摘要：当硅谷精英与宗教保守派罕见联手，一场围绕“生育”的战争正在美国悄然打响。《经济学人》记者深入全美首个生育主义者大会NatalCon现场，目睹科技富豪如何将生育率视作文明存续的关键，宗教右翼如何将其与反移民议程绑定。在这篇深度报道中，你会看到：特朗普自封“生育总
当硅谷精英与宗教保守派罕见联手，一场围绕“生育”的战争正在美国悄然打响。《经济学人》记者深入全美首个生育主义者大会NatalCon现场，目睹科技富豪如何将生育率视作文明存续的关键，宗教右翼如何将其与反移民议程绑定。在这篇深度报道中，你会看到：特朗普自封“生育总统”背后的政治计算，胚胎基因筛选引发的伦理风暴，以及进步主义者在此议题上的集体失语——这不仅是关于婴儿的争论，更是一场关乎美国未来身份的文化战争。
译文为原创，仅供个人学习使用
The Economist ｜1843
经济学人｜1843
Make America procreate again: among the MAGA fertility fanatics
让美国再次生育：MAGA生育狂热分子群像
Tech bros and religious conservatives have joined forces to boost the birth rate
科技兄弟与宗教保守派联手提高生育率
By Barclay Bram
通常情况下，卡车司机蒂姆·阿德金森睡在自己的车里。但在三月末一个温暖的夜晚，他在德克萨斯州奥斯汀的一家酒店办理了入住。他精心打扮了一番：白色的亚麻衬衫和斜纹棉布裤，头发向前梳，试图掩盖后退的发际线。他的手腕上戴着一个黄色的纸质腕带。这个配饰旨在向他当晚会遇到的人表明：他是单身，愿意约会，并且最重要的是，希望生育——大量地生育。
"我32岁了，还没有孩子，"阿德金森告诉我。我们并排坐在布洛克德州历史博物馆的礼堂里，吃着烤鸡和西兰花的晚餐。 这是NatalCon会议的开幕仪式， 这个为期两天的会议旨在"聚集世界上最聪明的头脑，为全球生育率下降寻找新的解决方案" 。在场的200多人中，充满了自称的"生育主义者"：这些人认为人们（至少像他们这样的人）应该生育更多的孩子，否则，社会（至少他们所认识的社会）将会崩溃。
阿德金森在开阔道路上的孤独生活让他有很多时间思考，他担心自己也是造成这个问题的一份子。"你知道，警报已经响起。为什么这件事还没发生在我身上？"他脸上闪过一丝脆弱。"这不只是卡车运输业的问题，"他说。"不单单是我。到处都这样。"
他看到有网红在网上谈论NatalCon，于是决定支付1000美元的费用来参加。会议的重点并非相亲；它被宣传为一个严肃的学术活动，将邀请生育主义思想家、科技企业家、风险投资家以及能接触到特朗普政府的人士。尽管如此，阿德金森还是想在这个志同道合的群体中试试运气。他填写了开幕前发给单身与会者的谷歌表格，在上面列出了自己的年龄、精神信仰背景以及想要的孩子数量（从1个到7个或更多）。
不过，既然来了，他对自己成功的机会并不乐观。"我发誓，男女比例大概是八比一，"他边说边粗略地扫视了一下房间。"我会试试看，但我不抱太大希望。"
阿德金森支持唐纳德·特朗普，并形容自己的政治立场为"强硬右派"。从这个意义上说，他可能找到了同类。会议的餐厅里混杂着自由意志主义的科技工作者和宗教保守派——他们是所谓的"科技-传统"联盟的代表，该联盟帮助特朗普成功连任。
对于这些政治上的同床异梦者来说，生育率下降是一场生存危机，对美国经济、国家安全和MAGA事业具有潜在的毁灭性后果。像马克·安德森、帕尔默·勒基、彼得·蒂尔，以及最著名的埃隆·马斯克这样的科技亿万富翁，都公开表达了对这个问题的忧虑，并向开发生殖技术的公司和研究项目投入资金。与此同时，宗教保守派，如右翼智库传统基金会中的那些，则一直在推动理论上可能有助于扩大人口的政策——例如禁止堕胎和减少避孕补贴。
副总统 J.D. 万斯正处于"科技-传统"联盟的交汇点。作为一名高调皈依罗马天主教、其政治生涯得到前老板蒂尔大力助推的人物，万斯很乐意帮助将生育主义明确塑造为一个MAGA议题。他批评没有亲生孩子的著名民主党人是"无子的猫女士"（泰勒·斯威夫特随后在去年支持卡玛拉·哈里斯时特意使用了这个短语）；他在作为副总统的首次公开讲话中特意强调"我希望美利坚合众国有更多的婴儿。"特朗普则相应地宣布自己是"生育总统"，并最近公布了一项计划，通过政府直营的TrumpRx网站（预计明年上线）提供折扣生育药物。
NatalCon的许多与会者有一种感觉，随着特朗普和万斯掌权，终于迎来了推动美国生育的时机。 但那些在会议开幕当晚聚集在博物馆外的人则有不同的印象：他们认为生育主义是一个更广泛、更阴险的计划的一部分，旨在创造一个更"白"的美国。一群抗议者，大部分蒙着脸，聚集在博物馆的庭院里。"纳粹滚出我们的校园！"他们通过扩音器尖叫着，而与会者则鱼贯而入。一个标语上写着"优生学家"，并划掉了"生育主义者"这个词。
阿德金森并不介意被骚扰。"我一生中至少被叫过500次纳粹，"他耸耸肩告诉我。他不明白围绕生育主义的所有大惊小怪是怎么回事。"信息很简单：去生孩子吧。左派要疯了！"
全球范围内，生育率正在下降 。《经济学人》最近的分析表明，如果当前趋势持续，世界人口很可能在2065年达到96亿的峰值，然后急剧下降；甚至有可能在2050年代停止增长，永远不超过90亿。 美国目前的总和生育率为每名妇女1.6个孩子，这意味着远低于2.1的更替水平——这是维持人口稳定所需的标准估计值 。但它仍然比欧洲或东亚更具生育力，后者部分地区正在应对1或更低的TFR。
在许多方面，生育率下降是积极事物的一个症状——更多的怀孕是计划内的，更多女性在行使对自己生活的自主权。但人口下降的后果是不确定的。如果每一代人都比前一代人少，那么承担赡养老年人和偿还公共债务负担的工人就会减少。人工智能或许能弥补人口数量的下降，但无法说能在多大程度上弥补。
