At a convention of the pronatalist movement, the relatively few women in attendance agreed: Motherhood needs a rebrand.
“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 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 persuade 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 economist Bryan Caplan, a father of four. “But they all got pregnant.” (He meant this literally; the conference organisers 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 – 1616 births per 1000 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 criticised 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.
The Natal Conference was started by Kevin Dolan, a conservative who came up with the idea after watching a Tucker Carlson documentary about falling testosterone levels. Since the inaugural conference, held in December 2023, political winds have shifted for the pronatalists. There, in the White House, is Vice-President JD Vance, who has urged Americans to have “more babies”. Often by President Donald Trump’s side is Elon Musk, who posts prolifically about “population collapse” and has fathered more than a dozen children. Trump last month called himself “the fertilisation president”. But the push for babies, of course, can only go so far without a crucial element: women.
“Without women, there is no future,” said Clara Chan, who travelled to the conference from Provo, Utah, after learning about it on a pronatal podcast.
“Women need to take their jobs seriously,” she said, then added: “Not their jobs. Their duty.”
There was a lot of talk about women at the Natal Conference, including by some of the male speakers whose children were back home with their mothers. But there were also some women in the room. There were women who came because they found motherhood lonely, and women who came because they found motherhood a total joy and felt judged when they told neighbours they were having a fourth or fifth child.
There was a 33-year-old mother of four from Salt Lake City who wanted to meet other mums staying home to raise large families, beyond following Instagram posts from Ballerina Farm. There was a 36-year-old mother of two from British Columbia who wished her neighbours would host more child-friendly gatherings. There was a 31-year-old living in Hong Kong who wanted at least four children, ideally with a career, and had not found a boyfriend who shared that desire.
Many of them say motherhood needs a sort of rebrand, a new set of cultural conversations, both for the young women contemplating it and for those in the thick of raising children. “It’s horrible to be telling young women that having kids is the worst thing you can do for your career,” said Emma Brizius, 37, a mother of five from Dallas. “That’s a death message for society.”
Madeline Frazier, a 22-year-old hairdresser from Georgia, who grew up home-schooled with six siblings, echoed this. “Young single women haven’t been shown the blessing of kids,” she said.
Some of these women wandered the hotel conference centre exhilarated, mingling with star demographers, policy wonks and right-wing Twitter celebrities. Others quietly or openly expressed discomfort with the speaker lineup, which included Jack Posobiec, a Trump loyalist who helped spread the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. “We are not replacing ourselves,” Posobiec told the crowd. “Meanwhile, those who don’t share our values are.”
In the audience, Brizius was uneasy. “I think it’s a very uncompelling argument to tell a group, ‘Have more kids to own the libs,’” she said.
For Brizius, 37, to leave Dallas for a weekend, putting her husband in charge of their children, is a significant undertaking, one that involves scheduling (Saturday lacrosse for their 9-year-old daughter), finger-food brainstorming (cheese quesadillas for the 5-year-old daughter and 3-year-old sons) and bringing along her clingiest, the 3-year-old triplet Madeline. But the Natal Conference seemed worth it, Brizius explained on Saturday morning, while Madeline, in a blue dress with white trim, toddled off her lap and began fixing zoo animal stickers to a sticker book.
Brizius grew up in Indiana as one of four, and as she grew older decided she, too, wanted a large family. In her early 20s, she and her husband were both putting in 60-hour weeks in finance. When they began having children, she stopped working. But she realised that her great-grandmother lived to over 100 and there was all this time stretching ahead, decades to fill with more than child care. She decided, this year, to start a network for other mothers who left corporate offices but wanted a career compatible with raising a large family, whether starting a small business or writing a book. When she came across the website for the Natal Conference, she thought, “Any woman here would be a natural fit.”
“I knew having five kids wouldn’t make me the weirdest person in the room,” she said.
At the Friday evening reception, Brizius handed out flyers with a QR code linking to a Google form for her group, called Undercurrent. Many of the recipients were men who told her, “Oh my goodness, my sister has been looking for something like this.”
On one level, Brizius seems like a good candidate for the Natal Conference community. She’s part of a network of Catholic Church and stay-at-home mum friends, with whom she discusses how to balance mothering responsibilities and outside ambitions. She listens to podcast interviews by demographers about declining birthrates.
But Brizius is leery of identifying as part of the movement, because of its extremist elements, including Posobiec. “I’d hesitate to call myself a pronatalist,” she said. “There’s a lot of baggage. The popular message people associate with it – I’m not sure I’d agree with it.”
Other women who attended, many from large families and some aspiring to have them, shrugged off worries about the voices that were elevated at the conference. Some were elated about the Trump administration’s focus on birthrates, even though the policies it plans to pursue in this area have seemed, so far, amorphous. Many, unlike Brizius, were focused on celebrating stay-at-home motherhood, and less on policies that helped people balance motherhood and work.
“If you want to have babies, go girl boss that,” said Hannah Centers, 41, a mother from Tennessee who home-schools her three children and said she felt judged by her neighbours when she told them she was pregnant with her third.
But working the crowds at the Natal Conference were some academics – economists, demographers – concerned about the alliances that the pronatalist movement had forged in pursuit of reach and influence.
