Opinion | Population Growth Isn’t a Progressive Issue. It Should Be.

JD Vance has repeatedly said that Americans aren’t having enough children. Other right-wing figures agree with him. Elon Musk, broadening the complaint, has said that “population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”

Because population decline is widely seen as a conservative issue, many progressives don’t seem to worry about it. But they should. If left unchecked, population decline could worsen many of the problems that progressives care about, including economic inequality and the vulnerability of marginalized social groups.

This doesn’t mean adopting the conservative case wholesale. Progressives need to develop their own version of pronatalism. It should stress the need for government benefits and social services like paid parental leave and subsidized child care while defending the right to abortion and rejecting the traditionalism and nativism that too often characterize the position on the right.

Skepticism about pronatalism is understandable, since the position frequently comes packaged with regressive ideas about race and gender. Prominent pronatalists like Tucker Carlson have spoken of the need to resist the “great replacement,” in which white people will be displaced by people of other races. Some proposals for increasing fertility rates call for outlawing abortion and restoring a culture in which women marry young and stay out of the work force, “freeing” them to have veritable broods of children.

In addition, some of the causes of population decline — higher levels of education and more career opportunities for women, greater reproductive freedom and lower rates of teen pregnancy — should be celebrated.

But right-wing packaging should not obscure the genuine perils to which pronatalism is a response. When populations decline, the average age of people in the population increases. This has several harmful consequences. Eventually, there are not enough young people to care for older people and to economically support them through contributions to social programs; to fuel economic growth, technological innovation and cultural progress; and to fund government services.