestone's prescription is like this feminist idea that we need to actually divorce reproductive labor from the gendered body so that those born, a side female at birth, those codified as women, feminized or unburdened of this particular kind of labor that is, you know, very onerous and dangerous and symbolically overlaid.
00:10:19.820Blake Masters is kind of a amanuensis to Peter Thiel, ran a horribly misconceived Senate
00:10:28.760campaign in Arizona and just lost the primary for a House seat in the same state.
00:10:35.300And that appears to be his kink is losing contested elections in the state of Arizona.1.00
00:10:40.900Yeah, he is this really like weird, leathery, reptilian guy.1.00
00:10:46.900Whenever I see him, I expect like a forked tongue to flip out of his mouth.0.70
00:10:51.940He's very pointy and he sort of speaks like a drill sergeant in these short declarative sentences that are just like absolutely sadistic and creepy.
00:11:01.400and Peter Thiel keeps funding him to run for political office
00:11:05.800and he keeps losing because he is so remarkably off-putting,
00:11:12.740of his fellow Peter Thiel acolyte, J.D. Vance, to say,
00:11:16.920if you aren't running or can't run a household of your own,
00:11:19.700how can you relate to a constituency of families
00:11:21.840or govern wisely with respect to future generations?
00:11:24.660This idea that people who are not parents should not be,
00:11:27.260like full citizens should not be leaders.
00:11:28.980And Elon Musk, who's also probably behind J.D. Vance, our most famous pronatalist, a guy who is devoting his considerable resources as a billionaire to advancing conspiracy theories about the need to breed more, a big endorser of the replacement theory.
00:11:49.940He jumped in to call Kamala Harris an extinctionist because he decides that she's insufficiently pronatalist.
00:11:57.920Yeah. And we might say sort of great replacement theory does have an implicit pro-natalist message, right? Like the elites don't want or they don't want us, whoever the us is, to have babies so they can bring in immigrants to replace them, right? That's the idea. And that's a very, very old idea on the right.
00:12:20.180I mean, I think Great Replacement Theory comes originally from France, I think.
00:12:24.180But I mean, like Lothrop Stoddard in the 1920s at the big books, what do they call it?
00:12:28.640The Revolt Against Civilization, The Menace of the Underman, right?0.97
00:12:31.860Like the idea that like we're replacing the babies, quote unquote, we should be having with what would later be called subhumans, right?0.99
00:12:40.820Like with people who are less than.0.93
00:12:43.380That's a really, really old concern.1.00
00:12:44.880Yeah. And, you know, Judy Vance, our buddy just blurbed a book that describes liberals as subhuman.0.96
00:12:51.220But, you know, the great replacement theory, this conspiracy theory that elites and it's usually implied or sometimes outright said that these elites are Jewish.0.82
00:13:03.360It's an anti-Semitic strain or sort of orchestrating a decline of Native white birth rates in order to replace that population with these Black and Latino populations who supposedly are much easier for the nefarious Jewish elites to control, right?0.89
00:13:24.480And pronatalism is positioned as one way to counteract this, right?0.77
00:13:28.280You could have more white native-born children to change the population.0.55
00:13:32.860And that's sort of the classic form that pronatalism takes is often as a gendered reaction to a racial fear, right?0.68
00:13:42.400It's like, because the racial composition of our community is changing, we therefore need to exert greater control over women and extract greater quantities of children and of reproductive labor more broadly out of them in order to sort of rebalance or reassert racial superiority.
00:15:09.380But it's also important to note that it's used in places to sort of explain and kind of thematize declining birth rates where there's no risk of like anyone out of any free choice being like, yes, this is the shithole country where I wish to make my, this is what I left my warm homeland for, right?
00:15:28.500Like I'm not going to name any specifics here, but like, right, there are countries where you're like, I'm sorry, are you being overrun by people who are like, yes, this is the place I need to live?
00:15:38.080I'll say like if I was a migrant who had made it from Syria to, say, Poland or Hungary, my greatest dream would be to get to Germany.0.97
00:15:51.120You know, my greatest dream is to get out of Poland or Hungary.
