Baby fever

The afternoon sun shines down on 3-year-old Torsten’s red hair, setting it aglow. His mother, Simone Collins, smiles with pride. “I love how his flamy hair sticks up at the back.” She gestures toward her older children playing on a wooden play set. “So far we’ve had all different colors,” she says. “Maybe with the next baby, to get the full range, we’ll have to start dyeing hair.”

Simone and her husband Malcolm have four children today. But they hope for a lot more.

Simone looks like a “trad wife” who stepped out of an Instagram account. Her dark blond hair is braided around her head. She wears an ankle-length black jumper but with a modern twist: circular, black-rimmed glasses. Her youngest, a 6-month-old baby, is slung on her back. On the wooden play set, her 2-year-old daughter is swinging in a long dress. The family lives in an idyllic 1790s stone farmhouse in Pennsylvania. They believe it was built by a soldier who served at nearby Valley Forge. Their kitchen has a low ceiling, red brick walls, and copper pots hanging above the stove. Later that afternoon, Simone will cook dinner for the family.

Despite appearances, the Collinses insist their focus is not backward but future-oriented: They are saving humanity from extinction, one kid at a time.

Malcolm and Simone call themselves pronatalists. As birth rates worldwide continue in free fall, the Collinses and other pronatalists are sounding the alarm, hoping to convince people to procreate and policymakers to take action. But in a culture callous to the purpose and value of children, they are finding their message a tough sell. And while pro­natalists agree on the need for more babies, they disagree on almost everything else.

Until recently, dire predictions surrounding depopulation seemed absurd. Worldwide, there’s no shortage of people. For the past two centuries the global human population has steadily climbed. But it’s expected to peak at 10.3 billion people in the 2080s, according to a recent United Nations report. And once it plateaus, within the lifetime of children born today, it will begin to drop at an unprecedented rate, according to Dean Spears, an economic demographer and director of the Population Wellbeing Initiative at the University of Texas, Austin. Spears is co-author of a forthcoming book titled After the Spike.

How rapidly the population declines and whether that is a good or bad thing have become subjects of heated debate among demographers worldwide. Spears told us the coming so-called “demographic winter” is not an urgent crisis yet—at least in the United States. But the economic, political, and social implications for societies where the elderly outnumber working-age populations are already playing out in countries such as Japan, South Korea, Italy, and other parts of Southern Europe.

In 2023, the U.S. fertility rate dipped to its lowest point since the government started tracking it in the 1930s. On average, an American woman will have 1.6 kids in her lifetime, a number that has been steadily declining for the last decade. Last year, the number of U.S. births reached its lowest point since 1979, according to federal data.

Still, Spears believes there’s time for an “inclusive conversation and a search for good ideas.”

Kick-starting that conversation and agreeing on strategies are different matters.

Photo by Bryan Anselm/Redux

AS WE SIT at the long wooden table in their kitchen, the Collinses’ grasp on the depopulation problem makes it feel urgent. Malcolm first punched the numbers while working as a venture capitalist in South Korea. What he learned: For every 100 South Koreans, there will only be roughly six great-­grandchildren. When he ­presented his concerns about a nonexistent South Korean economy 50 to 100 years from now, his employer told him, “Just pretend that’s not happening.”

But he couldn’t, and when he moved back to America, he began studying the fertility rate numbers here. They’re less dismal, but we are headed down the same path, Malcolm says.

“I’m cursed with: I saw the future. I see exactly what’s gonna go wrong. The economic class of our world isn’t pricing fertility collapse into the global economic models. The moment they do, the entire system collapses.”

As he talks, loudly, Malcolm makes broad gestures with his arms. Unfazed by the noise and her father’s dire predictions, baby Industry dozes in her sling. Simone chimes in but speaks slower, choosing her words with care. Her quiet intensity shows she’s no less passionate about the pronatalist cause than her husband.

If it were only about economic forecasting, the Collinses might convince more people. But in a culture where it’s taboo to prod individuals or families to have children, let alone have a lot, the Collinses feel compelled to “yell from the rooftop,” Malcolm says. Today, that means YouTube, X, and their website, podcast, and media engagements.

