Los Angeles-born and Ivy League-educated, Peachy Keenan isn’t the typical picture of a pro-natalist.
Yet the married, mother of five is part of a growing movement of mostly Catholic, well-educated women in deep blue California inspired by Donald Trump’s calls to have more children.
“To save the country, we need to get out and push the babies out, and to do it in mass scale,” she said.
For the better part of five decades, we told Americans — implicitly and explicitly — that children were a burden. We built a culture that prizes career over commitment, convenience over continuity, and freedom from ties over the joys of rootedness. We told women that motherhood was a trap, that marriage could wait (or be skipped entirely), and that the future would take care of itself. Now, with birthrates scraping historic lows, we act shocked. We clutch our pearls, roll out baby bonuses, and pretend this was all some mysterious accident of economics.
It wasn’t. It was a choice — repeated, reinforced, and rewarded at every level of modern society.
While cost-of-living issues and U.S. trade tensions have dominated discussions during the federal election campaign, a long-simmering issue is drawing concern among some experts who say the potential consequences warrant greater federal attention: Canada’s declining fertility rate and its long-term implications for population growth.
Canada’s birth rate has for decades been below the level needed to replace the population, with an even steeper decline in recent years, according to a recent report published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute titled “Baby Steps: How to reverse Canada’s falling fertility rates.”
While declining fertility is a global trend seen in other developed countries like the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, Canada now lags behind many of its peers in fertility.
To keep Canada off Trump’s authoritarian path, we must reject pronatalism and protect women’s rights
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s recent talking point commiserating with couples in their late 30s whose fertility window is closing and who can’t afford to start families touched a nerve. While it’s true that some couples are starting families later or having fewer children, and Canada’s fertility rate is declining, Poilievre’s rhetoric about women’s biological clocks running out is offensive. Liberals and the NDP rightly condemned it.
While he meant to sound sympathetic, Poilievre calling women’s wombs into service as a means towards political ends should be seen for what it is: Canada’s own brand of pronatalism — societal and institutional pressures on women (mostly from men) to have children. It mirrors U.S President Donald Trump, the self-professed “fertilization president” who uses pronatalism as a cover for rolling back reproductive rights and gender equality.
Where does the Star find these extremist loons?
How Did Having Babies Become Right-Wing?
Michelle Sabari always wanted to have six children. She started dating her husband in university and told him her plan — and he was game. By age 30, they were both finally done with school, had jobs and felt stable enough to start a family. Three kids came in four years, and they took a pause to regain their footing. But she didn’t feel “done” — not even close.
The comments on the Tweet are as you’d expect …
Despite generous public supports, Canada now has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. We need to find other ways to address ithttps://t.co/1YEDo8hUiG
— National Post (@nationalpost) April 14, 2025
Pierre Poilievre took flak this week for speaking out about couples who want to have children but who are running out of time. His critics are dead wrong.
Economic challenges and government policies are making it harder than in the past for couples who want children to have them. Political leaders should be trying to overcome those challenges, rather than waving them away or fussing over the words we use to talk about them. Canada’s fertility crisis should also not exclusively be a concern of the Right. It should be mainstream.
Children win wars, not generals. Europe and West-leaning Asia do not seem to know that simple truth. Israel does.
“Wanted: New Soldiers for Europe’s Shrinking Armies,” headlines the Financial Times.
The German government is worried: its army is small and decrepit. In Germany, the average age in 1990 was 36. Today it is 44, an increase of eight years in the space of a single generation. If the trend continues, in two generations more than half of Germans will be over 60. And today Germany must convince “Generation Z” to take the army seriously (judging by the levels of sympathy for Hamas, that will be difficult).
Spain has an army of old men: more than 34 percent of non-commissioned officers are aged 50 or older.
The inability of European countries to rebuild solid armies reflects the great taboo that grips the old continent: Europe is the demographic Titanic.
I’ve heard enough about the Crusades, that America was built on stolen land, or that Israel sits on occupied land. That’s life. Get over it. Might make right was the way of the world. But now, we’re seeing conquest through a different strategy, and the West is complicit in its own execution.
As birthrates drop in developed nations, mass immigration reshapes demographics, raising concerns about cultural integration, intelligence decline, and the long-term stability of advanced economies.
When a nation’s population grows, it’s easier for that nation to experience economic growth. This is the conventional economic wisdom that has been unchallenged for centuries. And there was little reason to challenge this axiom, because throughout human history, the global population trend has been one of perpetual increase. But as birthrates are crashing in wealthier nations, without exception, it may be time to reexamine what constitutes healthy economic growth and how it may be achieved without increasing population.
The way Western nations have chosen to respond to crashing birthrates is to rely on mass immigration. Tens of millions of people are being encouraged to migrate from poor nations where fertility remains high into rich nations with low fertility. This gives rise to challenges that remain unresolved and indeed may worsen as people arrive by the millions from cultures with dramatically different values and beliefs than the host culture.
The United States’ fertility rate has fallen to around 1.78, which, combined with the general downward trajectory, is a cause for concern. To replace the population, a country needs to maintain a rate around 2.1.
When I was a young lieutenant arriving in Germany in 1995, I was surprised by three observations: how good beer can be, how secular European society had become, and the fact that Europeans weren’t having kids.
Declining fertility isn’t about career-focused women delaying motherhood—it’s about fewer young people getting married.
Despite family-friendly social and economic policies, birthrates are falling in many rich countries. A recent article in the Financial Times notes that past declines were driven by families having fewer children, but now people are skipping having children altogether. “Nobody really knows what’s going on,” writes FT. “It’s not primarily driven by economics or family policies. It’s something cultural, psychological.”
Five years ago, it looked as if the racial and ethnic make-up of America was undergoing an unprecedented shift, with a large drop in the number of people classified as ‘white’.
The US Census Bureau’s 2020 tally showed a 276 percent jump in the number of multiracial people, while the white-only group fell from 72.4 percent of the population to 61.6 percent over that decade.
Now, it seems, this shift had more to do with how federal government demographers classified people than any actual changes in the make-up of the 331,449,281 people recorded in the census.
There are 7.3 million single mothers in the U.S., as well as 1.9 million single fathers. Single parents often face the dual challenge of being both the primary breadwinners and caregivers for their families.
h/t DS
Why ageing and declining populations are not all doom and gloom.
In Britain and most other countries today, the birth rate has fallen below replacement levels – usually defined as 2.1 babies per woman. Fertility first fell below replacement levels in about 1973, and since 2010 has fallen steadily to about 1.55 babies per woman. In a few countries, including China and Japan, there have already been absolute population declines.
These trends are now prompting a lot of doom-laden commentary from demographers, economists and politicians. They claim that an ageing population, with ever-fewer working-age people supporting ever-more retirees, is creating an unsustainable burden for society.
America’s population decline is decently bad, but it isn’t so bad that you’d notice anything drastically different in our society. We’re all still groaning with impatience when full school buses make our morning commute a good 20 minutes longer, our playgrounds are still used, and, depending on where you live, it’s not all that rare to see moms at the grocery store with kids in tow.
In short, it doesn’t yet feel like we live in a childless dystopian world. That’s not at all the case in Japan.
Japan has a bit of a population problem. Not only is its fertility rate incredibly low (at 1.37 births per woman) but last year government data revealed that for every one person born in Japan, two people died. Those kinds of numbers are a problem for social flourishing, and it’s starting to show.