00:15:55.440Look, I mean, like some people, you know, enjoy these countries, but it is just a fact that like, you know, that very few people, I agree, like leave Afghanistan.0.97
00:16:04.900it's not the caravans that come to the United States.
00:16:08.560So like there's something interesting there too, right?
00:16:10.320Like there's almost a phantasmatic element there
00:16:29.620does suggest that the birth rates are the secret,
00:16:32.700the thing that this story is secretly about.
00:16:34.900Yeah, so like you're kind of tapping into what I would call like the unspoken unconscious of the pronatalist argument, right?
00:16:46.160Is that there's a lot of racial anxiety sort of simmering underneath.
00:16:52.380And it also sort of bespeaks to often an awareness of national decline, right?
00:16:58.860So like in the U.S., I think like we are in pretty clearly a moment of like imperial decline, right?
00:17:05.780The United States is no longer the center of a unipolar world in the way that we were when we didn't have to worry about like international competition from, say, China.
00:17:15.640And, you know, we are no longer quite as powerful economically for large stretches of our middle class, which has really been sort of extracted out of existence.
00:17:27.200and a lot more people are being forced into poverty, right?
00:17:29.860And we are now much less politically stable
00:17:32.680than we were, say, 30, 40 years ago, right?0.68
00:17:51.080the boomers say it was the 50s and 60s.
00:17:52.780And like what these eras had in common
00:17:54.240is that the speaker was a literal child.
00:17:56.400And still has lead in their brain from back then, which probably also accounts for.
00:18:01.920There's also a degree of nostalgia for childhood among a lot of cronadalists.
00:18:05.860It's also something I want to talk about.
00:18:07.560But like there are these like far right fringe cronadalists like the Elon Musks, Peter Thiels, J.D. Vance's Blake Masters, who are really taking after two political theorists in particular.
00:18:19.640Adrian Vermeule, we've already mentioned, the Catholic Integralist, and Patrick Deneen, who is a political theorist.
00:20:21.580These books making an argument on a philosophical level or an economic level or sometimes a psychological level that people aren't having enough kids and really need to be having more.
00:20:33.780And that the things that people are doing instead of having children are evidence of like decadence and moral decline.
00:20:41.200Yeah. And I mean, I'm guessing you'll get to that.
00:20:43.580And the wages of second wave feminism, right?
00:20:45.220there was a piece, I think, just a couple of weeks ago in First Things, the Catholic magazine
00:20:49.180by a professor, I think his name is Carl Truman. He goes after, he's basically, these are the wages
00:20:55.100of like Shulamith Firestone and Donna Haraway, right? So like, this is like also just a way to
00:21:00.400kind of like have fights with feminism from over 30 years ago. Right. I mean, we are at a historical1.00
00:21:05.720moment. I'm going to talk about this when I give you my like grand unified theory of pronatalism.
00:21:10.020But we are at a historical moment where all of the gains of second wave feminism, not just abortion, but also birth control, women in the paid workforce, the idea of marriage is voluntary and divorce is accessible.
00:21:24.800All of these accomplishments of second wave feminism are being relitigated and having to be re-won.
00:21:30.180I think they are actually sincerely in danger in a lot of cases.0.97
00:21:33.520And anti-feminists see a real opportunity post-Obs to kind of not just force birth, but to like remake the whole gender order in order to undo the mid-century gains.0.88
00:21:46.580And they have a few of what are called like reactionary feminists trying to make this case for them from what they purport is a feminist point of view.1.00
00:21:56.440So there's like Nina Power, who just got fired from Compact for being too sympathetic to Nazis.1.00
00:22:07.720There is also, oh my God, Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry.
00:22:12.880Both of those women are British feminists who is trying to argue that things like abortion and birth control and the stigmatization of free marital sex have actually been worse for women.