The couple is gaining an audience as they put their family and viewpoints—including some eccentric and radical ones—on display. Their podcast, Based Camp, garners about 400,000 views per month. In March, the couple will headline the second Natal Conference in Austin, Texas. Several hundred people attended the first conference in 2023, despite ticket prices that ranged from $500 to $1,000. Those prices “did a good job of selecting a high bar of a person,” Simone said. “Everyone there was a tech entrepreneur of some sort or in media or in government.”

Photo by Bryan Anselm/Redux

THE COUPLE MAINTAINS ties to high-profile Silicon Valley tech elites, many of whom are also pronatalists. Simone is a San Francisco Bay Area native. Malcolm earned his MBA at Stanford University. In 2022, tech billionaire Elon Musk called the collapsing birth rate “the biggest danger civilization faces, by far.” He has 12 children with three different women and has donated $10 million in funding a natalist research group. Others, including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Skype founder Jaan Tallinn have funded fertility technology and other pronatalist initiatives, including the Collinses’ foundation.

Within these circles, pronatalism “is not at all some fringy thing that people are skeptical of,” said Brit Benjamin, an attorney who specializes in family law in San Francisco and is a friend of the Collinses. Benjamin is also a law lecturer who writes about reproductive biotechnology.

Benjamin met the Collinses more than a decade ago when they lived in the Bay Area. While there was plenty of wrangling over the value of raising children, especially among women in the workforce, she says, “In the last 15 years, there’s been an inching toward the realization that a movement is required to counter the overbearing rhetoric that permeates the rest of culture.” That rhetoric deems child-rearing and marriage as “low status, draining, unpleasant, and economically unfeasible,” she added.

At the first Natal Conference, she spoke about the role no-fault divorce laws have had on declining birth rates. Benjamin believes the “anti-child and anti-family rhetoric” in the United States stems from “a growing obsession with individual hedonism.”

That assessment resonates with Christian conservatives, who are also sounding the alarm about the so-called birth dearth and seeking to promote marriage and childbearing. Some are beginning to link arms with pronatalists in the tech world. In September, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, and Lyman Stone from the conservative think tank Institute for Family Studies participated in a breakout panel at a popular tech conference in San Francisco. Their presence “signaled that the low fertility issue could be a key part of the tech-conservative agenda,” one columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote.

Jay Richards, director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at Heritage, said the organization’s participation at the conference derives from a recognition that declining birth rates are “one of the defining cultural and policy issues of the 21st century … something we absolutely have to figure out how to solve.”

WHILE DECLINING BIRTH RATES were hardly a rallying cry in the November elections, plenty of politicians, including Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, used pronatalist talking points, from jabs at “childless cat ladies” to floating proposals for a higher child tax credit. Some commentators suggested the incoming Trump administration’s pivot away from the pro-life movement signaled a shift in approach toward a broader social policy agenda emphasizing the importance of the family.

Globally, many dispute the effectiveness of pronatalist policies. Hungary’s fertility rate rose after it instituted a series of pro-family policies beginning in the early 2000s to combat its shrinking population. But in recent years, it’s dropped again. Japan has embarked on a decades-long rollout of policies to urge people to have more babies—everything from subsidized child care to child care leave and direct cash allowances for having even one child. But they’ve been largely ineffective. In 2023, Japan’s fertility rate dipped to its lowest level since the government began gathering data in 1899.

In June, the Institute for Family Studies announced a new Pronatalism Initiative to research policies that counteract the global fertility decline. The project is led by demographer and senior fellow Lyman Stone. He acknowledged “a lot of unanswered questions about the kinds of policies that might help.” In the U.S., policies such as raising the child tax credit or getting rid of tax penalties for married couples have broad appeal and would likely generate a moderately positive change in birth rates, Stone said. But researchers don’t have enough data on other proposals, such as easing housing regulations, as a means to make family life cheaper and more accessible.

“There’s this misconception of pronatalism that it’s some weird project trying to get people to do some extreme thing,” he said. “What we’re really doing is we’re just standing up and saying it’s a tragedy that normal Americans can’t have the families they want to have.”

Stone argues that family policies that create financial incentives play an important role in shifting cultural patterns around childbearing.