一个国家应对人口萎缩的一种方法是允许更多外国人入境。 但移民对世界各地选民来说是一个有争议的问题 。民粹主义政党和领导人，尤其是在欧洲，常常将反移民情绪与生育主义情绪结合起来，认为"本土"居民生孩子是保护民族身份和文化的最佳方式。
许多政府试图贿赂人们生更多的孩子。韩国——TFR为0.72，全球最低——在过去20年里花费了2700亿美元用于支持生育的IVF，并在一些城镇为新妈妈提供免费住房。今年开始，韩国政府为每对夫妇每生育一个孩子，在八年内支付近3000万韩元（2万美元）的现金。维克托·欧尔班政府将匈牙利GDP的6%用于生育政策——包括为有两个或以上孩子的母亲终身免除所得税。
这些政策收效甚微。韩国的低生育率几乎没有变动；匈牙利的生育率为1.56，低于其邻国罗马尼亚和保加利亚，后者在鼓励生育上的花费要少得多。"看，生孩子更像参军，而不是出去吃饭，"NatalCon的演讲者凯瑟琳·帕卡卢克告诉我。"这就是为什么现金激励不起作用。"帕卡卢克是美国天主教大学的政治经济学教授，她的研究涉及家庭和人口经济学。"女性现在拥有了所有这些美妙的选择。这是值得庆祝的。但这使得生育成为一种选择。"
为了理解人们为何做出这种选择，帕卡卢克采访了50位拥有非传统大家庭（至少五个孩子）的美国女性。她发现的一点是，抚养孩子是一种需要学习的技能——这也是她从经验中得知的。"我有很多兄弟姐妹，所以我总是和孩子们在一起。我对拥有自己的孩子会是什么样子有所了解。"（帕卡卢克现在有八个孩子和六个继子女。）
生育主义者担心，低生育率国家的女性正逐渐习惯于身边孩子越来越少的环境，因此会觉得生育自己孩子的前景太过令人生畏。他们说，结果将是一个恶性循环，加速本土人口的下降速度。这一前景尤其令美国的生育主义者感到震惊。尽管美国长期以来一直自视为一个移民国家，但随着特朗普政府收紧签证规定并部署移民与海关执法局探员将疑似非法移民塞进货车进行驱逐，该国正处于近期记忆中最急剧的本土主义转向之中。
"信息很简单：去生孩子吧。左派要疯了！"
对特朗普的支持者来说，这使得内生人口增长的需求变得紧迫。杰克·波索比克是一位极右翼网红，他是"披萨门"阴谋论（指控顶级民主党人参与了一个儿童性侵团伙）的鼓吹者，也是国防部长皮特·赫格塞斯的密友。在NatalCon的第一晚，他宣称："这不仅仅是一场文化战争，也不仅仅是一场政治小冲突。我们坦率地说吧。我们正处于一场为文明本身而战的战争中。"而在那场战斗中，"生育主义是我们的剑与盾。"
处于"科技-传统"联盟核心的自由意志主义者和宗教保守派已被证明接受了这一信息。他们可能有着略微不同的计划——传统派组建大家庭是相信这符合他们的信仰（去生养众多），而科技派则相信由聪明孩子和智慧父母组成的大家庭将带来一个更具创造力、生产力的社会（去创新）。 但他们被一种强烈的共识捆绑在一起，即生育率下降是一个文化问题：是自由主义颓废和现代文化短视的症状。
在NatalCon上，科技领袖们很显眼，穿着印有公司标志的T恤，偶尔套着Patagonia背心以抵御猛烈的空调冷气。宗教保守派也是如此，他们通常穿着商务休闲装，熨烫平整的衬衫整齐地塞进裤子里。人群几乎全是男性，且大多是白人。
女性也在场，但她们常常是在照看成群的孩子，这些孩子可以被看到在谈论抽象孩子概念的男性群体中穿梭，而这些男士则礼貌地忽略了他们脚边的真实孩子。我遇到一位有九个孩子的女性，第十个即将出生。她和家人从德克萨斯州的一个小镇远道而来，住在她所说的"破旧的农舍"里。"很难遇到其他想要像我们这样家庭的人，"她说。她认为这次会议与其说是一次政治集会，不如说是与其他超级大家庭建立友谊的一种方式。（随后她的丈夫走过来，重复说他们不是出于政治原因而来，并代表她拒绝了进一步采访。）
莱曼·斯通是一位人口统计学家，保守派智库家庭研究所的"生育主义倡议"负责人，他知道这次会议的形象并不乐观。当我们在NatalCon见面时，他穿着一件夏威夷衬衫，这使他在人群中脱颖而出。"我们聚在一起，互相谈论孩子，这有点奇怪，尤其是对于一个大概，我不知道，70%、80%是男性的群体来说，"他笑着说。
他理解为什么女性会对与生育主义者交往感到犹豫。"很多人将担忧低生育率与女性权利的终结联系在一起"——与一种倒退的未来愿景，甚至是玛格丽特·阿特伍德在她的小说《使女的故事》中创造的反乌托邦联系在一起，在那里女性仅仅被视为生育机器。"这显然让很多女性对整个敬而远之。"
斯通向我保证，生育主义与保护女性权利，特别是她们拥有自己想要的家庭的权利是一致的。同时，他语气真诚地说，"许多高度支持生育的女性，她们对作为母亲角色的兴趣，远大于作为会议与会者的角色。"（他说他自己的妻子就属于这一阵营，选择呆在家里照顾孩子。）
西蒙娜和她的丈夫马尔科姆是美国最引人注目的科技界生育主义者。两人都30多岁，戴着厚厚的黑框眼镜（西蒙娜的是圆形，马尔科姆的是方形）。他们一起游说他们认为能够设计出解决美国生育率下降方案的投资者和开发者。他们还经营着柯林斯天才研究所（提供人工智能主导的家庭教育），写书并主持播客，并投资了生育科技公司和一款为想要孩子的人寻找长期伴侣的交友软件。
大约十年前，他们开始投身生育主义，当时马尔科姆是韩国一家风险投资基金的战略总监。他的老板让他模拟韩国在未来五到十年的情况——"你知道，什么会成为大产业。基本的风险投资工作。"马尔科姆记得自己被该国低生育率震惊了。"看起来韩国在一百年后就没有经济了，"马尔科姆告诉他的老板，据他说老板对此不以为然。"那让我感到恐惧，"他说。在他看来，拯救韩国为时已晚——但他可以为美国做点什么。
"生孩子更像参军，而不是出去吃饭"
