It’s hard to imagine anything less likely to encourage you to rip off your clothes and start procreating than having Elon Musk held up as a paragon of fecundity. No reflection on the charms of his numerous offspring, little X Æ A-Xii, Techno Mechanicus, Exa Dark Sideræl (who is just two, but has already changed her name to the deep, existential cry of “Y, Why, or ?”), and their nine siblings, but there is something deeply, for want of a better word, prophylactic about the kind of man who goes on a solo run to reverse the downward trajectory in global fertility rates. Musk has characterised the decline in women having children as “one of the biggest risks to civilisation”. In October, he posted on X: “Birth rates that low will lead to mass extinction of entire nations!” Not on his watch, ladies.
Similar concerns about fertility rates have been expressed by another big risk to civilisation. Donald Trump, himself a father of five children by three wives, recently promised to fund access to IVF in the US because “we want more babies, to put it nicely”. His future vice-president JD Vance has a well-publicised aversion to “childless cat ladies” and says societies with low birth rates are “pretty icky and pretty gross”.
As a rule, men who are in favour of women giving birth, but very much not in favour of women generally, ought to make us suspicious. When they say “we want more babies, to put it nicely” what they tend to mean is “we like our women barefoot and pregnant, and our children numerous enough to be able to pay for us in our old age”. Perhaps that’s unfair. They do like children – maybe not as individuals with their own rights, identity and destiny, but as symbols of their masculinity, like a pair of bespoke Gucci crocodile skin loafers. Remember Trump boasting about how he would like to date Ivanka? That was the biggest compliment he could pay himself.
As global fertility rates continue to fall – and the decline is precipitous in Ireland, with the average age of first-time mothers climbing to 31.6, and the average number of children per woman now 1.85, down from 4.06 30 years ago – the gaping maws of the culture wars have locked on to the issue of motherhood. Women who have long been banging the drum for better access to fertility treatment and more financial supports for parents have been bewildered to find themselves on the same side as the pronatalist movement of conservative politicians and Silicon Valley tech bros. “Parents and parents-to-be need to have long-term stability and a reliable financial situation.” Who said that? Was it Holly Cairns? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Sheila Heti? Nope, it was Hungary’s Viktor Orban.
With birth rates in Europe below the replacement level of 2.1, and surveys suggesting that young Europeans would like to have more children, the populist right has a renewed interest in family planning. In October last year, Orban – who is deeply concerned about what he charmingly calls “civilisational suicide” – hosted a two-day summit of pronatalists including conservative Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, on how to persuade Europeans to have more children.
[ Ireland’s demographic time bomb: too many retirees and too few babiesOpens in new window ]
“Cash” is usually the conclusion arrived at by these high-level think-ins. At the milder end of pronatalist measures is Emmanuel Macron’s programme of “demographic rearmament” or Fine Gael’s baby bonus of €1,000 for every newborn. At the more extreme is Orban’s offer of a loan of €31,250 to every married couple, with the total debt written off entirely after the third child, and a lifetime exemption on income tax for women who have four or more children or who start having children before the age of 30.
The pronatalist movement is associated with creepy visions of a society of tradwives, but does that matter if the net result is better supports for families? The problem is that throwing piles of money at young families does little to address the real reasons couples are opting out of parenthood. Financial incentives have “no or only modestly positive effects on fertility”, as an OECD report last summer puts it.
Those reasons are complex. They include changing gender roles; women’s desire or need to work; and a more intense approach to parenting that leaves little room, financial or otherwise, for anything else. “In the absence of work-life balance options, increased female labour participation leads to declining fertility rates,” the report states. Meanwhile, the more men are involved in the demanding, day-to-day grind of parenting, the fewer children couples are likely to have.
We didn’t need the OECD to spell any of this out. In an ideal world, making the decision that you’re ready to have a child could involve some or all of the following: being in a relationship; having somewhere to live; earning enough to meet your expenses; being set up in a career; having access to childcare; having a general sense of the world as the kind of place you are comfortable bringing a child into. And wanting to be a parent. These days, many people will never tick all those boxes.
Arguably, women and men who decide not to have children are making an entirely rational choice in a society that is not set up to support them; one that continues to be structured as though for every child, there’s one parent at home full-time – without putting any of the supports in place to make that possible. A €1,000 or a €30,000 baby bonus won’t address the climate crisis or buy you a house. It won’t even arrange to pick your child up at 2.10pm when your working day doesn’t finish until 5.30pm. And until those things are no longer an issue, fertility rates will continue to fall. No amount of bribes or Musk fretting about mass extinction is going to make a difference.