The pro-natalist movement should worry us all

Especially those of us who come from large families...

The New York Times recently ran an extended profile of Sean Duffy, the head of Trump’s Transportation Department. Duffy is the one who suggested that regions of America with higher birthrates should be eligible for more transit funding. The profile devotes much of its focus to the nine children Duffy has had with his wife, Rachel-Campos Duffy. Both parents got their start on reality TV, and their children have been hauled out in front of cameras since their infancy to help promote their shared mission of “making fertility great again.”

We are in a pro-natalist moment right now. The large families of everyone from liberal Hollywood problematic man-child Alec Baldwin’s seven kids with his 26 years younger wife, to wealthy Mormon tradwife Hannah Needleman, aka ballerina farm, participating in a beauty pageant just days after giving birth to her eighth child, to Elon Musk’s 14 children, at least one of whom (who happens to be trans) has stated she wants nothing to do with her father — they are all held up as exemplary of the notion that people with large families can “have it all.”

With birthrates plummeting globally, in some circles, there is a growing idea that large families are “back,” with Duffy even deploying his kids as part of his campaign image, posting videos of them on social media doing wholesome activities like log rolling and making pancakes. The children, like most children whose parents put them on social media, have no say in the matter. They are perpetually made to look as if being part of a large family is all fun and games, unlike the “liberal women” Duffy called out on his podcast, who are “sad, fat, and attracted to beta males” due to birth control and “the most unhappy people ever, because they don’t have kids.”

Probably not a coincidence that when I googled “large families” most of the images were of white people. There are only certain kinds of large families pro-natalists want to encourage.

Lost in these conversations about large families are two factors: one is the socioeconomic reality of what it costs to have more than two or three children. Duffy was a lawyer, Hanna Neelman’s husband is the heir to the Jet Blue fortune, and Elon Musk is, of course, the world’s richest man. Rarely do pro-natalists talk about the large families of working-class Americans – mostly because almost none of them come from working class backgrounds themselves. Children are expensive, which is one of the main reasons why many people delay having them until they’ve reached some kind of career stability.

What is also seemingly never discussed is the reality of what it’s like to be part of a large family. I am from a working-class family of five kids, and am the only person in my peer group to grow up in a family of that size, because by the 70s and 80s, the greater number of women in the workforce, the wide availability of birth control and legalized abortion all meant that men and women alike were much less likely to decide that having that many children was manageable. My parents didn’t plan to have five kids, by the way, but they were also Catholics, so you can fill in some of the gaps on your own.

The reality of being part of a family that size is that it is incredibly difficult for everyone involved. The finances are just the beginning. My father didn’t earn enough to support us and my mother didn’t want to stop working, but they both worked in education and the dollars just did not stretch to cover seven people. We wore second hand clothing, they drove cars that broke down, we ate food from food banks, and I didn’t get on an airplane until I was eighteen because we couldn’t afford vacations that weren’t in a car. When my father died during my freshman year of college, I’m told he had $200 in the bank.

Then there’s the fact that any parent with that many kids is exhausted, even if they have the good fortune not to have to work outside of the home. And exhausted parents can be short-tempered and distracted. You do not get the focused attention of either parent in a family that big, so you settle for scattered moments of it, which can cause issues with attachment styles, self-esteem and mental health down the line. Birth order theory posits that the eldest child gets the most attention, the middle children feel the most neglected, and the youngest will often become extroverted and attention-seeking. This theory is a little broad, but if you’re from a large family, the numbers mean there will always be a clump of kids in the middle feeling unsupported and sometimes unloved.

In a big family, you do learn to fend for yourself when it comes to laundry and chores, and if you’re not the youngest, odds are you can change diapers and feed babies bottles when you’re five or six years old yourself. When my father’s alcoholism was exacerbated by the stress of raising five kids and he dropped dead at 52, that left my mother alone to put the pieces back together. I don’t regret my childhood, and I love my family, but we dealt with many challenges that would have been much less stressful in a smaller family.

The five measures of Adverse Childhood Experience (ACES) that have been shown to impact adult mental and physical health include physical abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, and physical and emotional neglect. The more ACES you have, the more likely you are to experience anxiety, depression, and chronic disease. And the larger a family is, the more likely the children are to experience ACES. Financial stress can lead kids to go hungry or can lead parents to become verbally or physically abusive. In Mormon communities where large families are the norm, child abuse rates are higher than in religious denominations that don’t pressure parents to have so many kids. And, of course, in the Catholic church, larger families once meant a steady stream of young children sent to Catholic schools, where many were horrifically abused.

That latter point has kept me up for many nights lately. When I spent a decade writing for Catholic publications, I just rolled my eyes at headlines that said women should have as many children as possible, since the reality I saw in church was that large families were outliers. There’s a line in the movie Conclave where Stanley Tucci’s character, a liberal Cardinal, says the church cannot go backwards to a time when everyone had a huge family “because mommy and daddy didn’t know better.” And, of course, the statistics are everywhere that something like 99.9% of Catholic women use birth control.

And yet, by writing for these publications part of me was playing a part in the rise of the pro-natalist movement, even while I have always been vocally pro-choice (I have made a monthly donation to Planned Parenthood since college, even when money was tight) and have opted out of having children myself. One reason I quit my job at a Catholic magazine last year was that I heard and saw what people like J.D. Vance were saying about people like me, and I didn’t want to work for publications that agreed with him. The magazine was running fewer stories that I wrote anyway, because they were more interested in stories about motherhood than they were in stories about just about any other topic women can write about.

But my conscience just cannot escape the fact that my work was probably at some point read by people like J.D. Vance, and by others who feel that women without children are condemned to a life of misery, and that they likely thought since I was publishing in those magazines that I agreed with them. I want to state for the record that the answer is hell no. Being a childless woman has made me a better, more empathetic teacher, aunt, spouse, sibling and friend.

And coming from the background of often feeling lost and poor in a large family has also made me attuned to the fact that many women who end up with that many kids will also face challenges I’ll never understand. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t necessarily do it if that’s what they want and if they can afford to feed, clothe and house those kids and give every one of them the same amount of attention. I and most women without kids are not anti-child. Pro choice means being pro-woman and pro-child. It means every woman gets to decide what is best for her and her family. It means the government needs to do more for mothers and children, not less. Telling people to have large families while slashing social services is a recipe for disaster.

But the idea that God somehow desires that every single woman should deal with the physical and mental challenges of bearing 6,7,8 or 9 kids, the idea that God wants our planet to crack and groan under the weight of overpopulation, the idea that God wants children to starve and go without vaccines and for polio and measles to make a comeback? That is the opposite of a merciful god. And we need to have mercy now more than ever.