To Give Birth or Not to Give Birth
Global fertility decline has made reproduction a site of reactionary family policies and moralized childlessness. But a healthy society would let people choose to have children or not without turning that choice into a moral adjudication.
Pronatalist and antinatalist positions are becoming magnified in reaction to falling birth rates. Both miss aspects of a deeper problem: care being privatized, moralized, and foisted onto the family unit alone. (Billie Weiss / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images)
In her book The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson describes pregnancy as an experience marked by a peculiar duality. On the one hand, it is deeply transformative, bodily alien, sometimes almost incomprehensible to the person undergoing it. On the other hand, pregnancy is one of the most socially accepted — nearly invisible — states one can inhabit. The same paradox applies to parenthood. At a societal level, it appears as an almost self-evident life choice: something statistically expected of most people and silently assumed as a precondition for the survival of the state and the welfare system. Yet for the individual, the decision to become a parent is rarely self-evident. On the contrary, it is often one of the most far-reaching and irreversible decisions a person can make, saturated with hope, anticipation, fear, and anxiety. Having children is simultaneously norm and exception, routine and existential leap.
In a time marked by economic and political uncertainty, fewer and fewer people are taking that leap. Birth rates are falling, and what long appeared stable now looks fragile. In 2024, the Swedish government appointed a commission on “A Future with Children” after the fertility rate dropped to around 1.4 children per woman — a historic low, not seen since the eighteenth century. This development is far from unique. Declining fertility has become a global pattern, particularly pronounced in high-income countries but increasingly visible in parts of Asia and Latin America as well. Across much of Europe and North America, fertility lies well below replacement level, with Italy, Spain, and South Korea as extreme cases. Even countries long associated with high birth rates, such as India, have seen sharp declines. Only parts of sub-Saharan Africa maintain relatively high fertility rates, though even there a downward trend is evident.
This is therefore not a cultural quirk or national anomaly but a worldwide shift with profound implications for the global economy and future systems of care. Ultimately, it reflects how political instability and increasingly conditional promises of the future intervene in the most basic of human decisions. A 2025 report from the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) shows that young working-class households often postpone or forgo having children due to economic precarity and fear of future hardship. Other studies suggest that climate anxiety also affects people’s willingness — or courage — to take the existential leap of parenthood.
Fewer births pose problems, particularly for the state. Over time, low fertility produces aging populations, placing pressure on pension systems, health care, and the balance between working and dependent populations. In capitalist economies dependent on growth and labor supply, this is often framed as a systemic threat: fewer workers, a shrinking tax base, weaker growth. As the future of the capitalist welfare state appears increasingly uncertain, reproduction reemerges as an explicit political problem. Governments speak of the need to “enable” childbearing, while a different language gains traction — one focused on demographic balance, dependency ratios, and future labor supply.
The Repoliticization of Reproduction
This framing is not merely economic or administrative. Falling birth rates are frequently nationalized, as when Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, at the Budapest Demographic Summit, criticized Western countries for addressing population decline through immigration and instead advocated aggressive pronatalist family policies. Anxiety over the nation’s future fuels restrictive immigration regimes alongside efforts to steer reproduction through financial incentives, moralizing discourse, and, in some cases, direct curtailments of women’s reproductive rights. In countries such as the United States and Poland, the “pro-life” movement has made alarming advances. By August 2024, seventeen US states had enacted sweeping abortion bans, some as early as six weeks into pregnancy. Poland allows abortion only in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the woman’s life — rendering access practically impossible for most.
These assaults on bodily autonomy coincide with the normalization of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which claims that white populations in Europe and North America are being deliberately replaced by nonwhite migrants. This ideology fuels a politics that restricts reproductive rights for some while encouraging reproduction among others to preserve a white demographic majority. Here the nuclear family becomes a political instrument, mobilized in service of an exclusionary and racist vision of society. Reactionary family policy is never for all families — only for certain ones. While the great replacement theory is often associated with fringe extremism, it has pedigreed antecedents: at the 1965 United Nations World Population Conference, “overpopulation” was framed as a central global problem, and population control measures targeting the Global South were actively promoted.
At the same time, as welfare states retreat, we see a clear trend toward the “refamilialization” of social reproduction — the shifting of care responsibilities back onto families. When public services such as childcare, eldercare, health care, and income support are cut or privatized, the burden falls on private households. The family becomes a central node in the social safety net, concentrating economic support, physical care, and emotional labor within the same unit. This development reinforces traditional gender roles. Women, who already perform the majority of unpaid care work globally, are disproportionately affected, while social inequalities deepen as resource-poor families struggle to meet rising demands.
The Pronatal Position
A crucial blind spot of pronatalist policy is unpaid female care labor. Pronatalism focuses on births, not on the long-term labor of care that children require. Care is treated as a logistical issue to be solved by institutions, markets, or private families. But care is relational, time-consuming, and emotionally demanding. When states call for more children without renegotiating how care is distributed, they reproduce a gendered division of responsibility. Women are expected not only to give birth but to shoulder most of the labor that follows. Pronatalism thus fits into a broader pattern in which reproductive labor is rhetorically acknowledged but practically devalued — treated as an invisible background condition.