为了给他们的事业吸引注意力，"人们需要恨我们，才有理由谈论我们。所以我们一直在做一些我们称之为'媒体诱饵'的事情，"马尔科姆说。他推断，他们引起的争议越多，人们就越有可能被迫了解生育率下降和生育主义思想。
这就是为什么当我提到《卫报》对这对夫妇的报道——其中透露他曾在记者面前扇了其中一个孩子耳光——时，他耸了耸肩。那篇报道去年一经发表，迅速走红，导致网友评论柯林斯夫妇似乎不喜欢自己的孩子。"当你保护一个人免受任何负面情绪刺激时，他们在现实世界中遇到困难时就会迅速陷入焦虑和抑郁，"马尔科姆向我解释道，以此为他自己的行为辩护。
我曾想过，生育主义是否对科技行业人士比其他美国受过教育的群体更具吸引力，因为他们属于少数感觉自己能轻松负担得起大家庭的人。但很明显，即使对于柯林斯夫妇这样富裕的家庭，抚养一大群孩子也需要做出一些牺牲。例如，他们没有住在城市科技中心，而是搬到了宾夕法尼亚州的农村，在那里购买足够容纳众多孩子的大房子更便宜。
当我和马尔科姆交谈时，我注意到柯林斯的孩子们穿着和他们父亲一样的黑色 Polo 衫。"基本上我们只给孩子们准备一种随着年龄增长也能穿的服装，"他解释道。我说这似乎是抚养孩子的一种务实方式。"我们是在规模化生育，"他实事求是地回答，"所以我们需要找到节俭的方法。"
柯林斯夫妇踏入生育主义的轨迹反映了硅谷过去几年的转变，科技行业最著名的首席执行官们与特朗普政府及更广泛的MAGA运动之间的联系日益明显。马尔科姆·柯林斯告诉我，他并不觉得与特朗普基本盘中的宗教保守派共处一室有什么困难："这不是一个混乱的联盟。我们不会经常互相攻击。我们都彼此认识。"
在两个阵营中，都有一种感觉，即他们一直在对抗主流自由主义文化的潮流——马斯克常称之为"觉醒意识病毒"——并且他们凭借其非正统观点，才是多样性的真正捍卫者。 "科技界与MAGA联盟之所以如此融洽，很大程度上是因为我们双方都在说，嘿，别管我们。停止将你们的价值观强加给我们，停止试图让我们的孩子接受你们的价值观。"
那些其他生育技术常常得到科技领袖的支持：蒂尔投资了经期追踪应用"28"和为寻求生育护理者提供融资平台的"Gaia"；OpenAI的山姆·阿尔特曼资助了"Conception"公司，该公司正在研发使两个男性成为孩子生物学父母的技术。马斯克——他将家人和许多公司迁至德克萨斯州，以此对加州左倾政治表示明确不满——已向德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的"人口福祉倡议"捐赠了1000万美元。该项目旨在就"生育、育儿以及人口与经济未来增长"等主题进行"基础性研究"，以便为生育主义理念提供学术支撑。
即使是更具争议的生育技术的代表，在NatalCon也明显受到欢迎。在提供烤牛肉（为那些需要补充蛋白质的人）的自助餐区周围，我看到了几位"Orchid"公司的员工，该公司销售胚胎全基因组测序服务；他们可以通过T恤上公司风格化的鸟类标识来辨认。通常，全基因组测序是在孩子出生后进行的，以便让父母知道他们的宝宝是否有可能改变一生的疾病风险。相反，Orchid在胚胎植入前就进行这些测试，以确保被选中的胚胎若能足月分娩，将有最佳机会成长为健康的成年人。该公司还提供筛选胚胎"理想"特质（如智力）的服务（许多科学家对此是否真能实现持怀疑态度）。
据报道，马斯克在个人生活中为生育主义尽一份力时使用了Orchid的服务——他与四位女性（已知）育有13或14个孩子（已知）。正如报道科技界的自由记者朱莉娅·布莱克在NatalCon向我解释的那样：" 硅谷痴迷于精英制度。他们也坚信可遗传特质以及遗传学和智商等标志物的作用。他们在'先天与后天'的分歧中坚定地站在先天一边。 "
"我们正处于一场为文明本身而战的战争中……生育主义是我们的剑与盾"
从某些方面看，这种痴迷是可以理解的。大多数父母会尽一切努力增加生下一个健康、可能人生成功的宝宝的几率。但批评者担心，婴儿增强技术将在其安全性得到保障之前就被使用。其他人则担心，这 些技术将为全球精英创造"超级宝宝"，从而加剧不平等，因为精英的财富将不可避免地让他们率先获得这些技术 。
有些人甚至担心，这种关于受孕的思维方式离优生学只有一步之遥。Orchid方面对此说法予以强烈否认，称他们的工作有助于预防遗传疾病，并将其工作等同于优生学是"对历史无知和道德倒退"。
但是，伦敦大学学院遗传学教授、曾撰写关于优生学著作的亚当·卢瑟福认为，20世纪20年代和30年代流行的观念——其驱动力是认为某些人群正陷入终极衰退，需要通过激进的社会工程来拯救——与当今的生育主义思潮存在一些相似之处，后者同样对谁在生孩子、谁没在生孩子感到焦虑。"当埃隆·马斯克谈论生育率下降意味着我们所知文明的终结时，值得问问他所说的'文明'指的是什么，"他告诉我。
值得注意的是，在NatalCon——这个自称旨在为"全球最大危机"寻找解决方案的会议上——几乎所有的演讲者都是美国白人。例如，韩国有知名人口统计学家；为什么他们没有发言？（组织者凯文·多兰告诉我，他邀请了许多国际演讲者，但拒绝提供具体名字。）
与此同时，今年的NatalCon邀请了一些已知支持白人至上主义或其他令人反感观点的演讲者。其中之一是"Cremieux"，这是一个网络喷子的化名，他曾声称"精英在基因上与众不同"，并且非洲国家的平均智商远低于世界其他地区。
考虑到多兰的背景，NatalCon对此类胡言乱语的开放性或许就不那么令人惊讶了。他曾有一个匿名推特账号，在上面发布白人至上主义和恐同内容，并用来攻击不那么虔诚的摩门教徒（他曾是DezNat运动的一员，这是一个由原教旨主义摩门教徒组成的超保守主义和民族主义团体）。在2021年被德国情报部门列入互联网极端分子名单后，他说自己被摩门教活动人士人肉搜索，并丢掉了在博思艾伦汉密尔顿公司担任国防承包商的工作。
