In a 1905 speech to the National Congress of Mothers, President Theodore Roosevelt sought to remind the attendees of what he believed to be their one true purpose. Long an advocate of the “strenuous life”—believing as he did the life of the soldier or the loyal worker imparted moral value on them as a person and their nation—Roosevelt likewise felt “no ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children.” Dismissive of then-radical feminist calls for suffrage or labor reform, Roosevelt felt open disdain for not only the women who failed or refused to have children but those who refused to have lots of children. Warning of she who has “sunk in vapid self-indulgence“ or “prefers a sterile pseudo-intellectuality,” Roosevelt said:
There are many good people who are denied the supreme blessing of children, and for these we have the respect and sympathy always due to those who, from no fault of their own, are denied any of the other great blessings of life. But the man or woman who deliberately foregoes these blessings, whether from viciousness, coldness, shallow-heartedness, self-indulgence, or mere failure to appreciate aright the difference between the all-important and the unimportant—why, such a creature merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the soldier who runs away in battle, or upon the man who refuses to work for the support of those dependent upon him, and who, though able-bodied, is yet content to eat in idleness the bread which others provide.
Roosevelt’s pro-natalism was firmly rooted in fears of what he and social Darwinists at the time grimly called “race suicide.” Caused not only by those who refused any children but those who failed to create more than two children, Roosevelt warned of a scenario where “the nation as a whole would decrease in population so rapidly that in two or three generations it would very deservedly be on the point of extinction.” Coined by the sociologist Eugene Ross, the doctrine of “race suicide” was a toxic cocktail of xenophobic hatred towards new Catholic, Jewish, and Asian immigrants and the persistent racial terror of Jim Crow paired with the rise of eugenics social policy. As Ross described the causes of “race suicide” in a 1901 lecture:
“The working classes gradually delay marriage and restrict the size of the family as the opportunities hitherto reserved for their children are eagerly snapped up by the numerous progeny of the foreigner. The prudent, self-respecting natives first cease to expand, and then, as the struggle for existence grows sterner and the outlook for their children darker, they fail even to recruit their own numbers”
By then, the puritanical reign of Anthony Comstock and his federal ban on contraception and abortion was already a generation old and viewed as a critical bulwark against early feminists and a useful tool for fortifying the white birth rate. “Free love” and other First Wave feminist movements were perceived as decadent displays of gender fluidity and women’s personal freedom as a direct threat to the greater good.
In a letter to the social reformer Bessie Van Vorst, Roosevelt warned the independent working woman intent “to live one's life purely according to one's own desires” was a threat to “the fundamental virtues, for the practice of the strong, racial qualities without which there can be no strong races…the man or woman who deliberately avoids marriage, and has a heart so cold as to know no passion and a brain so shallow and selfish as to dislike having children, is in effect a criminal against the race, and should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence by all healthy people.”
If all that sounds familiar, it may be because of its similarity to the “pro-family” rhetoric of Ohio Senator and Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance. For much of the last month, a steady drip of past reactionary and misogynistic statements by Vance has been met with a flood of backlash against the senator, now the least popular vice presidential nominee in modern history. His disdain for “childless cat ladies” and support for a national abortion ban without exceptions for rape (which he’s called “inconvenient”) stems from a militant pro-natalism popular among Vance and the elements of the far-right he’s spent the last four years courting.
