fertility idolatry

online "pronatalism" has jumped the shark

What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, and anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give… An idol is whatever you look at and say in your heart of hearts: ‘If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.’ There are many ways to describe that kind of relationship to something, but perhaps the best one is worship.

Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods

Anything can become an idol. Even goods that a fallen world treats with animosity can become idols, especially when enumerated and upheld as evidence of the piety or superior insight of the “dissidents” who treasure them.

Fertility, for many in the conservative media space, has become one of those goods.

I can already sense my detractors frantically ripping open their mental filing cabinets to provide evidence of declining birth rates worldwide. Why would you say something like this when we are in a fertility crisis?

Allow me to clear my throat for the sake of the implicated: I am aware of and generally share your concern for all of the relevant figures, as well as ambient antinatalism, whether in public policy or social attitudes. I have written about all of these things previously, always in support of a more robust family culture. I support the basic premise of pronatalism: that certain shifts in our political culture can help families in crisis, and to the extent these shifts are reasonable and feasible, we should pursue them.

However factual declining fertility rates may be, they are beside the point of this essay.

Idolatry is not made licit by perceived political necessity. The ends-justify-the-means reasoning that idolatry commonly inspires, including much of what I have already seen and heard so many actors in the conservative media space argue (that “teen pregnancy is good, actually” and “you don’t need financial stability to have children,” spoken explicitly in order to “convince” young women to reproduce early and often, which they must do if “we” are going to “save” Western Civilization by outbreeding the global south), only serves to prove my point: that the kernel of truth in pronatalism has been covered in ideological plaque in recent years.

In highly influential corners of the internet, pronatalism has devolved into a game of identity-building, comparison, woman-hating, and virtue signaling. What may have begun as a genuine concern for the well-being of real families has transmogrified into a utilitarian view of human life, a broad reduction of the profound act of childbearing to a mere tool for achieving ideological or demographic goals. In this essay, I will provide three examples of memes and moments in the discourse that I believe illustrate my point:

• Rhetorical dehumanization of childless people

• Resistance to accountability and prudence

• The diminishment of virtue in favor of demographic goals

Loyal readers, allow me to repeat myself: the internet is reality going the speed limit. Memes germinate and incubate in online communities and spill over eventually into meatspace, especially when gone unchallenged (see: transgenderism on tumblr). Sincere actors need to be aware of the goblins in their ranks—and the real damage they can do, including, of course, undermining legitimate political goals, like supporting and encouraging family formation.

1. “childless cat ladies:” the rhetorical dehumanization of childless people

One common shibboleth that suggests to me that online pronatalism suffers from idolatry is the increasingly popular term “childless,” used not as a statement of fact but as an insult — always directed at women, of course, and often by nominally Christian people and pastors. The term and its usage are consistently reflected in viral memes such as this one:

Those who create, publish, or disseminate these memes believe they are doing the world a service by “shaming” women they see as failing to fulfill their proper role in life. The logic is that women respond to social shaming by conforming with whatever is presented as high status.

As Diane Yap notes, these memes are repulsive to well-adjusted women. Why? Because it’s clearly not about effectively communicating a pronatalist worldview for the benefit of society, as its purveyors would insist. It’s about 1) signaling ideological conformity and 2) inflicting emotional damage.

The venomous undertones—resentment of women, sexual jealousy, and even perverse imagery (see the dildo on the far right of the meme)—betray the creators’ ill intentions and, ironically, their own low status. Instead of championing family values or the inherent goodness of motherhood, these memes reduce the conversation to bitterness and humiliation.

This behavior is not merely offensive; it is indeed idolatrous. In this worldview, any woman who falls short of their ideal essentially ceases to bear the image of God. “Complete womanhood”—and even salvation, to the evangelical types—is reduced to one criterion: childbearing. For the latter group, this is a grotesque distortion of 1 Timothy 2:15, ripped from context, mixed with Red Pill lies, and mangled into a works-based theology where the grace of God is supplanted by the functionality of human genitals.

