Not Your Mom's Pronatalism: Technofuturism, Demographic Anxiety, and the Birth of a New Eugenics

• In Event: Demographic Anxieties

Abstract

Pronatalism looks to combat depopulation, based on a discourse that reduced birth rates present an existential and economic threat. Pronatalist policies and practices have long been socially exclusionary, with nuclear family ideals that place responsibility on women to reproduce, and on children to become productive members of society. In its modern form, however, American leaders and prominent figures in Silicon Valley are promoting what we refer to as techno-pronatalism. Techno-pronatalism is less focused on nuclear family ideals and traditional gender roles and more about optimizing reproduction through the use of technologies that are designed to provide unprecedented choice and control over which children are born. Techno-pronatalism brings up various bioethical concerns ranging from threats to reproductive justice, social implications of state surveillance, eugenic ideologies, family and child well-being, and the overlooked role of child-free members of communities in raising children in capitalist societies. Considering these concerns, we argue that the techno-pronatalist movement promotes a new kind of coercion and social exclusion, leveraging technological innovations and the threat of economic disaster to naturalize maternal sacrifice, reverse fragile gains in reproductive autonomy and compromise disability justice and reproductive justice. Further, the movement undermines society’s responsibilities to children and those who do not have children, with technological imperatives that create social harms that deserve greater sociological attention.

Authors

• Jennifer Elyse James, University of California, San Francisco

• Lori Freedman, UCSF

• Dapne Martschenko

• Julia Brown

• Chanel Matney