00:22:25.880she makes kind of an evolutionary psychology argument. I reviewed her book on my substack a
00:22:29.880while ago. It was like laughably bad, but I read it so that you don't have to. And then they're
00:22:34.840kind of like liberal apologists for gender conservatism. And of these, I would count0.95
00:22:41.440Rachel Cohen at Vox, who is on kind of a pronatalist kick, Christine Emba of The Atlantic,
00:22:48.820Tyler Austin Harper, also of The Atlantic, and Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker,
00:22:52.660who are like people who have a critique of the decadence of liberal elites
00:22:58.180that has led them to like an appreciation
00:23:00.620for these socially conservative pro-natalist politics.
00:23:04.060So there are people who are not on the extreme marginal
00:23:09.340to online millennial right who are making this case1.00
00:23:13.720that no, feminism has gone too far.1.00
00:23:15.840We have not emphasized motherhood, maternity and families enough1.00
00:23:19.460and we need to sort of bring in at least some kind
00:23:22.160of renegotiation of the gender order1.00
00:26:11.860But I will also say like a lot of the pronatalists who are talking about women who don't have children and how those women need to be persuaded and or compelled to have more children.
00:26:29.020They're talking about like, frankly, like women they went to college with who went to private schools, got four year degrees, got professional degrees, are earning six figures, are, you know, millennials.
00:26:41.420They're not talking about people who go to high school,
00:26:44.560maybe go to like some college, some nursing school,
00:27:08.280Where the fear is not no one in this society is having babies.
00:27:13.400The fear is we are not like, you know, whoever's speaking, usually white man, Muslims are, right?
00:27:20.980So this is like something like Thilo Sarrazin in Germany with what's called Germany abolishes itself, how we're putting our country in jeopardy.0.99
00:27:28.560This is all about immigrants are coming and they have different birth rates.
00:27:32.400It's like, you know, it turns out that's not true.
00:27:34.620But there you do get like the wrong people are having babies.
00:27:37.520And I agree that in the United States, it gets sort of refracted through cultural issues, right?
00:27:42.520You're like, oh, when you're saying, oh, women are looking for fulfillment and like hanging out with their friends in bars too much to have babies.
00:27:50.020They're like, OK, we're talking about a very specific class of people, aren't we?0.92
00:27:53.080But it at least has the advantage of not being like, and here's who I think shouldn't have babies, right?
00:27:57.460Like, that's nice. Thank you for at least that, I guess.
00:28:01.100I mean, that has not always been historically the case in the U.S.
00:28:03.960The U.S. has a very long and very violent history of forcible sterilization, particularly of women of color and particularly via the welfare system.
00:28:13.320Women who get health insurance via Medicaid in particular or women who are eligible for like aid to families with dependent children or food stamps are often encouraged.
00:28:26.140And by encouraged, I really mean like, you know, forced, coerced into either getting
00:28:31.920long-acting birth control or having tubal legations.
00:28:36.420That is a really rich history and it's not as far away as we think.
00:28:40.960And it's not as completely eradicated from our welfare benefit system as we tend to talk
00:28:45.700So like this other kind of negative eugenics in the U.S. is ongoing.
00:28:49.640It's not something that the most visible pronatalists are talking about in the American context.
00:28:54.540The second argument they tend to make after the eugenicist one, or maybe like really in the U.S. context foregrounded above the eugenicist one is economic, right?
00:29:05.140They say we need more babies because we need more people paying into social security and we need more people paying taxes.
00:29:13.360And we need to have more people who are going to grow up to be nurses to take care of you when you're old, right?0.80
00:29:20.920This is like a social wide version of the blackmail that gets made on an individual level to childless women.
00:29:28.080It's like, who's going to take care of you when you're old is now they do it with like, who's going to pay for your social security when you're old.
00:29:35.240But I mean, it's funny that this talking point is brought to us by people who do not pay their taxes.
00:29:40.500That's the other thing you could do.0.99
00:29:41.820You could just pay your fucking taxes, Elon Musk, or your rent on Twitter's headquarter.0.99
00:29:45.920And then that would already probably offset a bunch of kids.0.99
00:29:48.740This is also a problem, both on the tax level and on the like nursing, the elderly level that is already being solved, frankly, with immigration and could be solved with more immigration.
00:30:00.360Right. Like who is working as nurses in old folks homes?0.94
00:30:03.200It is not overwhelmingly like native born Americans.
