Mars Ain't the Kind of Place to Raise Your Kids
Disentangling rocket-powered 'pro-natalism' from actual pro-family policies
Don’t touch that dial — it’s Family Matters, on a Thursday, in observance of the Easter Triduum. Cuius livore sanati sumus.
The Main Event: Rocket Man and the Right
Live, from New York: It’s the Vibe Shift!
The Company Line: EPPC’s year in review
It’s Me, Hi: COMPACT, The Atlantic
Parting Shots
The Main Event
Important news! Last week’s Family Matters, “A Full Dinner Bucket,” was the most-viewed post in the history of this august newsletter, which means that, in the service of giving the people what they want, this newsletter will now permanently pivot to being All International Trade Takes, All the Time. The market is never wrong!
Alas, as the the last couple weeks have vividly illustrated, supply chains don’t shift on a time, so until we are able to revive enough domestic production, we’ll stick with our comparative advantage of family policy takes. And this week offers an excuse to re-up a recent piece that feels even more timely given reporting from the Wall Street Journal.
Earlier this month, for The Dispatch, I used the world’s richest man as a vivid example of what pro-natalism looks like when becomes untethered from the traditional understanding of family and marriage.1 New details reported by the Journal’s Dana Mattioli show just, well, weird things can get when your obsessions with IQ, space travel, and population decline intersect:
“Musk’s baby-making project is relevant to his ambition for NASA, which he wants to move faster to go to Mars…He is driven to correct the historic moment by helping seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence”
“Musk refers to his offspring as a ‘legion,’ a reference to the ancient military units that could contain thousands of soldiers and were key to extending the reach of the Roman Empire…’To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,’ he [texted…], ‘we will need to use surrogates.’”
Mattioli suggests that the true number of Musk’s children is much higher than the 14 that are publicly known. Sources in the right circles to know have suggested to me the true number could be much higher, by a factor of at least four. Of course, powerful men producing offspring with multiple women is, of course, far from novel in the course of global history. In a sense, the legal wrangling, paternity tests, and a Texas “compound” for his various offspring and their mothers are just a colorful 21st century spin on an old story.
But that doesn’t mean conservatives of any stripe should turn a blind eye to Musk’s misanthropic tendency to, as I wrote, skirt “uncomfortably close to viewing babies mainly as entries on a spreadsheet—and embracing practices that further break the link between partnership and parenthood.” His profligate paternity is the human representation of the fundamental tensions at the heart of the hypothesized tech-trad alliance. Musk’s billions may take care of their material needs, but conservatives have long been correct to stress the irreplaceable importance of having a stable father figure in the home. Ignoring that to celebrate “incredible genetics” is to abandon any claim of being a “pro-family” political movement.2
Of course, it’s not just Musk who has designs on remaking human fertility:
Pavel Durov, the billionaire founder of Telegram, has offered to pay for IVF for women under the condition they use his sperm, and claims to have fathered more than 100 children…OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was among the initial investors in a startup to turn human blood cells into eggs, a concept known as in vitro gametogenesis, which would allow one person to procreate without needing the genetic contribution of a partner, or a group of multiple people to each contribute part of a child’s DNA. Noor Siddiqui, a former Thiel Fellow, has founded a company that promises parents the ability to screen out embryos that might have a higher predisposition towards genetic diseases — opening the door to choosing embryos based on IQ, athletic ability, or other traits. This isn’t fertility tech aimed at helping couples who have spent years and thousands of dollars attempting to get pregnant. This is paving a path towards eugenics.
In Tesla and SpaceX, Musk has shown a genius for entrepreneurship and leadership. He, perhaps more than anyone else, may be able to claim credit for accelerating the “vibe shift” through his purchase of X, neé Twitter, that took progressive commissars out of the cultural driver’s seat. Conservative can appreciate his talents; one can be political allies even with someone with diametrically opposed anthropology of the human person. But that shouldn’t lead the right to fall silent when pointing out the differences between the type of “pro-natalism” one hears talked about in Silicon Valley and the kind that wants to see a healthy pro-family culture, with more babies the happy result of a contentedly married couple.
