LIBERATED, INFORMED, AND RESPONSIBLE CHOICES
Beyond Pronatalism
What is Pronatalism?
Having a child is one of the most important decisions that individuals or couples make in their lives. It can be a genuinely joyful and meaningful life path. However, authentic and informed decisions about planning one’s family configuration and size are strongly undermined by social pressures and norms.
Pronatalism is a set of social beliefs, assumptions, and forces across different cultures that pressure people—especially women, into having children. These pressures are a source of much confusion, suffering, as well as reproductive and social injustice around the world. Pronatalism is also at the heart of our unchecked population growth.
Motherhood as a Mandatory Role
Laura Carroll, Author “The Baby Matrix” on pronatalism and overpopulation
Current social and political pro-natalist norms promote motherhood as a necessary part of women’s normal adult role. The idea that all women want to be—and should be—mothers undermines fully-informed and free decision-making about having children. It can be an especially damaging force in countries with male-dominated, religiously conservative, and militaristic cultures, where women have little reproductive autonomy.
Pronatalism is equally pervasive in industrialized secular countries. However, because the cultural norms and policies are framed in strong family-centered terms—and regarded as somehow attuned to life and to women’s natural desires—they remain largely invisible.
Reproductive Coercion
Orna Donath, Author “Regretting Motherhood” on pronatalism in Israel
Pronatalism operates from a place of power and fear rather than a genuine care for people and their potential children. Pronatalist pressures can be overt or more subtle. Politicians want more taxpayers, religious leaders more members, corporations more workers and consumers, and military leaders bigger armies. The unfortunate end goal of all these pro-natalist pressures is the same—to treat numbers as more important than individual well-being.
Religious and patriarchal pronalist structures around the world, but especially in low and middle income countries, are mired in a type of population control that pressures women and girls into procreating.
Baby-bust alarmism, another kind of pronatalism, has been on the rise in middle to high income countries. Growth-focused economists and politicians, some compounded with nationalistic agendas, are pressuring women to have more children by actively preventing access to family planning education, contraception and abortion services, in addition to offering baby-bonuses. Some examples of countries employing such alarmism to promote births include China, Iran, Russia, India, Turkey, Hungary, Greece, the US, and Poland. In addition to violating reproductive rights, such pronatalist pressures view babies as commodities without much regard for their welfare needs.
Social pressures for childbearing remain far stronger than social pressures to control births. But, because pro-natalist pressures are often disguised in the well-accepted belief that having children is natural and normal, they are taken for granted and more difficult to see and challenge.
Victims of Coercive Pronatalism
In communities where women have limited or no reproductive freedom, they are repeatedly subjected to the extremely dangerous process of childbirth with limited or no prenatal or postnatal care. Approximately 270 million women worldwide (WHO) experience major barriers to family planning education and contraceptive uptake, rooted in fear and misinformation about contraception.
Globally, one in four girls does not attend secondary school, and one in five girls is married before her 18th birthday. Child marriage robs girls of a bright future. And pregnancy and childbirth at a young age carry a high risk of death and injury. Children born under such circumstances often do not have their most basic needs met and are subjected to a life of hardship and suffering.
Continued population growth in disadvantaged communities can make it impossible to escape from poverty and ecological degradation. Parents have little money to invest in each child—and the health of land, water, and air suffers, as more and more people have less and less to fulfill their basic needs.
As things stand, younger and future generations face the prospect of significant reversals in human rights. Mountains of evidence show that because of population-driven threats, children born today and in the future will live “an unprecedented life”, facing “conditions which older generations have never experienced. According to the most recent report from UNICEF, almost half the world’s 2.2 billion children are already at “extremely high risk” from the impacts of the climate crisis and pollution. The inequities created by unsustainable growth policies have other significant impacts on children, such as the estimated 356 million children who live in extreme poverty worldwide.
Dr. Amrita Nandy, Author “Motherhood and Choice” on pronatalism in India
Pronatalism Undermines Reproductive Responsibility
In communities where women are educated, have a higher standard of living, and have more reproductive autonomy, pronatalism still impacts people in many ways. With the growing awareness of the benefits of small families for individuals and the planet, many people are increasingly considering foregoing parenthood.