00:30:21.640Because the idea that there is this like one-to-one relationship between women's fertility and the size of GDP growth has actually been like pretty thoroughly debunked in the economic literature.
00:30:35.300But it makes a lot of intuitive sense to somebody who doesn't totally know what they're talking about.0.87
00:30:39.800So because it's so crude, because it seems so obvious, they kind of use it to beat people over the head with.1.00
00:30:46.960But there's actually a lot of policy interventions, including like alternative tax schemes or like immigration that could offset this in the way that does not require actually a reversal of the gendered progress that feminists have made.1.00
00:31:02.520But this idea gets trotted out. It's like, OK, to be responsible citizens. Sorry, we just have to make women property again.0.95
00:31:09.800it's like there's no other way and it gets talked about uh as if it's you know the the only sensible
00:31:17.200thing when in fact it is like a wildly disproportionate response to a problem for
00:31:22.840which there are like many many different solutions well the other thing that i'm sort of picking up
00:31:27.920here as a theme is like this whole thing has the gesture of like humility and like wanting to do
00:31:34.220something altruistic but ultimately being incredibly narcissistic right like it's all
00:31:38.640these men being like hey so maybe you should pop out a baby for me right we're like okay so I guess
00:31:43.940I wish gave father to that thought to stay with the natalist metaphor but then the other thing0.96
00:31:48.260here is like oh we should have more kids and then in brackets so they can wipe our butts when we're0.99
00:31:53.720older it's like like it's just about your ass again like right I mean like we could be like0.99
00:31:58.340let's soil and green ourselves when we hit 70 that would also solve this problem right like0.98
00:32:03.340let's turn ourselves into mulch but that's not the offer that they're making they're like no I
00:32:08.160need to have a child you can like do menial labor for me right like it combines or has this very
00:32:15.020thin veneer of altruism but it's ultimately like narcissistic and self-obsessed like to an almost0.98
00:32:21.320comical extent right often deployed by men who i don't think are wiping a lot of baby's asses in0.93
00:32:26.960the early years of childhood right like that you talked about the creepy pennsylvania couple0.76
00:32:31.020in which the father in one of his hundred thousand interviews because these people with the terrible
00:32:36.380glasses are just incessantly profiled.
00:33:28.660It always comes with the implicit addendum.1.00
00:33:32.220And they will be generated and raised by our servant class of women
00:33:35.340because these are not guys who are advocating for a ton of paternal involvement in child rearing.0.97
00:33:41.320So then the next argument that the pronatalists often make is really a moral one, right?
00:33:48.320And sometimes this comes in what we think of as like traditionally sexually conservative ideas, right?1.00
00:33:58.280That childlessness is a result of an unnaturally unimpeded sexuality, right?
00:34:06.620Like now we have abortion or we used to have abortion before jobs.
00:34:11.480And now we have birth control, which a lot of these political projects are now also going after.
00:34:17.200but that this has changed the natural consequences of sex and has enabled people to pursue a kind
00:34:25.440of sexuality that has insufficient constraints. So the notion of sexual license as being enabled
00:34:35.540by the prospect of childlessness and leading to like a kind of moral corruption among elites is
00:34:42.660something you get a lot. And you can see this kind of idea of excessive pleasure or decadence
00:34:50.880bleeding into the way that the pronatalists talk about childless lives because they imagine them
00:34:57.600as insane, like insane, amoral lives lived by people whose day-to-day have no values and no
00:35:07.480states right and so like they always talk about people going out dancing people drinking too much0.58
00:35:15.620people doing drugs people having a lot of sex people having a lot of casual sex people having0.78
00:35:20.080sex with multiple partners they think a lot about how the childless are having too much sex you know0.99
00:35:24.680yeah i mean as a gay man i cannot possibly imagine what it's like to have conservatives have
00:35:29.580vivid imaginations of what your everyday life is like and you're like wait my life is like 10% as
00:35:35.440cool as what you think, and now I feel bad. But no, this is a queering of the single woman,0.99
00:35:41.660right? This is how conservatives have looked at, especially gay men, I would imagine,
00:35:46.380for quite some time. Yeah, you know, it reminds me of the way I think about what my life would