多兰告诉我，被剥夺平台"实际上是我经历过的最好的事情之一"，因为这引发了深刻反省，最终催生了NatalCon。失业后不久，他创立了EXITgroup，一个男性权利组织，该组织自称是一个"志同道合的男性兄弟会，他们对现行体系做空，并为未来建设"（它提供健身训练、创业指导以及"一对一配对"服务，以联系其他成员的"同阵营智囊"）。
多兰感到震惊，人口下降居然不是更主流的问题。他指出，自从被人肉搜索后，他与影片中的一些人物建立了联系。"如果我把这些真正聪明的人聚集起来，我们试着从各个角度彻底解决这个问题会怎么样？"他告诉我。当我问他为什么NatalCon的演讲者名单包括一些有争议的思想家时，他将他们的出席归因于类似的想法："这是因为它 mostly 是我的朋友们。"他不认为他可能需要新朋友吗？"嗯，呃，也许吧，"他说，然后停顿了一下。"但不能以牺牲我现有的朋友为代价——我喜欢他们所有人。"
美国的生育主义者们已经成功地孕育了一个强大的政治理念——但他们尚未看到许多严肃政策的诞生。 特朗普扩大生育护理的提议才刚刚起步（无论如何，它们似乎无法达到他在竞选中承诺的免费提供IVF治疗的标准）。万斯则提出了其他想法，比如将儿童税收抵免从每个孩子2000美元提高到5000美元，并建议父母在选举中应该比非父母拥有更多的权。交通部长肖恩·达菲表示，他将优先投资于出生率较高的地区。一个更温和的提议是向生育超过六个孩子的女性颁发"母亲勋章"。
对于保守派人口统计学家斯通来说，期望生育主义者围绕一套核心政策理念达成一致还为时过早。"抱歉在这方面显得很学究，"我们交谈时，他向我们身后熙熙攘攘的NatalCon与会者挥了挥手说，"但我更愿意将这里描述为一个话语空间。"自称会议上"唯一进步派"的保罗·康斯坦斯也表示同意。"这里有很多戏剧性场面和关于复兴我们文明的远见卓识，"他把我拉到一边以便私下交谈后告诉我。"但是，请指给我看，有哪些共和党政策制定者拥有积极或雄心勃勃的议程，来让人们更容易生孩子。"
"当埃隆·马斯克谈论生育率下降意味着我们所知文明的终结时，值得问问他所说的'文明'指的是什么"
美国右翼尚未就可行的生育政策达成一致，这一事实应该给进步派提供一个提出自己想法机会。毕竟，许多左派的核心主张，如全民医疗保健和补贴儿童保育，都可以被塑造成鼓励人们多生孩子的方式。然而，到目前为止，进步派已将生育主义的话语权让给了右翼。这部分是由于与之相关的污名。"它已经变得非常有害，"我在NatalCon遇到的一位人类学家说。"我担心在这里露面就等于[支持]优生学和科学种族主义。"但似乎也有许多人要么不认为生育率下降是个问题，要么不相信政府即使尝试也无力回天。他们这么想可能是对的：对许多人来说，生育孩子的决定最终是由情感主导的。
在NatalCon的第二天，我遇到了萨巴，一位穿着别致细条纹套装的埃塞俄比亚女性。作为那里唯一的黑人女性，她一整天都被好奇的与会者和记者团团围住。"每个人都超级热情，"当我终于有机会和她交谈时，她告诉我。"我想我确实听到了一些关于我是不是记者的玩笑。不过，也许他们问过所有人。"我可以确认他们并没有。人们喜欢和我这个蓝眼睛的白人男性聊天——直到他们发现我是记者。
萨巴在香港有一份高级金融工作，以前曾在纽约和伦敦工作。会议上的一些人无疑会认为她是大都市全球精英的一员；当然，她的生活方式与我在开幕晚宴上同坐的卡车司机蒂姆·阿德金森相去甚远。然而，她也戴着黄色的腕带，表明她是单身。"我们在纽约或香港这样的城市都面临着这种挑战，在那里约会尤其困难。"她承认，拥有这样一份流动性强的职业使得（组建家庭）很难。"没有后悔，但总要有取舍。"
和阿德金森一样，她现在也是30出头，单身，没有达到她预期在这个阶段应该拥有的家庭。"我来到这里是因为我真的需要开始思考这个问题了。如果我想要一个大家庭，我不能等到37岁才去做，"她告诉我。她知道这个会议并非她天然适合的场合，但她想亲自了解相关的人物和想法——理解为什么她和她的朋友们在约会方面如此困难。"我不喜欢这样一种想法，即当我和我的进步派朋友提起这件事时，立刻会有一种感觉，好像被要求的是把女人拴在炉灶边，阻止她们工作，"她说。她认为这次会议实际上是在试图提前应对这个问题——在反乌托邦的替代方案成为桌上唯一选择之前。
萨巴还没有遇到让她一见倾心的人，但她说她进行了一些有趣的对话。当我转身调整录音机时，另一位追求者悄悄走近她。我走开了——他们有很多可以聊的。■
巴克莱·布拉姆是《经济学人》的高级播客制作人。请在此处收听他的播客《与美国生育主义者在一起》
插图：迈克尔·格伦伍德
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Ordinarily Tim Adkinson, a trucker, sleeps in the back of his vehicle. But on a warm night at the end of March, he checked into a hotel in Austin, Texas. He had dressed up smartly: white linen shirt and chinos, hair brushed forward in an attempt to mask his receding hairline. On his wrist he wore a yellow paper wristband. This accessory was meant to signal to the people he’d meet that evening that he was single, open to dating and, most importantly, looking to procreate—a lot.
