My wife and I had lunch recently with dear friends and their incandescent, cheerful 3 year-old daughter. And as she playfully jabbed at her bento box, our conversation naturally turned toward — what else — parenthood.
We have no children, but a family is certainly on our radar. When we purchased our home, I rationalized that the house with the nice backyard was something we did for our dog. Picking a school district, though, was not something we did with a canine in mind.
So between bites of spicy tuna roll, I asked (politely) invasive questions about parenthood and parenting.
“How did you do this?” I said, gesturing at their daughter.
Blank stares.
“Wait. No,” I stammered. “I mean, how did you raise her to be this delightful?”
As a toddler, she’s polite, precocious, conversational, thoughtful. I spent half our meal wondering how this little girl’s social grace somehow exceeded my own. Our friends were game to answer, and to not only encourage us to become parents, but to have many children.
And I, a dork, spent several of the following hours thinking about family policy, and when wanting (or not wanting) to have children turns into “pronatalism.” That movement of encouraging larger families to avert society’s collapse is something I’ve covered as a rising tide within the Republican Party, and particularly among the MAGA-aligned Heritage Foundation.
I scooped in September about a draft of Heritage’s “Manhattan Project” for more babies, then again in January when the full paper was published. Some highlights of the report, from my January story:
A report from the Heritage Foundation, titled “Saving America by Saving the Family,” urges President Donald Trump and lawmakers “to save and restore the American family” through massive tax credits for families with more children while capping alimony payments, enacting strict work requirements on social benefit programs, discouraging online dating, creating marriage “bootcamp” classes and more.
The report suggests public-private partnerships to honor and provide monetary awards for every decade a couple remains married. It calls for a 16-year-old age limit on social media and certain AI chatbots, and further age restrictions on access to pornography, and it argues that “climate change alarmism” demoralizes young people and dissuades them from having children.
The emphasis on the last part is mine, and it meshes with some public opinion data that’s been rattling around my head recently, too.
A poll from YouGov this month found that Americans are more likely to see overpopulation as a problem than underpopulation. That result holds both for the U.S. population and that of the whole world.
Americans — 61 percent, according to YouGov’s results — broadly feel they “must change their way of living so as to minimize their impact on the world's resources and environment.”
Heritage appears to stare this right in the face.
“For half a century, radical environmentalists have portrayed humans as a threat to the planet—and called for population control as the solution,” its paper states. “‘Population growth,’ people are told, ‘threatens environments at global, national and regional scales.’”
But while Americans are concerned about overpopulation, few say they want to change their own family planning behavior: 48 percent say they want the same number of children as they currently have, and 47 percent say they want more children, per YouGov.
Thinking about policy and public opinion questions like this is a great way to avoid thinking about what I want, at least for now.
But questions of population are also key drivers of the policy and political dynamics I’m covering. Vice President JD Vance is an outspoken pronatalist. So is House Speaker Mike Johnson. The fight to lead the Republican Party after Donald Trump will involve this question — and larger questions about how the party of limited government hopes to expand government’s role in family life.
The bedrock belief in infinite population growth also underpins many of the U.S.’s economic programs — tax policy, Social Security, federal borrowing — even as some recent studies have argued declining birth rates are less of a fiscal concern than previously thought, and that pronatalism can create its own economic drags.
I start my new position at Reuters on Monday (!), and I’m looking for stories that follow these themes. Got any ideas? Or questions you want me to dig into?
Email me at [email protected] and contact me securely on Signal at jacobbogage.87. And follow me on Bluesky: @jacobbogage.bsky.social.
