Pronatalism is Desperate to Recruit Women Into Its Bizarre, Dark Reality

At the top of a high-rise in midtown Manhattan, steps away from the Museum of Modern Art, Simone Collins is telling me she’s just selected her sixth implantable embryo. We’re standing in the kitchen of a rented apartment, purple Vitamin Waters in hand, as Simone’s husband Malcolm holds court in the next room. The couple is hosting a gathering.

Simone leans in to tell me that the embryo selection was particularly hard this time around: She was choosing between two that had genetic risk markers — one for Alzheimer's, the other for cancer.

“In the end, I went with the one [without] the Alzheimer’s,” she tells me, “because Alzheimer’s research took a real hit recently.” Her 6-month-old son, Tex, wriggles and coos in the baby carrier on her back. He’s the youngest of five kids, all close in age; the oldest, Octavian, is 6.

Simone and Malcolm Collins might not be household names for you. But you’ve probably seen them in passing on social media, spotted them in mainstream publications or seen them on TV. They are pronatalists — individuals who believe that Americans should be having more babies, mainly because the U.S. economy might collapse if they don’t. There are a number of different pronatalist types — among them, Ballerina Farm and the tradwife types who were satirized in “Yesteryear,” for instance. The Collinses, by contrast, see themselves as the tech-savvy, ‘new right’ branch of the movement. They leverage IVF as a means of selective breeding; removing genetic propensities to things like cancer, but also things like anxiety, using a controversial polygenic analysis company; and they glorify a high-tech vision of the future usually associated with people like Elon Musk.

The Collinses laughingly describe their parenting style to me as “neglectful nepo-baby.” If their kids wake up in the night, Simone says, they direct them toward a mini-fridge full of milk or tell them they can chat to the smart speaker’s AI agent.

If you’re wondering where that leaves the Collins family politically, JD Vance is their guy. They have traditionalist views on gender, for instance, but they’re also into transhumanism, the belief that wealthy humans should augment themselves with tech in order to live forever (think Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chips and “blood boys”). They predict we’ll have artificial wombs within the next seven years. Like many U.S. conservatives, they like guns and collect Trump flags. But unlike many U.S. conservatives, they follow their own religion — “Techno-Puritanism” — and they name their kids things like Industry Americus (a girl) and Octavian (a boy). They’re happy to see Trump stripping universities of funding, and they believe that homeschooling via AI will be the future, from elementary age right up to working age. In fact, they just withdrew their kids from school entirely, and they hope that self-directed AI college will put the “overly liberal” Ivy Leagues out of business.

For all the attention paid to people like the Collinses, pronatalists remain a small constituency rather than a mass movement. But their importance is less about their numbers than about the political ecosystem they have found themselves in. Concern about America’s falling birth rate has increasingly become a right-wing cause: Republicans are substantially more likely than Democrats to regard declining fertility as a problem, and figures including JD Vance, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have helped push pronatalist ideas into the political mainstream. 

The Collinses, then, are not necessarily representative of the average American Republican — or even the average person who thinks America should have more babies, but they are part of something a bit more peculiar: a collection of niche movements and constituencies that have discovered that they can lend one another political weight. 

Pronatalists sit alongside Christian traditionalists, anti-immigration activists, opponents of “gender ideology,” parts of the tech right and the various factions of the online nationalist right. These groups do not necessarily agree on everything; in fact, some of their ideas can be wildly at odds. But they share an interest in a government that is willing to intervene aggressively in the direction of traditional family, gender and national identity. 

The contemporary American right has become unusually adept at turning small, intensely motivated constituencies like these into a broader political coalition. And pronatalism is one of the latest ideas to find a home there: a movement that can begin with the seemingly benign proposition that America needs more babies can quickly open onto much bigger questions about who should have those babies, what families should look like, and what the state should do to encourage them.

Despite the fact that MAGA appears to be heading toward a potentially catastrophic set of midterm elections, Simone tells me she and Malcolm are feeling confident about them. Vance, she admits, isn’t yet giving off “main character energy,” but they like him. I tell her that a lot of women find Vance condescending, she says she’s never heard that herself. 