And, unfortunately, the “pro-natalism” that gets profiled by Emma Goldberg (for the Times) or Sarah Jones (for New York magazine) can’t escape the accusation of being bonnet-clad, IQ-obsessed, race-realist, bodybuilding weirdos (in fairness, not always all at the same time). A pro-natalism that prioritized mainstream credibility would find ways to elevate the relatively saner voices that just want to make it easier for people find partners and have kids, and be more vocal about disputing the premises of the race- or IQ-obsessed. Take, for example, a recent Substack piece by the feminist writer , pointing out what pro-family voices have long said— namely, that a model of career and family that prioritizes long and intensive pathways towards education and career discriminates against women and is anti-family:
In the New York Times this week, Michelle Goldberg features quotes from “edgy heterodox centrists,” and , who express regret about how the counterculture energies in the Trump 2024 campaign have been translated into the beat poetry of populist governance. If they can express regrets about how their political alliances turned out, so, too, can traditional conservatives who have silently tolerated Musk’s eccentricities so far.3 should likewise be
Raising awareness of the long-term consequences of declining fertility is important, yes. But anyone who talks about birth rates should take care to be vocal about how their pro-family project differs from the more-babies-at-all-costs tech bro version (the Institute for Family Studies’ pro-natalism initiative, led by , has largely been an example of how to do thread this needle.) And they should be a little more selective about how they choose to partner with and platform. When it comes to making the personal political, anyone who’s not Very Online will bristle at having the idea of starting a family turned into a political or eugenic project along the lines envisioned by the right’s Rocket Man. Every hour one is forced to spend explaining the pro-natalism doesn’t mean eugenic selection of embryos or a “legion” of descendants to inhabit a Mars colony is an hour one can’t spend making the case for a sizable baby bonus for new parents, advancing pro-family cultural messages, or passing laws that give parents more options and fewer headaches in how they raise their children.
For it’s not just because Musk’s obsessions threaten to tarnish the broader project of building a society with more children in it, though that is important. Being pro-family, rather than just pro-natal, puts as much focus on kids’ long-term stability and emotional wellbeing as much as whatever creature comforts an absentee billionaire can provide. The children being created as a result of his disordered concern with the fate of our terrestrial home deserve better than to be treated as means, either by dads with dreams of Mars or moms who willingly sign NDAs and cash checks, rather than ends in and of themselves.
Live, from New York
In Saturday Night (last year’s second-best movie about 1970s TV crews racing through a cloud of cigarette smoke and technical difficulties to figure out how to air a live production like no one had ever seen before, behind September 5), Lorne Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle) tells NBC execs about their show: “Saturday Night is a new kind of entertainment. Defiant, abstract, avant garde yet blue collar...”
Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) butts in: “It’s also a comedy.”
It’s no secret SNL’s defiant comedic guns have most often been turned on conservatives over the years, which is all fair game. But a sketch on last weekend’s show, hosted by Jon Hamm, got conservative tongues wagging:
This time, it’s not the stick-in-the-mud couples innocently asking questions about a new baby that are the butt of jokes for not being hip to Modern Families, but the hypersensitive gay couple played by Hamm and Bowen Yang. On its own, it’s a funny enough bit that maybe tries to milk the joke a little too long (often the case for SNL sketches). But in our cultural moment, it’s notable not just for poking fun at identitarian wokeness (touchiness around both trans identity and ‘National AAPI Month’ elicit laughs), but in granting that questions about basic biology are fair game, rather than inherently harmful.
Yes, “it’s also a comedy.” But it’s also a dye marker for what is in and out of bounds. The core of many conservatives’ understanding of family policy is a recognition that life has its origin when male and female gametes unite; that all of us, regardless of how we are raised, have a biological mother and a biological father somewhere in the world. Even making those clinical observations have been enough to raise ire on college campuses or be publicly accused of, in Hamm’s phrasing, “a phobia towards homos.” Now it’s on late night TV.
Add that to this week’s news from the UK that the nation’s Supreme Court (which doesn’t really make sense in the grand scheme of things, but that’s a rant for another day) ruled the nation's 2010 Equality Act refers to biological womanhood, not transgender identity, holding that “female” was, in the words of the plaintiff’s lawyer, an “immutable biological state.” It was a victory for UK conservatives, TERFs, and those who want words to mean precisely what they choose it to mean — neither more nor less.
The vibe shift (as discussed above) has opened all sorts of conversations once thought firmly closed (to be fair — not always for the better!). If SNL can joke about lightening up a little around where babies come from, and the UK can judicially affirms the biological facts of life, perhaps we can see a little more sanity return to our policy conversations as well.
The Company Line
Last, but far from least, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) released its 2024 Annual Report. It features updates on everything our team of scholars has been up to, from pushing back against progressive orthodoxy around gender and sex, to fighting the expansion of assisted suicide, to charting a productive course forward for the political right, to navigating the tricky waters of how religion and politics mix in a post-religious West. And, of course, advancing an authentically pro-family agenda that respects flourishing families as the cornerstone of a healthy society.