But economist Catherine Pakaluk, a mother of eight and stepmother of six, believes there’s more to it. In her recent book, Hannah’s Children, Pakaluk sought to understand the reasons behind America’s declining fertility rate by talking to the women who have defied it. Since 1990, the number of women aged 40 to 44 with five or more children has lingered at around 5%, according to her research. Pakaluk interviewed 55 highly educated mothers with large families. All had some form of religious beliefs, whether Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, or Mormon. Within these religious frameworks, the goodness of marriage and children are built-in beliefs, though not emphasized enough, she told us. “With so many competing cultural messages, it seems pretty easy for this to go away.”

Pakaluk supports encouraging young women to have families but ultimately believes religion, not tax credits, will bring about the paradigm shift. As a Catholic, she’s also pro-life and opposes birth control and assisted reproductive technologies.

Those views put her at odds with many pronatalists. But in the movement’s infancy, there appears to be plenty of room in the tent for differing ideological visions among conservative and secular pronatalists. “We’re willing to build a coalition of people who recognize the birth dearth as a serious problem, even if we have fundamental disagreements about the best way to fix it,” Heritage’s Jay Richards told us.

But as pronatalism gains traction, the dividing lines may become more apparent.

For the Collinses, pronatalism is not rooted in religion or marriage but in saving the species. On their website, they state they’re “vehemently against authoritarian population control policies” and oppose those who “use pronatalism as an instrument to other ideological or religious ends.” They support “anyone who has kids or may want them, regardless of race, sexuality, income, or other background.”

Already, the Collinses have publicly disputed with Stone, a confessional Lutheran. In posts on X, they claimed his Lutheran values and “socialist agenda” contradict pronatalist policy. They argue he manipulates data to promote an ideological agenda. (Stone disputed those characterizations in a lengthy rebuttal.)

A key disagreement within pronatalism centers on the role of assisted reproductive technology. Stone notes numerous studies show that in vitro fertilization does nothing to boost fertility rates.

But the Collinses emphatically support IVF and other reproductive technology. That’s partly because they rely on IVF to have children—Simone believes a past eating disorder affected her fertility. The Collinses have roughly 40 remaining frozen embryos, not including three they donated to a lesbian couple. Malcolm worries that’s not enough. They hope to have at least seven children, but ideally more. Each embryo has undergone polygenic screening to give Malcolm and Simone “risk scores that show us their relative odds vis-à-vis the larger population of anything from getting Alzheimer’s to schizophrenia, various forms of cancer, but even really trivial stuff like gum disease, acne,” Simone said. “We also have received scores on things like height, IQ, things that are often associated with … earnings and performance and educational attainment.”

Some journalists have labeled the Collinses as “hipster eugenicists.” But they see themselves at the cutting edge of reproductive technology, a burgeoning field that is largely unregulated. Polygenic testing goes hand in hand with artificial wombs, which are nearing human trials as a means to help save premature babies. But the technology could also enable humans to “uncouple reproduction from the human body,” Brit Benjamin said.

All of this is troubling for children’s rights advocate Katy Faust of Them Before Us. She argues that being pro-child should not include discarding or manipulating frozen embryos—or denying children the right to a mother and a father—to meet adults’ needs and desires. Pronatalism “cannot be more babies at the expense of children’s lives and well-being,” she told us.

BACK AT THE COLLINSES’ HOUSE, we move to the kitchen table after Torsten knocks over a glass of milk on the coffee table. “He has a track record with tables,” laughs Simone. The older kids are dispatched to play upstairs.

A loud bang sends Malcolm scrambling up after them. No one was hurt, and when he returns, he prods us back on topic before we lose our window to talk again.

While they’re passionate about their cause, Malcolm and Simone are also in the trenches of child-rearing. Being the public face of the movement has other challenges. The couple has received negative press and death threats. They’ve had Child Protective Services called on them twice.

Concerns about demographic collapse are not all that keeps them pushing forward. The Collinses say they have moved from atheism to wanting to incorporate religion into their family. Now, they say they are “a form of Christian.” But their beliefs about God, Jesus, and church are far from Biblically orthodox.

Still, they seem to recognize that having children is changing them.

“People say, well, what if your children don’t believe exactly what you believe?” Malcolm says as the kids come bounding down the stairs for dinner. “And I say … if we’re wrong, we want them to be right.”