‘American women, give birth’: Musk’s pronatalism makes inroads into the Trump administration

Everyone’s attention was drawn to the image of a child with a tech product name — X Æ A-Xii — in the Oval Office alongside his father, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump. But while most saw a four-year-old, the U.S. president saw “a high IQ individual.” The description could be dismissed as just another eccentric remark from the Republican president, but his words hint at the heated debate over birth rates that is gaining traction among the far right and Silicon Valley leaders.

In recent months, the Trump administration has moved closer to the pronatalist movement, which argues that governments should encourage procreation in order to raise the birth rate. This movement, while not new, is on the rise in the United States and other countries in the global north. During his election campaign, Trump said he wanted a “baby boom,” and a few weeks ago, he fantasized about being remembered as “the fertilization president.”

For years, pronatalists, like Musk — a father of 14 children with four women — have been making apocalyptic warnings about the threat posed to humanity by declining birth rates. “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” Musk said in a message on X.

But according to the organization Population Connection, in its article Pronatalism in the United States: The Trump Administration’s Push for More Births, that claim is “completely absurd,” given that the global population is growing by 70 million people per year and is projected by the U.N. to rise from 8.2 billion to over 10 billion by the 2080s.

The idea, then, is that not all people are equal — nor are all births considered equally valuable in serving the utilitarian goal of increasing the population for the purpose of social replacement. As Luke Munn, a researcher in Digital Cultures and Societies at the University of Queensland, writes in The Conversation: “Pronatalism is inextricably tied to nationalism alongside race, class and ethnicity.”

In 2023, the Hispanic population drove the majority of demographic growth in the United States, according to the latest Census Bureau report. Of the 1.64 million new Americans, 1.16 million were Latino — accounting for nearly 71% of the total population increase. President Trump’s ongoing crusade against immigration — particularly Hispanic immigration — and his promise of the largest mass deportation in U.S. history, is forcing the Republican administration to reframe its policies around boosting birth rates exclusively among U.S. citizens.

Among the proposals under consideration, according to The New York Times, are prioritizing married mothers for Fulbright scholarships, a $5,000 “baby bonus” for new mothers, and even offering menstrual cycle education to help women identify optimal times for conception. But the messaging, more than any specific policy or ad campaign, has been in motion since the campaign trail. In January, Vice President J.D. Vance declared: “I want more babies in the United States of America!”

This push for higher birth rates stands in direct contrast to key tenets of modern feminism, particularly the right to reproductive freedom and the choice to have children — or not — and to decide how many. The ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, architect of Project 2025, widely seen as a roadmap for Trump’s second term, republished an article in December 2024 titled Here’s How to Actually Reverse the Baby Bust, which criticizes U.S. higher education for encouraging an “artificially extended adolescence.”

“Current education policies push people to delay having families [...] and impose barriers to accessing religious education, both of which significantly reduce fertility rates,” write authors Jay P. Greene and Lindsey M. Burke.

“U.S. higher education policies provide enormous incentives for more people to attend universities, take longer to complete their degrees, select degrees with negative returns on investment, and pursue advanced degrees at much higher rates than if we did not have such programs,” the article continues. “In particular, highly subsidized student loans encourage more people to enroll and remain in higher education longer than they would if they fully bore the cost of their schooling.”

In vitro fertilization

But even within the political right, among those advocating for higher birth rates, there are deep divisions. Just weeks after taking office, Trump signed an executive order to expand access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) and lower its cost. IVF is rejected by segments of the Republican Party that uphold traditional and religious family values, while embraced by Silicon Valley’s tech elite.

Although Elon Musk hasn’t publicly addressed the issue, it’s widely known that many of his children were conceived via IVF. The New York Times, citing a source close to the world’s richest man, reported: “Mr. Musk has said that I.V.F. is a more efficient way of having children because it allows parents to control parts of the process.”

Musk’s 20-year-old trans daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson — who has been estranged from her father for some time — recently posted on Threads: “My assigned sex at birth was a commodity that was bought and paid for. So when I was feminine as a child and then turned out to be transgender, I was going against the product that was sold.”

The leading exponents of the pronatalist movement are Malcolm and Simone Collins, parents of four children through in vitro fertilization, who plan to have at least 10. The couple — the founders of Pronatalist.org — openly defends (and uses) genetic embryo selection, but rejects accusations that they are promoting eugenics to create children who are smarter, healthier and better looking — what Donald Trump might call “high IQ-individuals.”

The Collinses have submitted several proposals to the current Republican administration, including awarding a National Medal of Motherhood to women with six or more children. Simone also ran unsuccessfully for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 2024 as a Republican.

The activist couple embraces controversy as a defense of their unconventional lifestyle, which they frame as a selfless contribution to society. “I’m happy to die in labor,” Simone told The Washington Post earlier this year after leaving a fertility clinic.

In the February article, the newspaper reported that when a photographer visited them at their Pennsylvania farm, “Malcolm proposed dressing Simone up in her ’Handmaid’s Tale hat’ and that she serve a Jell-O dinner (‘very 1950s’) — with the intent of stirring up outrage."

Staging a photoshoot to mimic Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel (and its hit TV adaptation), in which fertile women are enslaved to bear children, seemed, to them, like a lot of fun.

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