Pronatalism is Just Another White Power Movement...with Babies

Back in 2017, when the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale aired, there was a round of criticism about how Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel and especially the adaptation skirted the issues of race and white supremacy. On race, Atwood has taken hits for using the Black American slave experience as a partial model of women’s role in Gilead, the theocratic, totalitarian country that partially replaces the United States (Atwood also takes from misogynistic fundamentalist Muslim societies). Modeling fiction on others’ history is a common practice in literature and not problematic if the author acknowledges her inspirations, which Atwood has done since The Handmaid’s Tale publication.

With the second criticism of both the novel and the TV adaptation, things get a bit tricky: While white supremacy is a plotline in Atwood’s novel, except for one short sentence, it exists in the background. That sentence is “Resettlement of the Children of Ham is continuing on schedule.” The “Children of Ham” is stand-in for Black and Brown people, a term borrowed from the Bible and propagated by Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), who up until 1978 used the “Curse of Ham” as a justification for slavery. “Resettlement” is a reference to the removal of non-white people to a colony in North Dakota. Thus, while Black and Brown people are not present as characters in the novel – a novel about a “racially pure,” misogynistic society – their lack of presence is a deliberate plotline.

(Years later, Atwood revived the Handmaid story in The Testaments, which stays true to the gist of the original novel. She has not – that I know of – created a fictional treatment of the life of the “Children of Ham” in the colonies, including how they got there and their reaction to subjugation, i.e., plots, revolts, and rebellions. Such a treatment would demand that Atwood, a white woman, write as or about people of color, something that she might be reticent to do.)

The TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale does away with the white supremacy plot line. Instead of “cleansing” Gilead of people of color, Handmaid’s producers created a multi-racial cast which includes Black handmaidens whose job is to produce babies for Gilead, something which was not only forbidden in the novel, but severely punished. I’ve no doubt that the show’s producers were very much worried about presenting an all-white cast, even though it would be true to the story and the nature of Gilead, and for both political and commercial reasons went “multicultural.” This is too bad, for portraying Gilead as Atwood initially wrote it would be much more illuminating than the “post-racial” show that they made.

In reporting on the “pronatalist movement,” the mainstream media is making the same mistake as The Handmaid’s Tale’s producers did with their television show.

Pronatalists are a male-led grouping of mass childbirth ideologues. Based on a warped interpretation of the Bible and crap science, pronatalists argue that we are having a population crisis, that we need more babies to help save humankind from extinction. If this sounds crazy, it is because there is a lot left unsaid in the pronatalist’s line. Let’s start with demographics.

Currently there are 8.1 billion people on Earth and, with a single person being born every nine seconds, while one person dies every ten seconds, that population is growing by one person every 17 seconds. Sometime around 2075, the United Nation predicts that the global population will peak around 10 billion people, so population isn’t shrinking, as the pronatalists imply, but it is growing. The problem is that the population is not growing uniformly across the globe, starving some regions of bodies and leaving over populated areas to starve.

The population of China, Russia, Japan, and much of Europe peaked in 2024. The population of Iran, Turkey, some of Southeast Asia, and most of Latin America is predicted to peak by 2054. Africa, India, Australia, North America (including the US) should see population growth through 2054 and after.

For China, Russia, Japan, and Europe the stall in birth rates is a problem. These regions are already seeing their young population dwarfed by a growing number of people age 65 and older, a situation which greatly impacts everything from economic productivity to the conditions in which people age. Already, countries such as Italy and Japan are seeing once populous parts of their lands left uninhabited, something that deeply impacts their tax base and economy, and, with Italy, leads to further depopulation as young people emigrate to other countries to make a living. The rest of Europe, Canada, and the United States would be in a similar situation if not for immigration.

Japan is notoriously strict on immigration. Canada is not easy to emigrate to. Italy has been restricting its immigration system, as have most of Europe and the United States. Most of the rest of the world keep on making babies, but those babies are staying put (or being turned away from countries who need population growth). Obviously, countries that are in a population bind due to low birthrates and/or depopulation need more people, there are plenty of folks living in regions with positive birth rates who could encourage emigration to countries who are or claim to be in a de- or low population crisis. That seems like common sense.

Not so for the pronatalist crowd and that is no surprise. While pronatalists say that they are pro-baby, they leave one key word out, “white.” Pronatalists are pro-white baby. They don’t say it outright, though super-breeders like Elon Musk do ramble on about “Western Culture,” while demonizing non-white immigration. Here’s Musk at a 2023 right-wing conference in Italy. After falsely stating that the global population is in decline, Musk says,

One can’t depend on other countries for immigration, and in fact, if you look at say the population worldwide, it’s almost everywhere in the world, and it seems to be a function of almost how – once a country industrializes, once a country urbanizes, the population conveniently starts to decline. We don’t want Japan to disappear, we don’t want Italy as a culture to disappear, we don’t want France’s culture to disappear, I think we have to maintain a sort of reasonable cultural identity [!] of various countries or we simply will not be those countries.

Back in April, in a “truly obvious” echo of the Nazi Heinreich Himmler, Musk tells far right Italian politician Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini,

This is a fundamental concept that is truly obvious. I mean, if you took the people of Italy and you teleported the people of Italy to, say, some part of the United States, it would still be Italy. But if you teleported a bunch of people from some other part of the world to Italy, where they're telling people no longer because they've been teleported to America, then the geographic region would no longer be Italy. It would be that other country. A country is its people, not its geography.

Not only does the nonsensical Musk confuse the definition of country (the land of a person's birth, residence, or citizenship) with nation (a territorial division containing a body of people of one or more nationalities), per Webster, his words are that of a “racial identitarian” or “ethno-nationalist.” Once again, Musk is throwing up another Seig Heil.

And it’s not only Musk. Besides Musk, the Trump administration is stocked with pronatalist white supremacists at the highest level. JD Vance has spearheaded the admin’s drive to enact pronatalist policies, including “baby bonuses” (a paltry $5,000 gift per spawn) and a Medal of Honor for women who have six or more babies, an idea stolen from Nazi Germany’s Honor Cross of the German Mother, part of its Lebensborn program (which followed Hitler’s drive for more land – Lebensraum. If taking over Greenland and annexing Canada come to mind, shame on you!).

Further, if Trump, Vance, and Musk’s concern was truly about all American babies, they wouldn’t cut funds to combat maternal and infant deaths, this while the US is experience a spike in deaths of mothers during childbirth, a trend that has magnified in states with abortion restrictions, and which impacts Black and Brown women more than white moms. Trump’s trio would also not attempt to cover-up these facts by gutting data collection efforts.

No, none of this is about maintaining a healthy population for productivity and the economy. Trump, Vance, Musk, and the pronatalist movement is about white supremacy. Their goal is that of the most hardcore white power advocates, as stated in the infamous 14 Words: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children" and outlined in the white nationalist Great Replacement Theory. The mainstream media won’t say it and the Democrats are too scared to speak it, but I will: This is what we are fighting against: A full-blown white power presidential administration and movement. These people are Nazis.