Those alliances include far-right characters like the conspiracy theorist who goes by Raw Egg Nationalist, a Saturday speaker who has posted white nationalist theories on the social site X and written books for Antelope Hill Publishing, which sells translations of works by Nazis. They also include techno-optimists like Simone, 37, and Malcolm Collins, 38, the hosts of the podcast “Based Camp,” who said they had started their own religion that held people responsible for every life they chose not to bring into the world. (Collins has had four children by IVF and C-section, is pregnant with her fifth and says she plans to continue having children until she can no longer medically do so.)
Catherine Pakaluk, 48, is an economist and mother of eight who wrote a book about college-educated women with large families. She believes in culturally and legally making it easier for women who want to have big families, but worries about government policies that pressure them to do so. “If what happens is that the government sees birthrates as a social target, that’s a threat,” Pakaluk said. “I don’t think it’s super far-fetched to say there’s going to be a czar of births or a tax on childlessness.”
Over lunch at an Indian restaurant near the conference centre, a group of academics discussed their worries about how the movement was broadly perceived. Lyman Stone, a demographer who has a side business forecasting births for formula, diaper and other baby-focused companies, lamented liberal and conservative politicians who themselves had big families and should have been on board with the conference’s message but had distanced themselves from pronatalism because of who else was in its tent.
“Josh Hawley didn’t want to identify as pronatal,” Stone said. “It’s wildly toxic.”
“How could it be toxic if no one’s ever heard of it?” replied Caplan, the economist and author of “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids,” an anti-helicopter-parenting book.
One business professor at the table said some people associated the term “pronatalism” with patriarchy.
Stone shook his head. “They think it rhymes with eugenics,” he said.
Milton Friedman’s grandson Patri Friedman, a libertarian entrepreneur who lives in Austin, jumped in with a joke: “Don’t dis Patri-archy,” he said, chuckling. “That’s rule by me!”
On Saturday afternoon came a session that had been generating buzz, advertised in the conference schedule like a tradwife game show: “Simone Collins & Peachy Keenan interview very eligible bachelorettes.” The room was packed mostly with men. Two women in their early 30s took their seats at the front, alongside Collins, the podcaster, and Keenan, the pseudonym of the right-wing author of “Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War.” (She said she did not write under her own name because of concerns for her children’s safety.)
Keenan turned to the two female panellists with a question that most single women would have nightmares about answering into a microphone. “You guys are catches, you’ve been to all these different continents, you speak multiple languages,” Keenan said. “What do you think is the reason that you’re single?”
Sabba Manyara, a 31-year-old born in Zimbabwe, wearing a dark blazer and slacks, said she had moved around frequently, living on three continents over a decade without putting down roots, and had prioritised intense finance working hours over starting a family. Manyara’s co-panellist said she had met men on dating apps who did not seem ready to settle down. The facilitators invited the men in the audience to offer advice, or, as Keenan put it, “Mansplain to us!”
Though it was ostensibly a session geared toward advising these young women, the subject quickly turned to male needs. “I’d love to hear your thoughts on trying to date women who are both educated and capable,” said Ogilvie, the law student from Chicago in the audience, who had been raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Minneapolis. “I’ve had a lot of bad dating interactions with progressive women.”
Keenan offered herself up as inspiration, sharing that her own social views had been fairly liberal before she met her husband. “I was a feminist, I was pro-choice, I was anti-gun,” she said. “He helped me deprogram myself.”
She also had some tactical advice for the men in the room: even if they were already looking for younger women on dating apps, they should turn their age ranges down further. “If the apples in the barrel are rotten, go to a different tree,” she said.
Manyara, the panellist, suggested a different approach. She advised the men in the room to try validating the ambitions of the women they dated, valuing their professional endeavours. “A woman can be both an ambitious woman and a family woman,” Manyara said.
“You’re going to have very smart kids,” Keenan told her.
At the next conference session, led by Bradford, who founded the exclusive dating app the League, audience members discussed ways of making dating apps more effective for people looking to start big families: how could they encourage not casual dates, but babies? One young man, Stephen Chilcote, suggested that to prevent women on apps from being flooded with messages from varying suitors, men should be required to donate money to a charity of the woman’s choice before messaging her. This would also, he suggested, allow men to screen for women who shared their political values.
“I’m never going to message a girl who puts her charity as the Trevor Project,” Chilcote said, referring to the charity that provides suicide prevention resources for LGBTQ+ young people. “But if it’s the Mises Institute ——”
This referred to a libertarian, free market think tank. The crowd tittered, as somebody called out, “She’s going to get a lot of messages.”
Standing outside the dating breakout room, Rebecca Luttinen, who is getting her doctorate in demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said she was dismayed by what she saw as the conference’s “alarmist” tone about birthrates. Her own focus is on helping people have as many children as they want, if they want them at all.
Personally, she is unsure whether she wants to have kids. She hopes to first finish her doctorate. “I haven’t been parading that around here, to be honest; not many people have asked me how I feel,” she said, smiling faintly. “They did approach me and ask if I was interested in matchmaking.”
Two weeks later, Luttinen, 27, flew to Washington for another conference discussing fertility rates. That gathering, hosted by the Population Association of America, seemed to her to have more female scholars and speakers.
“You can probably guess why there weren’t as many at the Natal Conference,” she said. “It was a bunch of men in the room talking about how we can try to change women’s behaviour and make them have more babies.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Emma Goldberg
Photographs by: Sylvia Jarrus, Laura Thompson and Eric Lee
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