Pronatalism, the push for women to have more children, has elbowed its way into prominence in public discourse. In the United States, cultural and institutional pressures on women to bear children are articulated in various ways, from negative portrayals of women who don’t consider having a child a viable choice for themselves, to a burgeoning Silicon Valley subculture that advocates having “tons of kids” to save the world, to policy proposals that would further restrict reproductive choice or limit the voting power of the childless. The stigmatization of people without children and the recent rise in contemporary pronatalism is a global phenomenon.

Resurgent pronatalism also lurks behind widespread assertions of a so-called “fertility crisis,” alarmism over falling birthrates, and a drive to reverse them through policy interventions. 

From the perspective of our collective wellbeing—socially and ecologically—this discussion needs to be reframed in policy discourse.

Although pronatalism has lots of contemporary resonance, it is not new; it’s a very old idea with a long and troubling history. It was institutionalized by men who led early states and empires 5,000 years ago and sought to consolidate their power through population growth.

Pronatalism’s deep roots still ramify today. We can see it play out every time a nation’s leader makes concerted efforts to encourage childbirth, restricts voting rights of people with fewer children, or outlaws free speech on the childfree choice. We can see it when religious leaders spread myths about fertility decline. We can see it when men inflict violence on their partners for using contraception.

The pervasive impact of pronatalism on women’s bodily autonomy and gender equity is often overlooked, while population growth as a factor in environmental degradation is frequently dismissed. This dismissal, rooted in concerns over past coercive population control measures, ignores the prevalence and success of voluntary family planning efforts that have benefited both women and the environment.

Debunking the Fertility “Crisis”

To be sure, there has been progress in advancing women’s rights over the last 50 years. Broader educational opportunities for women and girls, gains in their personal autonomy, and greater access to family planning have led to tremendous reductions in teen pregnancy and child marriage, progress in gender equity and women’s decision-making ability, and have lowered birthrates in most parts of the world.

When these trends are ensconced in a rights-based approach, they reflect positive trends. But despite the purported “fertility crisis,” global population is still increasing by about 80 million people annually and will gain a projected 2.3 billion people in this century. 

That growth will not be evenly distributed. Current and future growth is concentrated mostly in poor countries in the Global South, where fertility rates remain high often because women and girls have less reproductive autonomy and access to resources to decide the number and spacing of their children. More than 218 million women in low- and middle-income countries who want to avoid pregnancy have an unmet need for effective contraception, leading to high rates of unintended pregnancy and population growth. For example, in Angola, Burundi, and Uganda, where about one in three women have an unmet need for family planning, population growth rates are between 2.7 and 3% (far exceeding the global population growth rate of 0.9%), which means their populations will double in one generation.

Many of the countries with the highest fertility rates and lowest reproductive autonomy are also experiencing some of the worst climate extremes, with girls and women among the most vulnerable. The injustice of this is compounded by the fact that these are also the places that have consumed the least energy and emitted the least greenhouse gases. The richest countries in the world, including the United States, Canada, Japan and much of western Europe, have produced 50 percent of the carbon emissions released from fossil fuels and industry over the past two centuries, although they account for just 12 percent of the global population. At the same time, rapid growth of the global middle class, concentrated largely in China and India, is spreading the impacts of hyperconsumption across more of the globe.

Ignoring the Needs of Many

The pronatalist argument that we must keep populations growing to keep economies growing has been rightly called a Ponzi scheme. The theory is that fertility rates must stay forever high to fuel GDP growth and keep a high ratio of young workers paying taxes to seniors drawing benefits. But that treadmill can’t go on forever. A system that relies on perpetual growth on a finite planet is a system in need of reform, and there are many options for caring for our elders that don’t involve pressuring people to have more children, such as removing the income cap on Social Security to make the wealthy pay their fair share, strengthening intergenerational social safety nets, and integrating seniors into meaningful roles in society.

A pronatalist approach also ignores the welfare of children. “Baby-bust” alarmism treats babies as cogs in a growth machine, ignoring the right of children to be born into social and ecological conditions that support their well-being. 

Those conditions are now in tragic decline. Rapid population growth and limited social protection measures have led to a steep increase in extreme poverty among children, especially in Africa and South Asia. Almost half of the world’s 2.2 billion children are at risk for “extremely dire” impacts from climate change and pollution. Meanwhile, poverty, rapid population growth, and patriarchal cultural norms are driving high rates of child marriage. An estimated 640 million women alive today were child brides, often caught in a spiral of population growth, poverty and poor health. Regions of the world with the highest population growth also have the highest prevalence of child labor.

Embracing Female Empowerment and Population Contraction

Under these conditions, declining fertility is not cause for alarm—on the contrary. Instead of rolling back advances in gender equity and pushing pronatalist policies like restricting abortion and contraception or preserving and legalizing child marriage, our goal should be to ensure that all women are empowered to exercise choice about childbirth.

Confronting harmful pronatalist norms, empowering women, and expanding access to voluntary family planning programs will enable us to bend the curve on population growth and ecological overshoot. This could help mitigate climate change, conserve and rewild ecosystems, shrink our agricultural footprint, and free up financial resources to care for the elderly and the growing number of people displaced by conflict and climate change. For a socially just and ecologically sustainable future, we must get off the endless-growth treadmill, reject the false claims of pronatalism, and reorient our policymaking toward upholding women’s and children’s rights.