00:35:53.560be like if I had just a ton of money, right? I would be on a beach all the time. I would do
00:36:01.640esoteric kinds of like weird yoga, I would be like reading for pleasure and always on vacation
00:36:09.840and never on the internet. When in fact, we know that the richest people in the world are actually
00:36:14.300constantly on the internet and they seem to live like kind of narrow, miserable lives, right? Like
00:36:19.040the fantasy that's like pretty clearly to me injected with envy, right? Of like a pleasure
00:36:27.120filled life with no stakes and no quotidian annoyances is clearly animating the notion
00:36:34.400of the childless woman that exists in the pronatalist imagination. And it just has no
00:36:39.500bearing on how actual childless women live, which are like anybody else. They have responsibilities.0.90
00:36:46.200They have often a lot of intimate connections. They have tedious things they would rather not
00:36:52.740do but in the pronatalist mind the childless life is one of just pure selfishness and pure pleasure
00:37:01.340right so it's understood as children as like kind of a way to discipline adults children as a way to
00:37:07.720like make adults more worthy more responsible raise adults yeah exactly yeah it's also worth0.95
00:37:13.960kind of i'm gonna make two points here one very stupid and one hopefully kind of nerdy one is0.98
00:37:21.780this imagination of luxury of women luxuriating in singlehood strikes me as also of course an0.97
00:37:28.320anxiety about the fact that like you know we talked about this with the taylor swift episode0.95
00:37:31.960that there now are women who easily out earn the men around them and compete with them for jobs
00:37:39.380etc etc there's also one something like that right like there's a there's a kind of an economic
00:37:43.760anxiety that now attaches to women in a way that for at least those thinkers seems to feel new
00:37:50.140Right. Like, that's not to say that you couldn't have felt that way in the 1980s, but like they didn't think they had to worry about the ladies.
00:37:56.460And now they do. And it's not it's not making them all together happy.
00:38:00.200Well, I mean, like women no longer or women, at least in certain classes.0.99
00:38:04.780Right. This is actually very much not a universal experience.
00:38:07.600But there are kinds of women who these pro-natalist pundits and thinkers are seeing a lot who do not require partnership with men for their economic survival.
00:38:17.760right? That is something that has sincerely changed since the second wave era when a lot
00:38:23.760of women entered higher paid paid work, entered higher echelons of paid work, entered higher0.76
00:38:28.900paying professions in large numbers. It became like very thinkable, actually, for women to
00:38:34.700survive without male support, which has changed the dynamics of heterosexuality because now men0.58
00:38:39.680need to compete with something other than women's destitution and desperation in order to secure a
00:38:47.320woman partner yeah i mean like what's the you'll know this but what's the date at what point could0.90
00:38:53.100women you know procure a line of credit without you know a man signing the papers it's it's
00:38:59.520mid-70s not within my lifetime but it's like in the 70s right yeah meaning that just doubles the
00:39:04.160number of people you compete with for you know that nice apartment that you wanted to put a
00:39:08.440down payment on or that you wanted to pay first month's rent on right like like this is this does
00:39:13.900reflect something real but it's like you know fellas would do anything but you know
00:39:17.440compete with women on a level playing field yeah right and not just compete you know for
00:39:24.000apartments compete for jobs compete for public esteem like I will say I think I've told this
00:39:29.500story before but I once had before my career as a feminist I was a young writer and an editor was
00:39:37.060like Moira don't you think a male editor somewhat older than me was like don't you think like sexism
00:39:42.500is over. And I was like, well, what do you mean by that? And he's like, well, you know, and then
00:39:47.180he tells a story about how he wanted a job that seemed like a really cool job and a woman got the
00:39:52.020job. And to his mind, this meant that if anything, women were now at an advantage over men. And this
00:39:58.480is, you know, something that a lot of Republican politics is now trying to tap into, especially
00:40:03.380among when they pitch young men. Yeah, they're really Andrew Tate wing. Yeah, they're like
00:40:09.060really kind of cultivate a sense of a prerogative of dominance, social dominance, economic dominance
00:40:16.840as a masculine right that has now been denied, right?
