Why should pronatalist policies matter to aspec folks?

Policies designed to increase birth rates can impact aspec lives.

There's been recent reporting about the Trump administration's push to bring pronatalist policies to the table, an effort to boost the country's declining birth rates. While these policies don't specifically name asexual and aromantic people, their impacts would be directly and culturally felt by aspec folks. Let's get into it.

What is pronatalism? Pronatalism is a movement to reverse the declining birthrate in our country, out of fear that decreased births will lead to things like economic collapse, culture collapse, and even extinction. Pronatalist movements have mostly been underground fringe movements, but these days, fringe is mainstream. Elon Musk is a visible proponent of pronatalism.

The ideology reaches further than simply increasing the number of babies. Pronatalism enforces heteronormative relationship and family structures as the only acceptable ways to increase the birth rate, so pronatalist policies would also privilege traditional marriage structures, the dominance of heterosexuality, and traditional gender roles.

Aren't we already kind of pronatalist? Yes. The United States certainly has a pronatalist heart, but this particular strand of pronatalism is more extreme. It's also blending in more explicitly white supremacist, anti-queer, and anti-feminist values and ideologies. It's favoring families with power-hungry political agenda.

What does this have to do with the Trump administration? The Trump administration is signing on to this strain of pronatalism as a policy goal. It's going so far as to solicit ideas from the general public on how to best achieve these goals of making more marriages and babies. The NYTimes reported on this Trump administration project, noting that ideas like restricting Fulbright Scholarships to only those with children, "baby bonuses" and declaring a "Medal of Motherhood." It signals their openness to aggressive pronatalist policies.

Why should aspec folks care about pronatalism? Aspec folks are already working under the social and cultural pressures to get married and have children. More aggressive public policy that pushes this current strain of pronatalism would increase that pressure, and depending on the aggressiveness and severity of the policy, even punish aspec folks for building lives outside of marriage and children. It's the kind of policy-making that limits asexual and aromantic individuals around the relationships they wish to build and the lives they wish to lead.

Doesn't this impact anyone who doesn't have kids, though? Sure. Pronatalism does have impacts across the spectrum of sexual orientations. But just as we'd see this is a form of queer discrimination as applied to gays and lesbians -- couples for which "natural birth" is a high bar to jump and adoption doesn't increase the birth rate -- we can see its application to asexual and aromantic individuals as another form of queer discrimination.

... and there's a unique feature to this problem, too. It's a unique case where the burden of discrimination allies straight people and queer people. Straightness isn't universally privileged in this case. Some straight folks would suffer just as much as a majority of queer folks, and lesbians would have an easier route to avoid discrimination due to greater ease of having babies on their own. Pronatalism disrupts some of our usual discrimination binaries, and makes unlikely allies across some unexpected orientations.