A Libertarian Pronatalism

If babies are the easiest people in the world to love, pronatalists are particularly easy to hate. Never has a movement made a fondness for babies feel so unseemly. They make suspiciously self-serving suggestions for how parents of large families (usually including themselves) should be showered with money, opportunities, even extra votes. Some are attracted to reactionary gender politics, others to utopian visions involving genetically engineered superbabies. Truthfully, many of the people drawn to this banner are just undeniably weird. Elon Musk seems to be inventing a new style of polygamy; pronatalist influencers Simone and Malcolm Collins have forged a new quasi-religion with “descendant-worship” as a central principle. Perhaps the West was due for a new fertility cult, but this one clearly has some warts.