00:40:20.780Yeah, right. Couched as like male victimization fantasy.
00:40:24.380It's being taken away, your birthright is being taken away from you.
00:40:27.200The other thing I wanted to point out is there is this, I wonder whether the origins of what
00:40:31.560you're describing, this idea that, you know, that the political ramifications of tattering
00:40:37.380family structures like actually comes out of the immediate aftermath of the french revolution
00:40:42.480there's a bunch of conservative writers in in switzerland france germany immediately after the
00:40:48.280french revolution who sort of write like the reason why the french revolution was able to happen
00:40:52.520which they hated they were horrified by was because the aristocracy is like the aristocracy
00:41:00.160the aristocrats sort of like lost sight of their family structures right they like were unable to0.79
00:41:04.800sort of right like the women were sleeping around everyone was kind of having parties all the time1.00
00:41:08.780right let them eat cake blah blah and then what did the women do they brought all those enlightened1.00
00:41:13.740philosophers to the court and the philosophers were like hey should we maybe like not have a1.00
00:41:17.780king or whatever and boom they chopped his head off right so this idea that like actually the
00:41:22.720dissolution of aristocratic family really brought about kind of the downfall of that class was was
00:41:31.300extremely pervasive among the reactionary right in the let's say 18 teens 1820s and then their
00:41:38.580idea always was like we have to restore the family in order to restore the family of the state the
00:41:44.520other thing of course that's worth pointing out is that like in some way some very some much more
00:41:49.380republican or democratic elements in european political thought also thought this right they
00:41:55.400thought that the bourgeois family was more natural and was more based on genuine affection
00:42:01.440and that it sort of showed why they had rightfully superseded the aristocracy right meaning i mean
00:42:09.000like this is kind of going way back but it does mean that like some form of democratic societies
00:42:13.920have implicitly justified themselves through their family structures right they've said like
00:42:18.020the way we conduct our business morally like not in the sense of like you know stealing or whatever
00:42:25.020But in the sense of like, you know, mores, like our customs are better, right?
00:42:31.000They're more natural, they're more humane.
00:42:35.260And that is the thing that renews the state.
00:42:38.120Meaning, right, like when that goes, right, it does kind of call the question sort of implicit assumption that I think has subtended at least some democratic thought as well.
00:42:48.500Yeah. You know, this is one of those moments where the radical feminists and the like, like neopatriarchs or, you know, organized misogynists sort of agree on their diagnosis and disagree on the interpretation. Right. Because one is like, that's awesome. The other one's like, yeah.
00:43:06.360Yeah, I mean, you see like this assertion that men's private domination over women and ability to control women and to control reproduction and to order private reproductive life via the family is the baseline locus of control that enables every other hierarchy and every other organizing institution of society.
00:43:29.880right? And when you lose control of women, you unleash this anarchic questioning of all other
00:43:37.280kind of hierarchical social orders. This to me sounds really awesome. And to Patrick Deneen0.97
00:43:43.140and Adrian Vermeule, like, you know, agree on that diagnosis, but they think it needs to be
00:43:47.600prevented at all costs. I had one more argument that the pronatalists make often in eugenicist
00:48:18.280Like, I mean, he's pathbreaking in many ways, but the idea that hysteria could be cured by, you know, putting a baby up in the hysteros was like pretty, pretty widespread at the time.
00:48:31.200And in some way, he's just falling back off the most conventional wisdom, as I'm guessing are some of these neonatalists, the new natalists.
00:48:38.020At the same time, I do think it's really fascinating that like there is this kind of insistence on a kind of sequential ordering and meaningful ordering of human lifespans, which, you know, I love this concept by late Beth Freeman, chrononomativity, right?