Part of the benefit of being at a place like EPPC is that not all of our scholars speak with one voice — in fact, part of the richest conversations happen when we disagree. But all of us are, in our various ways, trying to apply the richness of the intellectual and religious tradition which we inherit to the contemporary problems facing the United States (and, really, everywhere.) EPPC, at its best, is thoughtful, but not hide-bound; principled, but not beholden to any one politician or cause; nimble, but not caught up in the day’s frenzies; and interested in shaping policy just as much as renewing culture, recognizing that one doesn’t simply flow downstream from the other but that they both reinforce each other.
As this report suggests, my colleagues are at the forefront of applying age-old conservative principles to contemporary challenges. If you’re at all interested, I encourage you to page through our report, and, if so moved, to support our work for the upcoming year (next year will be EPPC’s 50th!)
It’s Me, Hi
For COMPACT, I review some of the populist, pro-family moves that are being passed, often under the radar, in red states like Arkansas:
Too many would-be influencers seem to understand being “pro-family” as consisting mostly of opposing transgender athletes in women’s sports, a position with which supermajorities of all voters (including nearly half of Harris voters) now agree. A robust, pro-family populism should push for more.
In her coverage of this year’s pro-natalist conference, Elizabeth Bruenig quoted my piece for The Dispatch on the edgy voices that too often get center stage (The Atlantic):
“The racism and misogyny of pro-natalist circles often gets overblown in skeptical media outlets…But that doesn’t mean those strains are completely absent from the lineup in Austin or the broader pro-natalism movement.”
Parting Shots
Sen. Jim Banks (R-Indiana) has introduced a Senate version of the Family First Act, a monumental step forward in improving the Child Tax Credit. More to say on this soon, hopefully next week. (Daily Caller; Washington Examiner)
John Ricco points out that while the dependent exemption was indexed for inflation, the CTC currently isn't, meaning that the value to parents continues to erode over time (Yale Budget Lab)
Conor Dougherty writes a fine piece in favor of sprawl, but the contrarian framework is a bit odd given that all but the most diehard environmental activists tend to be in favor of it (the question is whether we should be building up in addition to out, to which the answer is yes.) (New York Times)
Gov. Mike Braun of Indiana has directed his state agencies to estimate the amount of marriage penalties in the tax code and welfare programs and recommend ways to fix them (Office of the Governor)
The Associated Press is intent on finding the downside of efforts to give pregnant moms more support in states like Kansas and Florida
Italy is now offering new parents a 1,000 EUR bonus when they have a child (a bambino bonus, if you will) — the U.S. should follow suit! (Il Messaggero)
Marissa Martinez reports that “some Republicans in both chambers are eager to expand the [CTC], including Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo, an Idaho Republican” (The 19th)
My EPPC colleague Nathanael Blake writes that evangelicals should develop a more robust theology around IVF, premised on the value of human life (WORLD)
Tim Carney reports on his trip to Hungary, and how the Orban government is and isn’t succeeding in its efforts to support family formation there (Washington Examiner)
Child care whip-around: North Carolina looks to boost reimbursement rates for providers…Maine wants to create employer-provided child care credits…Oregon is exploring allowing nearly by-right child care zoning (!)…Minnesota is considering a state child care scholarship program…Georgia’s budget would introduce a $250 non-refundable child tax credit and increase how much parents can receive from the state’s child care tax credit AND create an employer child care credit…New Mexico is using money from the state’s oil and gas rights to fund child care expansions…
The National Marriage Project, hosted by U-Va’s Brad Wilcox, hosted a panel on women, motherhood, happiness, and family in Charlottesville earlier this month, featuring a scintillating lineup: Kate Odell, , , Brett Cooper, and Michel Martin. Video is now available:
Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.
I, of course, respect journalistic endeavors and recognize the need for places that pay writers to keep the lights on — but I also recognize that having a paywall get in between you and my trenchant, provocative observations has been credibly accused of being a human rights violation. If you or someone you love has had this happen to you, I know a guy.
As Family Matters as covered in previous installments, Musk’s influence through DOGE has also not advanced a conservative agenda for reforming, as opposed to hamstringing, the federal government.
I have a feeling the kind of pro-natal you’re talking about is going to amount to more welfare for poor single moms and open borders. Also anti-IVF/pro genetic disease.
Literally worse than the status quo.