Days before the Collins’ gathering in New York, Vance had appeared on the TV talk show, The View, to promote his new book about Christianity. Asked about his infamous “childless cat ladies” comment from 2021 — when he implied that women without kids were both irresponsible generally and unfit to rule in politics — he laughed and said he’s just “pro-family,” in a country that, according to him, has become “increasingly anti-family.” 

In the living room of the apartment with the Collinses, a Mormon talks about how he and his wife are struggling to conceive their fourth child. He asks Malcolm nervously if it’s true that the administration is planning to ban IVF. Simone jumps in to say that no, a ban isn’t on the horizon: even though it was obliquely floated in the Trump 2.0 blueprint document Project 2025, she claims that she and Malcolm know people at the Heritage Foundation who have assured them it won’t happen. Like most things they say, this is unverifiable — but it’s true that the Collinses do have connections to multiple right-wing organizations and that Malcolm’s brother, Miles, worked at DOGE under the Trump administration.

The IVF question is a good one because it underscores how hard it is for the ‘new right’ to keep on board both the evangelicals and the right-wing members of the tech industry who are in it for the tax cuts and the cutting of red tape around AI. The Collinses aren’t shy about talking about their “pragmatic alliances”: the extremely religious, the extremely capitalist, what they like to call “the normal gays.” 

And indeed, a sharply-dressed gay couple is sitting in the living room at the apartment, talking about where to hire surrogates to carry the babies they want to have. On the sofa opposite them, a man with a transatlantic accent is shouting about how he wants civil war in the U.S., the U.K. and France — and how he’s so sure it’ll happen that he’s already put money on it.

Recent polling by the Pew Research Center shows most Americans say a declining birth rate will negatively affect the U.S., and would like to see more people having more kids. But right-wing, MAGA-brand pronatalism tries to marry a brutally capitalist landscape with a sweet, flowery vision of nine-kid families. The only way to actually achieve both at the same time is to throw women to the wolves: to keep them out of the workplace and effectively out of public spaces entirely, perpetually pregnant and in endless domestic servitude to an expanding rabble of kids. 

Still, there is an important distinction between the MAGA vision of womanhood and the Collins' particular brand of pronatalism. Simone Collins does not believe women should be banished from the workplace, or even that women should have to choose between motherhood and professional ambition. Quite the opposite: When she and Malcolm talk about having 14 children (their stated aim), they talk about childcare, flexible working and technology as the infrastructure that would allow women to do both. Simone herself once planned never to have children because she wanted a career; her conversion to pronatalism was partly predicated on the promise that she would not have to give that up.

The sacrifice, in their worldview, is not supposed to be women's lives. It is supposed to be an adaptation of one’s life, sacrificing some individual comforts, letting go of the conventional ideas of a successful life: take fewer vacations, for example, live in a smaller house, work differently, organize your career around your family. And most importantly, put up with the physical risks and exhaustion of repeated pregnancies because the thing you are building is bigger than you are. 

Simone describes the stakes to me in existential terms: If people who care about women's rights stop having children, she argues, they may eventually lose the ability to pass those values on to the next generation.

Motherhood becomes not a private choice that competes with ambition, but the highest-return investment imaginable. And that is where the Collins' vision starts to collide with the broader politics of the American right. Because not every pronatalist believes, as the Collinses do, that women can have 10 children and a career if society is redesigned accordingly. Some of the movement's more traditionalist figures explicitly argue that women's participation in the workforce is itself part of the fertility problem.

The Collins’ answer is essentially that women should not have to choose. They should be mothers, professionals, political actors and — crucially — producers of the next generation. The question is whether that amounts to liberating women from the impossible demands of modern life, or simply adding another enormous burden to the list.

Back at the apartment in midtown Manhattan, the man who predicted civil war is now listening intently to Malcolm Collins talking about the future of the right. At the moment, says Malcolm, the Trump-voting groups have to stick together to defeat the liberals. Once that’s sorted out and the high-tech, many-babied future is here, “we can have wars in space against each other.”

The man who predicted civil war grips his wine glass so tightly, it suddenly shatters in his hand. Glass shards and dark Merlot spill all over the pale gray sofa, making an expanding stain. The men exclaim and laugh in surprise, but none of them move. Simone, crying Tex still on her back, jumps up to clean up the mess.