“I’m 32 years old and I haven’t had any kids,” Adkinson told me. We were sitting next to each other eating a dinner of roast chicken and broccoli in the auditorium of the Bullock Texas State History Museum. It was the opening ceremony of NatalCon, a two-day conference that tasked itself with “gathering the brightest minds in the world in search of new solutions” to the global fall in birth rates. The 200-strong crowd was full of self-proclaimed pro-natalists: those who believe that people (at least people like them) should be having more children, and that, if they don’t, society (at least as they know it) will collapse.
Adkinson, whose solitary life on the open road gives him a lot of time to think, was concerned that he was contributing to the problem. “You know, the alarm bells were going off. Like why hasn’t this happened for me?” There was a flash of vulnerability in his face. “It’s not just trucking,” he said. “It’s not me specifically. It’s everywhere.”
He had seen influencers speaking online about NatalCon, and decided to pay the $1,000 fee to attend. Matchmaking wasn’t the point of the conference; rather, it was billed as a serious academic affair that would feature pro-natalist thinkers, tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and people with the ear of the Trump administration. Still, Adkinson wanted to try his luck among a like-minded crowd. He filled out a Google Form that was sent out to single attendees before the opening ceremony, on which he listed his age, spiritual background and the number of children he wanted (from one to seven or more).
Now that he was here, though, he didn’t like his odds. “It’s like eight to one, men to women I swear,” he said, giving a cursory glance around the room. “I’ll give it a shot but I’m not holding my breath.”
Adkinson had voted for Donald Trump and described his own politics as “hard right”. In that sense, he might have found his people. The conference dining room was a jumble of libertarian tech workers and religious conservatives—representatives of the so-called tech-trad alliance that helped propel Trump to a second term in the White House.
Many governments have tried to bribe people to have more babies
For these political bedfellows, falling birth rates are an existential crisis, with potentially devastating consequences for the American economy, national security and the MAGAproject. Tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen, Palmer Luckey, Peter Thiel and, most famously, Elon Musk, have all publicly fretted about the issue, and funnelled money into companies and research initiatives that are developing reproductive technologies. Meanwhile, religious conservatives, like those at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think-tank, have been pushing for policies that might, in theory, help expand the population—such as banning abortion and reducing subsidies for contraceptives.
The vice-president, J.D. Vance, is at the nexus of the tech-trad alliance. As a vocal convert to Roman Catholicism whose political career was supercharged by Thiel, his former boss, Vance has been thrilled to help make pro-natalism an explicitly MAGAissue. He has criticised prominent Democrats who don’t have biological children for being “childless cat ladies” (Taylor Swift then pointedly used the phrase in her endorsement of Kamala Harris last year); and he made a point of saying in his first public address as vice-president that “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Trump, in turn, has declared himself the “fertilisation president” and recently unveiled a plan to offer discounted fertility drugs through TrumpRx, the administration’s direct-to-consumer website, due to launch next year.
There was a sense among many at NatalCon that, with Trump and Vance in power, the moment to jump-start American baby-making had come at last. But those gathered outside the museum on the opening night of the conference had a different impression: that pro-natalism was part of a broader and more insidious project to create a whiter America.A group of protesters, their faces mostly covered, gathered in the museum’s courtyard. “Nazis off our campus!” they screamed through a megaphone as conference attendees streamed in. One sign read “Eugenicists” with the word “Natalists” crossed through.
Adkinson didn’t mind being heckled. “I’ve been called a Nazi at least 500 times in my life,” he told me with a shrug. He didn’t see what all the fuss over pro-natalism was about. “The message is simple: go have babies. And the left is going nuts!”
Globally, birth rates are falling. Recent analysisbyThe Economist suggests that, if current trends continue, the world population is likely to peak at 9.6bn in 2065, then tumble; it is even possible that it might stop growing in the 2050s and never exceed 9bn. America currently has a total fertility rate (TFR) of 1.6 children per woman, meaning that it is well below the replacement rate of 2.1—the standard estimate of what’s required to keep a population stable. But it is still more fecund than Europe or East Asia, parts of which are reckoning with TFRs of 1 or less.
In many ways, falling birth rates are a symptom of something positive—that more pregnancies are planned and more women are exercising agency over their lives. But the consequences of population decline are uncertain. If each generation is smaller than the previous one, there could be fewer workers to shoulder the burden of caring for the elderly and servicing public debt. AImight compensate for a fall in the number of humans, but it’s impossible to say by how much.
One way for a country to deal with a shrinking population is to let in more foreigners. But immigration is a contentious issue for voters around the world. Populist parties and leaders, particularly in Europe, often marry anti-immigrant sentiments with pro-natalist ones, arguing that “natives” having children is the best way to preserve national identity and culture.
Many governments have tried to bribe people to have more babies. South Korea—which has a TFRof 0.72, the lowest on Earth—has spent $270bn over the past 20 years on pro-na IVFand, in some towns, giving new mothers free housing. This year it began granting couples a cash payment of close to 30m won ($20,000) over eight years for each child they have. Viktor Orban’s government spends 6% of Hungary’s GDPon pro-natalist policies—including a lifelong exemption from income tax for mothers of two children or more.
