The Women Who Think the World Needs More Babies

“We’re going to fix the birthrate decline in this room,” said the dating app entrepreneur Amanda Bradford, facing a hotel conference room filled with men in blazers and slacks, men ready to offer up their wisdom on the mishaps of modern dating. All these apps, all these swipes, all these meet-ups and make-outs and just not enough babies. This room was ready to fix it. Or at least, given the audience demographics, to dutifully do its part.

It was late March in Austin and roughly 200 people had flown in for the Natal Conference, an event devoted to discussing collapsing fertility rates. There were churchgoing conservatives and Silicon Valley technologists, parents of five and parents of nine, edgelords in leather jackets and women in Lilly Pulitzer, all sharing a common concern: how to convince Americans, namely American women, to have more babies. At the Friday evening reception, as attendees mingled over wine in the domed entrance of the Bullock Texas State History Museum, a 31-year-old woman remarked with a twinge of concern that there did not appear to be all that many people wearing yellow wristbands, meaning the singles. Another guest said the room seemed heavily male.

“We were going to have more women,” said the economist Bryan Caplan, a father of four. “But they all got pregnant.” (He meant this literally; the conference organizers said four female speakers had dropped out, citing either pregnancy or caring for a sick child.)

Ben Ogilvie, a 25-year-old law student from Chicago, who came single and eager to meet someone, said he was not surprised by the male skew: “A lot of pronatalist women are themselves having children,” he said. “They’re out there doing the work.”

With America’s fertility rate at a historic low — 1,616 births per 1,000 women, far under the rate needed to maintain the population size — a “pronatalist” community has emerged, calling for bigger families and policies that encourage childbearing. This movement has skewed heavily right, made up of cultural conservatives who see conventional family units as the bedrock of society, as well as of technologists concerned that humanity is not replacing itself.

Many on the left, including those who share the goal of making it easier for people who want to have big families, have criticized the movement for embracing far-right voices: white supremacists who fear developing countries’ outpacing wealthy white people in their childbearing, misogynists calling for a return to traditional gender roles.