Family values conservatives have been obsessed with heterosexual marriages and babies for decades. They have fought to curtail womens rights in an effort to keep them pregnant and out of civic life, decimated abortion access, attempted to limit access to birth control, and tried to define marriage and family in the narrowest terms possible. Now, declining birth rates have the MAGA crowd pushing policies designed to increase the number of babies born in the United States every year. While this new desire to increase the population seems in line with the traditional family values Republicans have been espousing for years, there is a more sinister ideology at the heart of this new movement: pronatalism. This used to be a fringe topic, but now pronatalism seems to be a cornerstone of the modern Republican agenda. In March President Donald Trump said hell be known as the fertilization president, Elon Musk father to 14 children recently told Fox News that civilization will disappear if the birthrate doesnt increase, and Vice President JD Vance summed up the problem at the March for Life rally in January when he said, "Let me say very simply: I want more babies in the United States of America."But what is pronatalism, and should you be worried?What is pronatalism?While the exact definition is murky and different factions have slightly different beliefs, pronatalism is a movement that tries to promote increasing pregnancies in an effort to combat the declining birthrate which makes the decision to have children not just a personal one, but as a tool for population growth.Proponents of the ideology range from Silicon Valley elites to the religious right to tradwives, and new right anti-feminist movement followers. Some believe in conceiving children naturally while others are proponents of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), and while they may disagree on womens roles in the family unit, they all agree that more babies is the solution to plummeting birth rates and economic woes. Democrats are also concerned about declining birth rates because it could spell disaster int he future for programs like Social Security and Medicare which rely on younger workers paying into the system to support older people no longer in the workforce. During the presidential campaign, former Vice President Kamala Harris even proposed a $6,000 tax credit for parents of newborns. But pronatalists are largely conservative and dont support abortion access and reproductive freedom, or social safety nets like affordable childcare, paid family leave, universal healthcare, that would make childbearing more accessible.To remain stable, a country must reproduce at replacement rate, which is 2.1 children per women, but currently the United States is averaging 1.6 children per woman. Pronatalists claim this is a catastrophic failure that needs to be corrected, reducing women to their reproductive potential.Why is it important for the LGBTQ+ community to be aware of pronatalism?Pronatalism may seem like straight peoples business, but the LGBTQ+ community will likely be affected too. In an article for The Nation, journalist Elizabeth Gregory wrote that the conservative protnatalists anti-gay and anti-transgender policies aim to push the growing group of young people who identify as LGBTQ back into the closet, and into heterosexual relationships and more pregnancies, planned and unplanned.Many pronatalists also believe in traditional gender roles and rolling back access to abortions, contraction, and hormone therapy, all of which have real-world consequences for queer people. Far-right Republicans have been attacking trans rights and passing sweeping anti-trans bills for years now, but some have started using pronatalist talking points to strip the LGBTQ+ community of their rights. In 2022, a conservative Idaho representative condemned gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth because accessing care may lead to children being sterilized and unable to have children of their own in the future. We are not talking about the life of the child, but we are talking about the potential to give life to another generation, Rep. Julianne Young said, the Idaho Press reported. In a similar vein, earlier this year, conservative Michigan lawmaker Josh Schriver tried to pass a resolution to condemn same-sex marriage with the argument that, This is a biological necessity to preserve and grow our human race, Bridge Michigan reported.Elon Musk and JD Vance are big fansPronatalism has become a unifying ideology bringing together modern tech moguls like Musk with religious conservatives like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Vice President Vance. The Tesla billionaire and father to 14 children born to four different mothers, has been an outspoken pronatalist for years, often sounding the alarm bell that decreasing populations sizes could destroy the world. He has repeatedly taken to X (formerly Twitter) to say that population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming, that instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness, and that "Low birth rates will end civilization.Vance, an anti-abortion Catholic who called Democratic leaders childless cat ladies, has proposed a $5000 child tax credit and been vocal about his pronatalist views that Americans need to be having more babies, and that the Democratic Party is anti-family and anti-child. Prominent pronatalist advocates Malcolm and Simone Collins, who have four children with a fifth on the way, proposed that Trump should give out a National Medal of Motherhood to encourage women to have more babies because they agree with Musk and see the declining birth rates as a extinction level event."Pronatalism has sort of become the global warming of the right. It's a broad statistical issue that is going to lead to the collapse of our civilization," Malcolm told USA Today. "And, for whatever reason, the other side is unable to acknowledge it."Modern day eugenicsThe second ever pronatalist Natal Conference was held in Austin, Texas earlier this year and featured pro-eugenics speakers and promoters of racist pseudoscience. Many on the religious right may agree that pumping out more babies will solve society's problems, but the Silicon Valley elites are more open to things like IQ screenings for IVF embryos, The Guardian reports. After Texas banned nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, the fertility rate increased for the first time since 2024, with an 8% increase among Hispanic women since 2021, but pronatalists, who are overwhelmingly conservative, only want a certain kind of person to have more babies. Its about having more babies, but its important to ask whose babies, Patrik Hermansson, a researcher at Hope Not Hate, told The Guardian. Its about promoting the idea that certain people should have babies that have been improved with positive eugenics.Much like the racial hygiene programs of the Nazi party, and the forced sterilization of the disabled and mentally ill in the United States, the more extreme proponents of pronatalism believe in breeding a better human race.At Natal Con, one speaker linked pronatalism to the great replacement theory, which is a white nationalist conspiracy theory that there is a plot to erase white people through immigration and white people having fewer babies than other races think white nationalists chanting Jews will not replace us at the deadly Charlottesville rally in 2017. Some adherents to the pronatalism ideology believe it is a solution to the great replacement theory."So by a very superficial gloss, [today's pronatalist movements] could appear to be, let's say, almost a libertarian approach to babymaking," Alexandra Stern, a UCLA professor and author of books on the American history of eugenics, told NPR. "But if you look at the underlying, driving ideologies, la Charles Murray and others who have written about who should be having babies and who should not be having babies, it often comes down to ideologies of genetic determinism and who is more fit or less fit.Using IVF and screening embryos for IQ, risk of depression, and other markers is part of what Collins calls this polygenics. Although the anti-abortion far-right Republicans disagree with this type of intervention, Trump seems to be siding with Musk and the rest of the tech pronatalists when he signed a pro-IVF executive order.The LGBTQ+ community is being attacked left and right by the White House and conservatives across the country, and the way pronatalists push gender ideology, control of womens bodies, deciding who is worthy of having children, and policies that could force queer people back into the closet, is a risk to LGBTQ+ people everywhere.