To keep Canada off Trump’s authoritarian path, we must reject pronatalism and protect women’s rights
This article was published in The Toronto Star on April 26 , 2025.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s recent talking point commiserating with couples in their late 30s whose fertility window is closing and who can’t afford to start families touched a nerve. While it’s true that some couples are starting families later or having fewer children, and Canada’s fertility rate is declining, Poilievre’s rhetoric about women’s biological clocks running out is offensive. Liberals and the NDP rightly condemned it.
While he meant to sound sympathetic, Poilievre calling women’s wombs into service as a means towards political ends should be seen for what it is: Canada’s own brand of pronatalism — societal and institutional pressures on women (mostly from men) to have children. It mirrors U.S President Donald Trump, the self-professed “fertilization president" who uses pronatalism as a cover for rolling back reproductive rights and gender equality.
This is nothing new. Pronatalist ideology arose with patriarchy about 5,000 years ago. Since population growth was crucial for emerging empires and states, women’s role became relegated to reproduction. Millennia of socialization through policies, education, media, and social valuation by religious, ethnonationalist, and economic interests made pronatalism ubiquitous in women’s lives.
Today, pronatalists like Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk, and others stoke alarm about declining fertility, spinning it as a crisis to be reversed. Musk claims “population collapse” from fertility decline is “a much bigger risk” to humanity’s survival than climate change.
This is demonstrably false; there is no collapse. Canada’s population is still growing, like most industrialized countries, despite declining birth rates. Even so, there is no lack of proposals to intervene and boost fertility, from raising the Canada Child Benefit to waging a culture war pressuring women to stay home and raise children.
There is nothing wrong with people wanting to have large families. But cajoling or compelling women to have more children to serve external demographic goals violates their right to make their own reproductive choices. Wherever women gain greater reproductive autonomy, they tend to have fewer children, or none and that can make governments nervous since it means fewer consumers, taxpayers, religious followers, and soldiers.
Poilievre and Jordan Peterson, a right-wing commentator influential among Christian nationalists, discussed “fixing” declining birth rates in a recent interview, where Poilievre averred young people are yearning for “traditional values” just as women with ticking “biological clocks” are yearning for babies.
This is the tip of a dangerous pronatalist spear. The U.S. example demonstrates how birth rate anxiety can descend into misogyny, eugenics, coercion, and criminalization.
It starts with oddball, outlier arguments about needing to triple the population to compete with China and keep the economy growing, strange subcultures of “effective altruism” and “tech-bro pronatalism,” and eugenics-inspired, “weird” pronatalist conferences advocating having as many children as possible, especially genetically superior ones.
Then those outliers are aggressively normalized by well-funded pronatalist think-tanks, like the so-called Population Wellbeing Initiative (PWI) at The University of Texas at Austin, launched with a $10 million donation from avowed pronatalist Elon Musk. They work to infiltrate mainstream media discourse and population research, such as the Population Association of America. At PAA’s recent annual meeting, a special reception feted the launch of a pronatalist book co-authored by PWI founder and Musk beneficiary Dean Spears decrying the supposed dystopian consequences of slow or negative population growth and arguing pronatalism will save us.
Well-intentioned progressives sometimes fall for this tech-funded, Astroturf advocacy. Some go so far as to suggest they should take pronatalism back from JD Vance, Musk and the Right and adopt it themselves as “the ultimate gesture of confidence in the future.”
They’re tragically mistaken. In a time of ecological overshoot, climate change, and growing economic dislocation, pressing women to have more babies and spike population and consumption growth isn’t just grossly misogynistic, it compounds existential crises.
Rather than fighting falling birth rates and aging demographics, progressives should be working with them to frame policies for a livable future, for example by advancing an equitable safety net ensuring quality of life for all.
Progressive flirtation with pronatalism undermines that work. Worse, it normalizes pronatalism, which isn't just a distasteful political ploy. Controlling women’s bodies, asserting they owe society babies, and attacking those who disagree are serious harbingers of authoritarianism.
Vance shaming “childless cat ladies” or proposing giving parents more votes (disenfranchising those without children) are morphing into actual policies — giving preference to communities with higher marriage and birth rates for U.S. Department of Transportation grants, banning reproductive choice and potentially charging women who have abortions with murder, making them subject to the death penalty, unlawfully deporting and jailing immigrants to combat the putative “Great Replacement.”
From there it is not far to the coercive pronatalism and human rights abuses of Russia, China, Romania, Turkey, or Hungary, whose fiercely pronatalist and autocratic leader Viktor Orban Trump admires.
Poilievre losing support indicates voters repudiate the Trumpian path. But to keep Canada off the authoritarian road that Hungary and an “Orbanized” U.S. are paving, progressives and conservatives alike should reject pronatalism, one of its big on-ramps. They should embrace women’s rights, reproductive choice, ecological limits, and slower population growth’s opportunities for a better future.
Nandita Bajaj, Toronto-based executive director of the nonprofit Population Balance, produces and co/hosts the podcasts "OVERSHOOT" and "Beyond Pronatalism," and is a senior lecturer at Antioch University. Her research and advocacy work focus on combined impacts of pronatalism and human expansionism on reproductive, ecological, and intergenerational justice.
