CNN’s Meena Duerson travels to Austin to join roughly 200 “pronatalists” for the second-ever Natal Conference, an event devoted to discussing the world’s declining birth rates and potential solutions. The issue is a hot topic among demographers, economists and Elon Musk.

Austin

The second-ever Natal Conference recently took place in Austin, gathering approximately 200 "pronatalists" who are concerned about declining global birth rates. Among the attendees were notable figures such as Elon Musk and Malcolm and Simone Collins, who have become prominent advocates for pronatalism. The event aimed to address what participants view as a looming "civilizational catastrophe" due to decreasing birth rates, which experts warn could lead to labor shortages and economic challenges. 

To address these challenges, the pronatalists advocate for measures such as encouraging marriages and childbearing, with political discussions skewing toward the right. Some attendees, however, were marked as controversial due to accusations of promoting race science and eugenics. Event organizers, including Kevin Dolan, dismissed these criticisms, emphasizing the importance of the conversation over concerns about the polarizing nature of some speakers.

Attendees experienced matchmaking opportunities at the event, which featured speakers discussing potential solutions like tax credits and housing initiatives to boost birth rates. Despite the right-leaning political tilt, the gathering included a diversity of opinions concerning family formation and childbearing, revealing tensions between different viewpoints on how to address the issue of declining birth rates.



A weekend with the pronatalists

Raise your hand if you are a mom or a dad in the room here tonight. This is the war for civilization, and we are going to win it one life at a time. We're here at Natalcon, which is a gathering of about 200 people from all over the world who have come here because they all feel very strongly that the world needs more babies. There's a civilizational catastrophe coming, and the way to solve it is to have sex. Like, that's got to be the easiest pitch in history. Birth rates around the world are plummeting, and they think this is the issue of our time. It's a massive conversation, and that's why we're here. We need to encourage more people to get married and have kids. We need those people to be the people of the future. Many countries are no longer having enough kids to replace their populations. Some experts predict this will cause labor shortages and inflation, permanently changing the economy. The people most passionate about this call themselves pronatalists. People are like, why are high fertility people always so weird? Malcolm and Simone Collins have four kids, soon to be five, and are some of the loudest advocates for pronatalism. What we've seen is pronatalism and demographic collapse have become the global warming of the right. Some of the first people who really recognize the scale of the problem are major players in the White House right now, you know, like J.D. Vance and Elon Musk. The birth rate is very low in almost every country, and unless that changes, civilization will disappear. Elon Musk's fixation with population collapse has pushed pronatalism into the spotlight. His tweets about Natalcon helped double attendance for this year's event, where the tickets cost $1,000. Yes, I spent all of my savings coming here, actually. Do you want to have kids? Yes. You don't have kids? No. How many do you want to have? Well, minimum five. I want to have my first at 22, and then I want to have a... Okay, you've got to get on that. Yeah, I know. Organizers said they heard a lot of interest in matchmaking, so they gave yellow wristbands to singles to help them find each other. You have a yellow wristband? Yes, yes. So you're... And you're... You're open to mingling. Yes. Well, yeah. Have you met anybody good? I'm not sure if you can tell, but there's a lot of lads here, there's not that many ladies. The speakers are largely dry economist types, focused on tweaks to boost birth rates, from tax credits to housing. But politically, the vibe is firmly right-wing. The marginal people need to go back to the margins. We want to raise families. The left is raising pride flags over cat shelters. And 2024 actually did have a slight uptick in births. Bad news. It was just the anchor babies from the illegal immigrants. It's pretty difficult to draw a neat, tidy circle around everybody here. The far right or the extreme right, like, we would like to have more babies, but we would like to have more of our babies. On the other end, people, like, more babies are always good, whether it's babies or immigrants. And the other axis, you know, trad Catholics, Mormons, and then like a kind of tech bro or tech futurist genetic selection of embryos, trying to refine the quality of the babies that are born. Because the Collinses are building their family through IVF, using experimental testing to rank embryos for traits from health risks to intelligence, they get one of the biggest criticisms of pronatalism, that it's code for eugenics. Eugenics is when you say, these are good traits. These are bad traits. This is just people choosing among their own embryos. We're not talking about sterilizing people or all the classic problems that are out there with eugenics. Ahead of the conference, press coverage called out some speakers as race science promoters and eugenicists. And students accused the event of hosting Nazis. A criticism organizer Kevin Dolan dismissed. You can't be governed by people calling you names. I think that these ideas, they're not going to come from people who don't want to hurt any feelings. Do you feel like there's a risk of alienating people with the kind of speakers you've selected and that tenor? Yeah, of course. And is that a risk for the larger cause? I mean, yeah, some of those people are polarizing. They're my friends. And, you know, I'm not going to chuck them under the bus. We can't let the right own things that are that fundamental. Paul Constance was the only liberal we met the whole weekend. I'm here because I think it's a really big, big topic. And progressives need to be in the conversation. Why is this such a big deal to you? So I have kids in their 20s. Young people today feel very hesitant or unable to form families. It's very easy to talk about cat ladies and to imply that people on the left don't care about kids. It's much harder to actually put forward policies that would make everyone of any political stripe be more inclined to form a family. I think that one of the things that often gets skipped over in any discussion of legalism today is kind of the actual lives of women who make decisions about whether or not to bring a child into the world. Don't forget about the ladies. Don't forget about the people who have the babies.

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