These policies have had little effect. South Korea’s low birth rate has barely budged; Hungary’s is 1.56, lower than its neighbours Romania and Bulgaria, which have spent far less on promoting births. “Look, having a child is more like joining the military than going out to dinner,” Catherine Pakaluk, a speaker at NatalCon, told me. “That’s why cash incentives don’t work.” Pakaluk is a professor of political economy at the Catholic University of America, where her research touches on the economics of family and demography. “Women now have all of these wonderful options. Which is to be celebrated. But that renders childbearing a choice.”
To understand why people make that choice, Pakaluk interviewed 50 American women who had unconventionally large families, of at least five children. One of the things she found was that raising children is a learned skill—something she knew from experience, too. “I had lots of siblings, so I was always around children. I had a sense of what it would be like to have my own.” (Pakaluk now has eight children and six step-children.)
Pro-natalists fear that women in low-fertility countries are becoming accustomed to being around fewer children, and will, in consequence, find the prospect of having their own too daunting. The result, they say, would be a doom loop that will speed up the rate of native-population decline. This prospect has been particularly alarming to pro-natalists in America. Although the country has long considered itself a nation of immigrants, it is now in the midst of the sharpest nativist turn in recent memory, as the Trump administration tightens visa rules and deploys Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to bundle suspected illegal immigrants into vans for deportation.
“The message is simple: go have babies. And the left is going nuts!”
To Trump’s supporters, this makes the need for endogenous population growth urgent. Jack Posobiec is a far-right influencer who was a champion of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory (which alleges that top Democrats were involved in a child-sex ring) and is a confidant of Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defence. On the first night of NatalCon he declared: “It’s not just a culture war, it’s not just a political skirmish. Let’s speak bluntly. We are in a war for civilisation itself.” And in that battle, “natalism is our sword and shield.”
The libertarians and religious conservatives at the heart of the tech-trad alliance have proved receptive to this message. They may have slightly different projects—with the trad contingent having large families in the belief that it accords with their faith (go forth and multiply), and their tech counterparts believing that large families composed of bright children and clever parents will lead to a more creative, productive society (go forth and innovate). But they are bound together by a strong sense that the decline in birth rates is a cultural issue: a symptom of liberal decadence and the short-sightedness of modern culture.
At NatalCon, the tech gurus were conspicuous, sporting T-shirts with their company logos and the occasional Patagonia gilet to guard against the aggressive air-con. So too were the religious conservatives, who were usually dressed in business casual, their pressed shirts neatly tucked in. The crowd was nearly all male and mostly white.
Women werepresent, but they were often herding gaggles of kids, who could be spotted weaving their way through groups of men chatting about children in abstract terms while politely ignoring the real ones at their feet. I met one woman who was a mother of nine, with a tenth on the way. She and her family had travelled from a small town in Texas, where they lived in what she described as a “raggedy farmhouse”. “It’s hard to meet other people who want families like ours,” she said. She saw the conference less as a political gathering and more as a way to build friendships with other super-max families. (Her husband then walked over, repeated that they weren’t there for political reasons and declined on her behalf to be interviewed further.)
Lyman Stone, a demographer and the head of the Pro-Natalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think-tank, knew the optics of the conference were unpromising. When we met up at NatalCon, he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that made him stand out from the crowd. “We’re getting together and all talking to each other about babies, which is kind of a weird thing to do, especially for a group that’s like, I don’t know, 70%, 80% men,” he chuckled.
He understood why women would balk at hanging out with pro-natalists. “A lot of people associate worries about low fertility with the end of women’s rights”—with a regressive vision of the future, or even the dystopia created by Margaret Atwood in her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, in which women are seen simply as baby-making machines. “That obviously turns a lot of women off to the whole conversation.”
Stone assured me that pro-natalism was consistent with protecting women’s rights, especially their right to have the families they want. At the same time, he said, his voice sincere, “A lot of the women who are highly pro-natal are also more interested in their role as mothers than in their role as conference attendees.” (He said his own wife fell into this camp and had chosen to stay at home with their children.)
The few women who did have a platform at NatalCon were either “trad wives”—the term for women who voluntarily embrace old-fashioned gender roles—or tech-world girlbosses, who were keen to show how deftly they were combining their large families with their jobs. One such career woman was Simone Collins, the former managing director of Dialog, a secretive members-only organisation co-founded by Peter Thiel. She took to the conference stage wearing a milkmaid’s bonnet—a sly nod to her detractors’ “Handmaid’s Tale” jibes—with a baby strapped to her back. It was her fourth child, a girl named Industry Americus (her two daughters have gender-neutral names). At the time, Simone was expecting her fifth baby. “Half of me wants to vomit and the other half wants to lie down on the stage,” she told the audience (she made it through her speech without incident, to rapturous applause).
Simone and her husband Malcolm are two of the most visible tech pro-natalists in America. Both in their late-30s, they wear thick black-rimmed glasses (Simone’s are round, Malcolm’s square). Together, they lobby investors and developers who they believe can engineer solutions to America’s falling birth rate. They also run the Collins Institute for the Gifted (which offers AI-led homeschooling), write books and host a podcast, and have invested in fertility-tech companies and a dating app for long-term partnerships between people who want children.
They were spurred to take up pro-natalism around a decade ago, when Malcolm was the director of strategy for a venture-capital fund in South Korea. His boss had asked him to model what the country would look like over the next five to ten decades—“you know, what will be the big industries. Basic VCstuff.” Malcolm remembers being struck by the country’s low birth rate. “It doesn’t look like Korea has an economy in a hundred years,” Malcolm told his boss, who he says shrugged it off. “That horrified me,” he said. It was too late to save South Korea, in his view—but he could do something for America.
“Having a child is more like joining the military than going out to dinner”
To garner attention for their cause, “people needed to hate us to have a reason to talk about us. So we kept doing things that we called media-baiting,” Malcolm said. The more controversy they caused, he reasoned, the more likely people would be forced to learn about falling birth rates and pro-natalist ideas.