To add humiliation to heresy, rarely if ever do proponents make any distinctions between open antinatalists, intentionally single women, unhappily single women, and women in marriages who suffer from infertility. I’ve also never seen them mention men who seek to limit their wives’ and girlfriends’ fertility (many such cases).

There is a way, I believe, to communicate the beauty and goodness of family life without implying that every woman for whom it isn’t a vocation or possibility is defective or subhuman. I absolutely resent this characterization on behalf of everyone who knows that life isn’t as flat or linear or predictable as the online right would like to make it seem. True pronatalism, if it is to have moral and cultural integrity, must be rooted in love, not contempt. It must inspire, not coerce. And it must account for the true diversity of human experience, not demand blind adherence to a flat meme. Anything less is not advocacy; it is idolatry peacocking as virtue.

2. “if it’s not crying, it’s dying:” parental resistance to accountability

Last week on X, there was a viral post by a father complaining about how the curate of his Anglican parish pulled them aside after the service on Sunday and described his family’s presence there as “selfish,” due to the fact that their child was extremely rambunctious in the sanctuary. The original poster accounted for the child’s behavior:

“If I chase my son as he runs up the pew, he thinks it's a game and laughs. If I try to carry him, he goes ballistic. So he runs up and down the pews for a bit of the service and sometimes raises his voice a bit.”

Sinèad Watson spat, “Maybe don't take a toddler to fucking church then.”

First of all, Watson’s comment was indisputably, unnecessarily rude. She received a pile-on ratio of her very own for that comment, with many pro-life, pro-natalist people citing “if it’s not crying, it’s dying” in order to support the original poster’s presence in the Church.

I, too, support the presence of children in church. I understand that the phrase brings many parents, including myself, comfort when our children are inconsolable at the least opportune of times. That said, as a parent, I do not believe parents or children are inherently beyond reproach when it comes to behavior in church, or anywhere else. It’s always hard to judge the veracity of anecdotes presented as such on social media. Of course I’m willing to concede that church leadership could be in the wrong. However, the fact that the man doxxed his parish while using self-excusing, minimizing, and self-victimizing language tells me that he could very well share at least some of the blame here.

In response to the kerfuffle, I tried to communicate to parents that, actually, you really need not remain in the sanctuary if your child is being truly disruptive, and if you are the type of person who feels bound by conscience to do so, then you can release that burden for everyone’s sake, no big deal. According to Canon Law, it is not a requirement for children under the age of reason to attend Mass, though they can always be encouraged and supported; and parents are excused from their own obligation when they are caring for children.

In other words, the phrase “if it’s not crying, it’s dying” has its limits. I think its overuse in situations where prudence would instead demand the removal of an unhinged kid can encourage a sense of either haughtiness in a particular type of permissive parent or extreme frustration in hyper-scrupulous ones. Yes, I do believe that running up and down the pews shouting, as OP described, is indeed disruptive behavior, and that permitting it was a mistake. Maybe I’m wrong, but my attitude is basically this: I don’t expect other people not to be annoyed by my kids (or me, for that matter) when we’re being annoying. In those cases, I appreciate their tolerance, but I know I’m not completely entitled to it, and that a sincere demonstration of effort to reel it in on my part goes very far to ameliorate the situation.

Pronatalists and I would agree that the general public owes parents a basic debt of gratitude and patience for young ones still learning to be human. However, I encountered great resistance when I suggested that parents simultaneously owe the public the effort to civilize, discipline, and when appropriate, remove those children out of basic consideration for others. I’d be remiss not to mention that the institutions themselves could do a better job providing family-friendly infrastructure in any case. Living in a functional society implies mutual obligation, and it was quite shocking to me that saying as much felt so much like poking a sacred cow.

Just because the world occasionally responds to us parents with young children with disdain does not mean that we should pretend like we are above accountability on account of the perceived importance of our vocation in an age of fertility collapse.

