"I did mine because I have six children. Now you do your thing," Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg asked GB News viewers. Not so long ago, politicians were panicking about overpopulation. Now they worry that there are - or will be - too few people in the world. "There is one critical outcome where liberal individualism has completely failed, and that is babies," said one of the Tory rising stars, Miriam Cates MP, at the Conservative Party conference in May.
The rise of natalism was caused by the decline in birth rates around the world. According to one study, in 1950 women gave birth to an average of 4,7 children in their lifetime. By 2017, the average had dropped to 2,4, and by 2100 it is predicted to fall below 1,7. England and Wales are already close to that level, as the birth rate has fallen from 2,9 in 1964 to 1,61 in 2021, marking what Cates says is a "population collapse".
As a solution, many countries actively implement policies to increase the number of children born, although the effectiveness of these programs is debatable. In Japan and South Korea, the downward trend has not stopped even after several decades of such policies.
In Europe, the drive to increase family size is led by right-wing populists, especially in Hungary, Poland and Italy. Their policies are widely recognized by conservatives in other countries as well.
However, right-wing natalism also contains a paradox. Studies have shown that the biggest and most long-lasting positive impact on birthrate growth comes from wider access to quality, well-funded public childcare services, as well as increased paid parental leave, while tax reforms and cash payments produce weak and temporary results at best.
Despite this, conservative natalists insist on their approach. In recent years, the disastrous policy of canceling social assistance after the second child has been implemented in Britain, which practically punishes people if they have more children, and pushes larger families into poverty.
It would be logical to expect self-proclaimed natalists to oppose policies that penalize people with larger families. It's just the opposite. Cates and Rees-Mogg support this limitation. Cates also opposes government plans to extend the right to free childcare and calls for tax reform to encourage mothers to stay at home instead. Right-wing natalists may wish people had more babies - but only the desirable kind of people and only within the desirable family structure. Their political program relies on the fear of immigration and demographic changes on the one hand, and the fear of the breakdown of traditional gender roles on the other. All this is united in his policy by the favorite natalist of Western conservatives - Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
In his 2019 address to the nation, Orbán announced a series of natalist measures, including the abolition of income tax for women raising at least four children. Rejecting the idea that immigration is the solution to the declining number of births in Europe, Orbán insists that "we need Hungarian children... For us, migration is surrender."
"If in the future Europe is going to be inhabited by people who are not Europeans," Orbán said at a demography summit in Budapest later that year, "then we are practically agreeing to population replacement: a process in which the European population is replaced by someone else." It was a transparent allusion to the Great Replacement Theory - the far-right belief that leftist elites are replacing native Europeans with immigrants. Immigration, Orban insisted at the next summit on demography, is a question of identity. For him, only white Christians are acceptable migrants, while all others, especially Muslims, are invaders.
The association of baby production with the protection of racial identity and Western civilization has a long history. At the end of the 19th century, future US President Theodore Roosevelt claimed that the "competition of the races" amounted to a "cradle war". That idea has become a key motif in contemporary far-right circles. "The cradle is," claims Adriano Šjanka, a leading member of the neo-fascist organization CasaPound, "the most powerful weapon"; when "cradles are empty, civilization dies".
It is not only the extreme right that associates civilization with the cradle. Orbán has become a star among mainstream conservatives, who are attracted to his demographic vision of the West. They are concerned about the "decline of the white population" and the expulsion of Europeans from their homelands and are supporters of the great replacement theory. Many associate the concern over the falling birth rate with the fear that Europe will lose its racial identity. "Fertility in Africa and the Middle East is enormous," lamented writer Lionel Shriver in a polemic against anti-natalists. Without a drastic change, she claims, "European nations and their diaspora will disappear."
If resistance to immigration is one pole of right-wing natalism, the other is the maintenance of traditional gender roles, with the desire for women to be stay-at-home mothers. The development of public childcare services, Cates argues, "devalues the crucial role of motherhood". For Cates, "you cannot be socially liberal and economically conservative."
In Hungary and Poland, natalist policies go hand in hand with restrictive policies on abortion and contraception. They also fit in with the resistance to the gay community. "The Western left is attacking the traditional family model," Orbán claimed, "relativizing the concept of family" and promoting the idea that gay couples are equally capable of providing children with a good family life. This, Orban claims, is "LGBTQ propaganda". Italy also, under Giorgio Meloni, joined the attack on the gay community in the name of protecting the traditional family.
There are good reasons to expand access to public childcare services and paid parental leave; not because it might increase the fertility rate, but because such policies are good for women, children and society. We need to think more concretely about the consequences of the decline in the birth rate and the policies needed to respond to it and admit that immigration cannot be the only solution, but it will probably be part of the solution.
Meanwhile, concerns about falling birthrates are being used to fuel hostility toward immigrants, radicalize the debate over identity issues, and curtail the rights of women and gays. Huge injustices are sold to us in family packaging.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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