00:48:56.080the idea that like there's a there's a kind of a ordered sequence to our lives and like you know
00:49:01.400you know there's a moment for sowing your wild oats and then there's your the moment to settle
00:49:05.660down etc etc and the children are basically a big moral marker there and i think i think it's very
00:49:12.640very noticeable that like whether it's queerness we talked about this in the fag hack episode
00:49:17.200any refusal of that chrononormative kind of progression is read i think not unjustifiably so
00:49:25.360as a challenge to the way society is normally organized because it groups you into into
00:49:31.420stakeholder groups basically right it kind of breaks down breaks you down into you know taxpayers
00:49:38.440into uh school board members to people who are concerned about you know the number of unhoused
00:49:44.620people on the street or whatever right like it it creates this kind of these kind of stakes that
00:49:49.800are sort of supposed to be part of of a quote-unquote maturation process and and the you're
00:49:55.400absolutely right that that like the the symbolic child is sort of extremely extremely important for
00:50:01.000that now the other thing of course is that like that comes with a narrative of personal growth
00:50:06.940and as a you know not not new parent but fairly new parent myself i can just say like
00:50:12.600god the number of people who are still working out like their relationship with their parents
00:50:18.260like through their raising of their kids
00:58:09.540To reject even very, very good policy proposals if they come with this kind of thing in the background, precisely because ultimately it's about curtailing options, right?
01:09:48.120The increased visibility of trans people over the past, you know, 10, 20 years, I think
01:09:52.840is what has really pushed this whole much more broader scale reconsideration, not just
01:09:58.580of straight and queer life, but of male and female lives and what these look like.0.66
01:10:03.600I think the boogeyman and maybe the sort of hero for feminist revival that might involve a rejection of reproductivity as, you know, a biological destiny, you know, we might have to give trans people the credit for that because, you know, the pronatalists are certainly giving them a lot of blame.0.93
01:10:24.220Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, and it is a way that the trans body becomes kind of the stalking horse for liberalism and that the attack on trans people becomes sort of the attack on liberalism or on the liberal state where people have rights, right, as individuals.0.69
01:10:45.340you know too cool like i for and when you told me you're going to do this episode i did some
01:10:51.260little bit of reading and i found this this text from the from our friends at the heritage
01:10:56.220foundation from july 2024 did you read this by emma waters no yeah who's a senior research
01:11:03.460associate in the devose center for life religion and family at the heritage foundation that's a
01:11:08.960That's a bunch of words you don't want to see in one sentence.
01:11:12.360Anyway, so one of the key takeaways in her piece is that in order for the birth rate decline to be reversed, women need to trust that the losses and changes of parenthood they might fear will be worth it, right?
01:11:26.040And so you might think like, oh, okay, so now they're going this direction of like, you know, we're going to make being a parent easier and remunerative or whatever.
01:11:38.600And that's not at all where she comes down.
01:11:40.140I'll read you the final two paragraphs.
01:11:42.740Women need to trust that the losses and changes of parenthood they might fear,
01:11:46.600of their bodies, lifestyles, sense of self, and current relationship dynamics,
01:12:08.260Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
01:12:14.800More true words could not be said about the call of motherhood and fatherhood.
01:12:18.500We need a generation that encourages people, despite the unknowns, to embrace the self-sacrificial call of Christ, right?
01:12:24.960This is like submerge your identity, forego your individual self-realization in favor of, yeah, submersion in some kind of collectivity that we posit, right?0.74
01:12:40.280This is ultimately, right, what trans people refuse to these people, according to these people, is the yoke of gender that we're all, quote unquote, naturally born with.0.68
01:12:54.100What the childless cat lady refuses is the fact that she has to enter this risk in order to be a member of the community.
01:13:02.980She has to possibly die in childbirth, possibly has to die of an ectopic pregnancy, possibly has to...1.00
01:13:09.420Or just, you know, sacrifice any other desire or vocation.
01:13:12.520The contempt with which these people say the word travel, right?
01:13:15.840Because they position anything that women might desire besides birthing and raising children as in competition with this better, truer calling that all women supposedly have to birth and waive children, right?
01:13:32.100And like to be able to do anything else, anything else besides birthing and raising children, the woman is tasked in this pronatalist worldview with justifying those pursuits as greater than children, which they can't do because children are positioned as an absolute moral good, right?0.81
01:17:09.680and the moms are having coffee martinis.
01:17:14.960In Bed with the Right, I'd like to thank the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support, Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio, our producer is Katie Lau.