That’s why he shrugged when I mentioned a Guardianprofile of the couple, which revealed that he had slapped one of his children in front of the journalist. When the piece was published last year, it instantly went viral, causing people online to remark on the Collinses’ seeming dislike of their own children. “When you protect a person from any negative emotional stimulus, they’ll quickly spiral into anxiety and depression whenever they encounter difficulties in the real world,” Malcolm told me, by way of explanation for his actions.
I had wondered whether pro-natalism was more attractive to people in the tech industry, than to, say, other educated groups in America, because they are some of the few people who feel they can comfortably afford to have massive families. But it was clear that, even for a couple as affluent as the Collinses, some sacrifice was necessary to raise their brood. Rather than living in an urban tech hub, for instance, they had moved to rural Pennsylvania, where it was cheaper to buy a house large enough for a host of kids.
As Malcolm and I spoke, I noticed that the Collins children were wearing the same black polo shirt as their father. “Mostly we just have one outfit for the kids that can change with age,” he explained. I noted that that seemed like a pragmatic way to raise children. “We’re breeding at scale,” he responded matter-of-factly, “so we need to find ways to be frugal.”
The Collinses’ path into pro-natalism tracks transformations in Silicon Valley over the past few years, as the tech industry’s most prominent chief executives have become more visibly entwined with the Trump administration and the wider MAGA movement. Malcolm Collins told me that he didn’t find it difficult to move in the same world as the religious conservatives in Trump’s base: “It’s not a messy alliance. We’re not taking jabs at each other regularly. We all know each other.”
In both camps there was a sense that they had been fighting against the tide of mainstream liberal culture—what Musk has often referred to as “the woke mind virus”—and that they, with their heterodox views, were the true champions of diversity. “ A big part of why the tech and MAGAalliance works so well is because we both are just like, hey, leave us alone. Stop imposing your values on us and stop trying to get our kids to adopt your values.”
Still, some issues between them are tricky to reconcile, including IVF. The technology accounts for only 2% of American births, because it is expensive and often not covered by insurance. But some religious conservatives oppose it, as the process produces excess embryos—“unborn children”, in their eyes—that are often destroyed. The Heritage Foundation supported last year’s decision by the Alabama Supreme Court which ruled that frozen embryos have the same rights as living children; the decree has created confusion over appropriate storage methods and the legal liabilities those seeking IVFtreatment might face. Many of the religious conservatives at NatalCon took a more pragmatic approach to IVF, however, acknowledging that it attracts broad public support. As Peachy Keenan, one of America’s most famous trad wives, said in her NatalCon speech, “My best friend used IVFto build her family. I have IVFnieces.” In spite of her “serious moral qualms about the byproducts of the process”, she did not think it was something to block: “Neither I nor J.D. Vance nor the pope is going to outlaw IVF. That toothpaste is out of the fallopian tube.” Kevin Dolan—the conference’s organiser and a Mormon father of six, with a seventh on the way—concurred. “Religious conservatives know they’re in the wilderness. They know they won’t get to decide if people use IVFor other fertility technologies,” he told me.
Those other fertility technologies are often backed by tech gurus: Thiel has invested in 28, a period-tracking app, and Gaia, a platform that provides financing plans for those pursuing fertility care; Sam Altman, of OpenAI, has funded Conception, a company that is working on technology that would allow two men to become biological parents of a child. Musk—who moved his family and many of his companies to Texas in a pointed rebuke of California’s left-leaning politics—has donated $10m to the Population Wellbeing Initiative at the University of Texas, Austin. The project aims to conduct “foundational research” on topics such as “fertility, parenting and the future of population and economic growth”, in order to provide academic ballast to pro-natalist ideas.
Representatives of even the more controversial fertility technologies were clearly welcome at NatalCon. Around the buffet, which featured seared beef for those loading up on protein, I saw a few employees of Orchid, which sells whole-genome sequencing for embryos; they were identifiable by the company’s stylised bird logo on their T-shirts. Typically, whole-genome sequencing tests are performed once a child is born, to let parents know if their baby is at risk of potentially life-altering diseases. Orchid, in contrast, conducts these tests before an embryo is even implanted to ensure that those which are selected have the best chance of becoming healthy adults, should they be carried to term. The company also offers to screen embryos for “desirable” qualities like intelligence (many scientists are sceptical that this can actually be done).
It has been reported that Musk has used Orchid’s services as he attempts to do his bit for pro-natalism in his personal life—he has 13 or 14 children (that we know of) with four women (ditto). As Julia Black, a freelance reporter who writes about the tech world, explained to me at NatalCon: “Silicon Valley is obsessed with meritocracy. They also firmly believe in heritable traits and the role of genetics and markers like IQ. They’re firmly on the nature side of the nature versus nurture divide.”
“We are in a war for civilisation itself... natalism is our sword and shield”
In some ways, this obsession is understandable. Most parents would do anything to increase their chances of giving birth to a healthy baby who is likely to succeed in life. But critics are concerned that baby-enhancing technologies will be used before they are safe. Others worry that they will aggravate inequality by creating “superbabies” solely for the world’s elite, whose wealth would inevitably give them access to these technologies first.
Some even fear that this way of thinking about conception is only a hop, skip and a jump from eugenics. Orchid, for its part, strongly denies the suggestion, saying their work helps to prevent genetic diseases and that equating its work with eugenics is “historically illiterate and morally backwards”.
But Adam Rutherford, a professor of genetics at University College London, who has written books about eugenics, finds some similarities between ideas circulating in the 1920s and 1930s—which were driven by the sense that certain populations were entering terminal decline and needed to be saved by radical social engineering—and today’s pro-natalism, which is also anxious about who is and isn’t having children. “When Elon Musk talks about falling birth rates as the end of civilisation as we know it, it’s worth asking what he means by ‘civilisation’,” he told me.
It was noticeable that at NatalCon—a conference that billed itself as finding solutions for the ”biggest global crisis”—almost all the speakers were white Americans. South Korea has celebrity demographers, for instance; why weren’t they speaking? (Kevin Dolan, the organiser, told me he had invited a broad spectrum of international speakers but declined to give specific names.)