However, cultural notions of “the biological clock”, “the maternal instinct”, and masculine virility perpetuate these pro-natalist pressures and prevent an authentic discussion around family choices. Current family planning policies promote reproduction and punish those who don’t want or have biological children. The stigmatization of the childfree and childless both socially and politically make it difficult for people to make responsible reproductive choices.
Lack of access to comprehensive sexuality education as well as reproductive services and care remains a major challenge even in industrialized countries. In the US, 45% of pregnancies are unintended, with nearly one million unwanted children born each year. Children remain the often invisible victims of pronatalism with nearly 424,000 children in foster care in the United States on any given day.
Furthermore, having one fewer child in industrialized countries like Canada is over 20 times more effective than other high-impact personal actions that one can take to reduce their carbon footprint, such as going car-free, flying less, or becoming vegan. Our global ecological footprint is at least 75% larger than the planet can support sustainably. Those of us living in high-income countries like the US and Canada are consuming several times our equitable share of the global biocapacity, compared to people in low income countries. That is why our procreative choices have an enormous impact on the planet and marginalised communities.
Population Balance Advisor Maxine Trump discusses the pervasive social pressures to have children in this interview.
Challenging Pronatalism Is Not Antinatalist
Opposing pronatalism is not anti-birth or antinatalist. We represent a position of anti-pronatalism, which means that we oppose pronatalism so that people can make liberated, informed, and responsible procreative choices free from pervasive cultural pressures. Our goal is to promote societal conditions where people are neither pressured into having children or scorned for having them, such that people arrive at the decision to procreate with maximum autonomy, education, and informed responsibility. We believe that neutralizing pronatalism will lead us to not only a more liberated relationship to our own lives but also a more stable population size.
A Humane and Child-Centric Family Planning Model
The current isolation model of family planning is one in which potential parents are seen as individual entities apart from their prospective children and the communities in which they live, whereby the rights of prospective children are not recognized and the voices of communities are not heard. This current normative model of family planning is unsustainable, antisocial, and based largely on subjective parental choice, which is often influenced by strong pronatalist forces. It does not adopt a holistic and objective focus that includes the rights of prospective children and their communities, who have just as much, if not more, at stake in family planning.
This can be achieved through a child-centric family-planning model — what we call a humane family-planning model — by enacting universal policies that promote delayed parenthood, parental readiness, smaller families, and equitable family planning entitlements. Such a model would ensure that the right to have children is balanced with an obligation towards children — both present and future, while affording people relative freedom from pronatalist pressures and respecting ecological and planetary boundaries.
Our Vision for Liberated and Informed Choices
We envision a future where people can make free and informed family choices for themselves, their families, and the planet - including how they define their family. Moving beyond pronatalism is essential for achieving true equality across genders and across generations.
It can give all people—especially women—the freedom to create fuller expressions of their own identity and capacity. Moving beyond pronatalism allows everyone to seek meaning in their lives as they define it, with or without children, free from oppressive social pressures.
Governments and community institutions have a responsibility to promote sustainable and equitable investments in family planning and families by educating about the benefits of delayed parenthood, birth spacing, and smaller families (for those who choose to have children). These benefits include greater financial stability and health, better social and emotional outcomes, higher standards of living, greater women’s empowerment, greater investment in each child, and a more sustainable planet. Family planning interventions are also the most effective way to reduce population growth and improve human well-being while simultaneously preventing ecological collapse. These should be emphasized not only as a means of supporting the realization of individual rights but also as advancing the legitimate goal of creating equitable and sustainable birth conditions.
Education
We offer the following services free of charge to help make the connections between pronatalism, reproductive and social justice, and overpopulation, as well as solutions:
Collaboration
We support and partner with organizations that advocate for social and reproductive justice as well as a sustainable population through initiatives, such as:
Providing rights-based family planning education and services, especially accessible and affordable contraception
Improving educational opportunities for girls and young women
Campaigning for incentivized family planning policies that promote the highest levels of reproductive responsibility
Supporting the integration of sustainable population, ecological overshoot, and comprehensive sexuality education into school curricula