As central to his message as his coercive natalism, however, is Vance and the Trump campaign’s racist and dehumanizing rhetoric about immigration. While many of the seemingly banal issues cited by Vance and pro-natalists to justify their limits on bodily autonomy (like shortages of labor or taxable income) could be solved by easing the path for legal immigration, Trump has instead promised mass arrests, detainment, and deportation of immigrants who he accuses of “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Vance has likewise echoed the racist “Great Replacement” theory—a descendant of “race suicide” doctrine—by claiming during his Senate run the Democratic Party “have decided that they can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.” He’s even tiptoed up to white supremacist theories of “white genocide,” falsely accusing Joe Biden of allowing fentanyl to be smuggled into the United States to “punish the people who didn’t vote for him. Vance himself recently made the connection between his 21st-century nativism and 19th-century nativism explicit in a 2021 podcast interview and again this week when said interview resurfaced:
“Has anybody ever seen the movie ‘Gangs of New York’? That’s what I’m talking about. We know that when we have these massive ethnic enclaves form in our country, it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates….What happens when you have massive amounts of illegal immigration, it actually starts to create ethnic conflict, it creates higher crime rates. We’ve certainly seen that over the last few years.”
The actual data suggests the link between immigration and crime is “mythical,” but the crime of the migrant to someone like Vance isn’t how they cross the border or what they do afterward—it’s failure to “assimilate.” It’s rank xenophobia of the kind that recently fueled neo-Nazi riots in the UK and has served as the hypermasculine, toxic heart of nationalist strongmen from Vladimir Putin to Viktor Orban (the latter Vance celebrated for banning “critical race theory and critical gender theory” even after Orban sparked fury by denouncing miscegenation like Vance’s own marriage). As I’ve written about before, the anti-gender animus of Putin and Orban portrays any life course other than heterosexual reproduction as a decadent import of the West and a threat to the native-born “human capital” perceived as necessary to forestall “demographic collapse.”
While Trump has tried to create the illusion of distance between himself and his party’s reproductive politics, his blood-and-soil nationalism is importantly inseparable from Vance’s archaic reproductive politics. It’s rare to see them linked in either Vance or Trump’s rhetoric or even public rebukes by Democrats. Vice President Kamala Harris, for example, is actively attempting to have it both ways by denouncing Vance’s comments about reproduction while effectively adopting Trump-era immigration policies, billing herself as “tough” on immigration yet equally tough in defense of abortion rights. Yet both the violence of a militarized border and the repression of reproductive freedom are inextricably linked by nationalism as a perspective and demographics as an obsession, both of which tend to steamroll the humanity of the people who dare to cross them and neither of which is severable from their dehumanizing effects.
This is also why I doubt the “pro-natalist” movement—a collection of economists and sociologists who view childrearing as a stick-and-carrot project for mass social engineering—can be saved from the likes of Vance. Writing in The Washington Post, American Enterprise Institute fellow Ramesh Ponnuru warns adherents to the movement should focus less on reproductive coercion or shaming the childfree and instead focus more on “helping people achieve their preferences than of changing them — of identifying the obstacles to having more children and removing them.” That’s all fine and good (and a pillar of reproductive justice) but when the explicit goal is to yield more children for the capitalistic grind it’s hard to imagine the kind of sensible social policies endorsed by pronatalists (like child allowances and paid leave) won’t come with the kinds of strings attached that have plagued social welfare policy for the past century.
When government assistance is treated not as a matter of human dignity or equality but instead as a means of yielding conservative social and cultural ends, it tends to come with the kinds of means-testing and reporting requirements that follow recipients across their entire lives. As Melinda Cooper and others have noted, the social welfare “reforms” championed by neoliberal economists in the second half of the 20th century continue to monitor women’s reproductive and sexual lives precisely because they hold marriage and the privatized nuclear family as their goal. In doing so, they echo the intents of Roosevelt, Ross, and there Progressive-era natalist politics. These goals in turn support the nationalist reproductive goals of someone like Vance by regarding personal freedom as little more than a barrier to having more native-born children as a bulwark against shifting racial demographics.
The moment you decide to treat humans like capital you’ve already decided to dehumanize them. The idea that state power should be marshalled in defense of some mythical demographic integrity threatened by “race suicide” or a “great replacement” is not a new one and has yieled some of the most horrifying public policies in American history. Vance’s gender revanchism and militant nationalism are two ends of a vile and familiar beast, and attempts to sever one from the other—or throw a more positive spin on either—only serve to perpetuate the myths it feeds upon.