At the same time, this year’s NatalCon featured a number of speakers known to espouse white supremacist or other objectionable views. One was Cremieux, a pseudonym for an online troll who has argued that “elites are genetically different” and that average nationalIQs in Africa are much lower than they are in other parts of the world.
NatalCon’s openness to such claptrap is perhaps less surprising in light of Dolan’s backstory.He once had an anonymous Twitter account where he posted white supremacist and homophobic content, and which he used to attack less observant Mormons (he was part of the DezNat movement, an ultra-conservative and nationalist group of fundamentalist Mormons). After being put on a list of internet extremists by the German intelligence services in 2021, he says he was doxxed by Mormon activists and fired from his job as a defence contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton.
Dolan’s de-platforming “was actually one of the best things that ever happened to me”, he told me, because it led to the soul-searching that eventually sparked NatalCon. Soon after he lost his job he founded EXITgroup, a men’s rights organisation, which describes itself as a “fraternity of like-minded men who take a short position in the present system and build for what comes next” (it offers fitness training, coaching on how to create a startup and “one-on-one matchmaking” to connect with an “on-side brain trust” of other members).
Dolan’s interest in pro-natalism really kicked off after he and his friends watched “The End of Men”, a documentary from 2022 created by Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News host and current MAGAcheerleader. The film argues that endocrine disruptors are destroying male testosterone, creating a weak and pliant society that is ultimately doomed. It opens with a well-known conspiracy theorist and vaccine sceptic claiming that “there has been a 50% decline in sperm counts in the last 40 years along with a precipitous decline in testosterone production.” That fringe thinker, Robert F. Kennedy junior, is now health secretary. “We’re headed for a calamity,” he continued. “That’s not hyperbole. That’s not an exaggeration. That’s a mathematical fact.” (It isn’t.)
Dolan was shocked that population decline wasn’t a more mainstream concern. He noted that since his doxxing, he’s developed relationships with a number of people featured in the film. “What if I just got these really smart people together and we try to really hash this problem out from all angles?” he told me. When I asked him why NatalCon’s speaker roster involves some controversial thinkers, he attributed their presence to a similar thought process: “That’s an artefact of it being mostly my friends.” Didn’t he think he might need new friends? “Well, erm, maybe,” he said, before catching himself. “But not at the expense of my existing friends—I like them all.”
American pro-natalists have managed to gestate a powerful political idea—but they have yet to see the birth of many serious policies. Trump’s proposals to expand fertility care are just getting off the ground (in any case, it seems as if they will fall short of his campaign promise to make IVFtreatment free). Vance has thrown other ideas around, like boosting the child tax credit from $2,000 to $5,000 per childand suggesting that parents should get more votes in elections than non-parents. Sean Duffy, the transport secretary, has said he will prioritise investment in places with higher birth rates. A more modest proposal is to award a “motherhood medal” to women with more than six children.
For Stone, the conservative demographer, it was still too early to expect pro-natalists to have coalesced around a core set of policy ideas. “Sorry to be an academic about this,” he said when we spoke, waving his hand at the NatalCon attendees milling behind us, “but I would describe this as a discursive space.” Paul Constance, who characterised himself as “the only progressive” at the conference, agreed. “There’s a lot of theatre and a lot of visionary talk about recovering our civilisation,” he told me, after taking me aside so that we could talk privately. “But show me Republican policymakers who have an aggressive or ambitious agenda to make it easier for people to have kids.”
“When Elon Musk talks about falling birth rates as the end of civilisation as we know it, it’s worth asking what he means by ‘civilisation’”
That fact that the American right has yet to agree on workable pro-natal policies should give progressives an opportunity to offer their own ideas. After all, many left-wing staples, such as universal health care and subsidised child care, could be cast as ways to encourage people to have more children. So far, though, progressives have ceded pro-natalism to the right. That’s partly owing to the stigma associated with it. “It has become so toxic,” said an anthropologist I met at NatalCon. ”I’m worried being here is tantamount to [endorsing] eugenics and scientific racism.” But it also seems that many either don’t see falling fertility as a problem, or don’t believe governments could do much about it if they tried. They are probably right to think so: for many people, the decision to have children is ultimately guided by emotion.
On the second day of NatalConI met Saba, an Ethiopian woman dressed in a chic pin-striped suit. As the only black woman there, she had been swarmed all day by curious attendees and journalists. “Everyone has been super welcoming,” she told me, when I finally got a moment with her. “I guess I did get a few jokes about whether I’m a journalist or not. But hey, maybe they were asking everyone.” I can confirm they were not. People loved chatting to me—a blue-eyed white man—untilthey found out I was a journalist.
Saba has a high-powered finance job in Hong Kong, and used to work in New York and London. Some people at the conference would undoubtedly consider her a member of the metropolitan global elite; certainly her lifestyle was a world away from that of Tim Adkinson, the truck driver I sat with at the opening dinner. Yet she was also wearing a yellow wristband indicating that she was single. “We’re all facing this challenge in cities like New York or Hong Kong, where it is especially difficult with dating.” It was hard, she admitted, having had such a mobile career. “No regrets, but there are trade-offs.”
Like Adkinson, she was also now in her early 30s and single, without the family she had expected to have by this point. “I’m here because I need to really start thinking about this. If I want to have a large family, I can’t do that when I’m 37,” she told me. She knew the conference wasn’t her natural scene, but she wanted to form her own opinion of the people and ideas involved—to understand why she and her friends were having such a hard time dating. “I don’t like the idea that if I bring this up with my progressive friends there’s immediately this sense that what’s being asked is that we chain women to the stove and prevent them from working,” she said. She thought the conference was in fact attempting to get ahead of the problem—before the dystopian alternatives became the only options on the table.
Saba hadn’t met someone who had swept her off her feet yet, but she said she’d had some interesting conversations. As I turned to adjust my recorder, another suitor sidled up to her. I moved away—there was plenty for them to talk about. ■
Barclay Bram is a senior podcast producer at The Economist.. Listen to his podcast “Hanging out with America’s pro-natalists”here
Illustrations Michael Glenwood
来源：左右图史