Pronatalism is hardly new. Throughout the twentieth century, population policy was central to many states’ self-understanding, often intertwined with nationalism, pseudoscientific racism, and social engineering. Fascist Italy launched a “Battle for Births” in the 1920s and ’30s, linking women’s reproduction directly to national strength, offering incentives for large families while criminalizing contraception and abortion. The Soviet Union introduced pronatalist measures during and after World War II to offset demographic losses, including taxes on childless adults. Nazi Germany fused family policy and racial ideology, rewarding “Aryan” reproduction while violently excluding others.
Given this history, pronatalism appears unequivocally reactionary. Yet it can also be understood differently. Any society, regardless of its political system, depends on people being born and caring for one another. From this perspective, concern over declining fertility can be linked to traditions of welfare and feminist politics rather than racial discipline or authoritarian control. The key question becomes why people do not have children — and how states might make family formation easier without coercion.
In “After the Family Wage: Gender Equity and the Welfare State,” feminist political theorist Nancy Fraser distinguishes between different welfare state regimes. In the male breadwinner model, childbearing is enabled through women’s economic dependence and unpaid care labor, excluding them from full participation in paid work. The universal breadwinner model promotes women’s employment without reorganizing care, producing a double burden and privatizing the problem of reproduction. Only the caregiver parity (or dual-earner-dual-carer) model — which socializes care through public childcare and generous parental rights — creates real conditions for combining work and childbearing by recognizing care as a collective responsibility. In such contexts, women are more likely to have children. Sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen similarly argues that both deeply traditional and genuinely egalitarian societies tend to have higher fertility, while societies caught between declining patriarchy and incomplete gender equality experience falling birth rates. Where ideals and material conditions clash, the nuclear family falters; where they align, it thrives.
These ideas shaped feminist family policy aimed at building a “women-friendly state,” shifting responsibility for care and provision from private families to public institutions through individual rights, expanded care services, and gender equality policies. Yet this tradition has increasingly been dismissed as tepid reformism or disguised heteronormativity — criticized for failing to challenge the nuclear family and reproduction as ideals.
Family Abolitionism and Antinatalist Ethics
As reproduction becomes a political flash point across the spectrum, an opposing tendency has gained visibility: family abolitionism and antinatalism. These currents reject both conservative and traditional feminist family politics. Family abolitionists argue that the nuclear family reproduces gender oppression and capitalism itself, socializing individuals into capitalist subjects and supplying labor power. From this perspective, abolishing the nuclear family is essential to anti-capitalist struggle. Any pro-family rhetoric is seen as inherently reactionary — what writer Dustin Guastella calls a “nuclear weapon” that must be dismantled.
Antinatalism goes further, questioning whether it is ethical to bring children into the world at all. Reproduction appears not as a contribution to the future but as a moral problem: another life that will consume resources, generate emissions, and inevitably suffer amid ecological collapse and political instability. In climate debates, this has taken the form of movements like BirthStrike, urging people to forgo parenthood as climate action, as well as philosophical arguments such as David Benatar’s claim that it is always better never to be born. These ideas resonate in contemporary lifestyle discourse, where childlessness is framed as an enlightened, responsible choice — a refusal to burden an already strained system.
Both family abolitionism and antinatalism articulate alternative ethics of responsibility beyond the call to reproduce society through the nuclear family. Abolitionists urge us to rethink solidarity and care beyond exclusive family units, arguing that the nuclear family blocks more collective and inclusive forms of care while promoting possessive, antisocial relations. Antinatalism frames childlessness as moral action — sometimes as solidarity with future generations — redefining responsibility as refusal rather than reproduction.
Reproduction, Guilt, and Moral Economy
A striking feature of pronatalist, antinatalist, and abolitionist discourses alike is how reproduction becomes saturated with guilt. Pronatalism frames childlessness as withdrawal and free riding. Antinatalism casts parenthood as irresponsible harm. Abolitionism condemns exclusive familial attachment as selfish possessiveness. This moralization reflects a broader moral economy in which responsibility is increasingly framed as individual choice rather than collective arrangement. Reproduction becomes a decision to be justified before an imagined moral ledger — to the state, the planet, or future generations. Yet these future generations often function as political fictions, mobilized to legitimize action or inaction in the present while lacking agency themselves. When reproduction is reduced to utility — national, economic, or ecological — something essential is lost. Children become either investments or liabilities. What disappears is the question of what it means to live through relationships that cannot be reduced to instrumental value.
Is it possible to think about reproduction without falling into pronatalist or antinatalist calculus — and without dismissing people’s desire for family as false consciousness? I suggest that we treat reproduction as an existential choice: one some people want to make, others do not, without either choice being morally superior by default. This choice is always shaped by political and social conditions. Sometimes refusing reproduction is a response to conditions that make a dignified life difficult. But the most effective way to change those conditions is not to regulate reproduction through norms or calculations but to expand people’s political capacity to choose what they want — grounding reproductive decisions in meaning, relationships, and life projects rather than imperatives.
Such a politics is simultaneously pro- and anti-natalist. It acknowledges the ambivalence of reproduction: that it can be meaningful for some and constraining for others. A noninstrumental approach does not deny the political dimensions of parenthood but refuses to reduce it to a means — whether for national survival, economic growth, or ecological management. Responsibility, then, is not about maximizing or minimizing birth rates, but about creating conditions in which relationships can be formed and sustained without systematically sacrificing certain bodies or groups.
Reproduction thus becomes not merely a matter of family policy, but an ethical and existential project — a way of shaping our lives together in a shared world, where we are allowed to take, or refuse, the existential leap of giving birth. To make that possible, we don’t need anti- or pronatalist politics, but a just society.