Inez Stepman made a great point about how this particular form of idolatry becomes a vicious cycle:

“It’s a death loop: people become less generous about kids as parents become more militant that everyone WILL listen to my child wail without apology because she has a RiGhT to Be In PubliC.”

3. ready or not, reproduce: the diminishment of virtuous preparation in favor of demographic goals

One of the many complaints of the pronatalist movement, sincere and insincere factions alike, is that young people can’t get their priorities straight when it comes to money, and that if they only purified themselves of their avarice, they could have the large families the world needs, which cost very much less than today’s average parent would imply.

I am entirely willing to concede that consumerism and poor financial management is a real problem. I am entirely willing to concede that there are couples for whom having children is delayed unnecessarily on the basis of not having met financial goals that maybe don’t matter as much as we may think.

What I cannot accept is this notion that the introduction of children into one’s life is essentially a zero-cost proposition, that it is basically impossible to breed oneself in over one’s head, and that poverty isn't so bad, anyway.

Kaeley Triller, responding to a meme suggesting as much, put it well: “It’s reckless. The people who are encouraging young people to go into debt in order to procreate are the same ones who will make you feel like a failure as a mom if you have to work outside the home to provide for your quiver full of children. Don’t be reckless. Kids aren’t accessories or notches in your belt.” Triller was predictably countersignalled by a gaggle of right wing influencer bros.

I can’t help but to note the irony that the same political circle just had a huge fight about the systematic undermining of American wages and inflation of our real estate market on account of global labor arbitrage. How can conservatives simultaneously uphold that these things are a problem while also utterly minimizing the primary financial concerns (housing, healthcare, education) of the vanishing middle class?

There seems to be a strange effort on the part of online pronatalists to insinuate that everything you could ever want that costs money is inherently superfluous. You mention college, they say “oh, your kids don’t need to go to those WOKE places anyway.” You mention extracurriculars (music, athletics), they say “oh, kids don’t need any kind of structured play or recreation…just let them outside.” You mention housing, they say, “our ancestors lived in shacks with twelve kids!” You mention proximity to multiple generations of family, they say, “three hours isn’t a bad drive.” You mention the lack of economic opportunity where real estate is affordable, they say “as a Christian, you should love poverty!”

Sidenote: Poverty has no intrinsic goodness, but is good only to the extent that it is useful to remove the obstacles which stand in the way of the pursuit of spiritual perfection. Not everyone is automatically subject to vows of poverty for simply being Christian, and there are cases when it would be entirely inappropriate to arbitrarily forgo material wealth for the sake of itself. The Church wouldn’t make almsgiving a priority if everyone was meant to be impoverished and if impoverished people were meant to just suck it up.

I understand that pronatalists need to prove that some things are more valuable than money, and this is true, but I’m sick and tired of hearing people pretend like money can’t buy valuable things, and that wanting to provide valuable things like education, recreation, and social opportunity to our children is pointless and superficial.

My priest says when it comes to fertility, we are called to generosity and prudence.

I actually had a pronatalist on X last week tell me “now is not the time for prudence.” And to that I say, virtue, i.e. conformity with God’s imagination, is the point of civilization. To the degree that you betray excellence in virtue in order to pursue goods you have deemed more worthy (yes, even fertility) (this is called idolatry), you undermine civilization, no matter how fervently you believe you are saving it.

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True pronatalism should arise from a place of love—love for children, families, and the divine purpose of creation—not from fear, competition, coercion, or ideological posturing. When the desire to “fix” declining fertility becomes a litmus test for ideological purity, or a culture war talking point, or a weapon used by misogynists to justify the verbal, and, yes, even physical and financial abuse of women and children, it loses its grounding in truth and becomes an idol. Fertility, like all good things, cannot save us—it is a gift, not a god. If we are to champion family formation and human flourishing, we must do so with humility, integrity, and an unwavering commitment to what is good, true, and beautiful, resisting the temptation to let even the most righteous causes become idols in our hearts.