One of the most trenchant lines from the 2004 film Mean Girls is spoken not by any of the girls but by one of their adult male teachers. “Don’t have sex because you will get pregnant and die,” he shouts, standing in front of a blackboard where the word ABSTINENCE is written in giant capital letters, then circled and underlined for good measure. “Don’t have sex in the missionary position, don’t have sex standing up, just don’t do it, OK, promise?”
A joke, yes, but one based in truth — and instantly recognisable to anyone who had come of age in the previous decade, when high-school sex-ed classes became ground zero for the government’s efforts to stem the early Nineties epidemic of teenage pregnancies. The holy grail for these educators was, indeed, ABSTINENCE, whose virtues were promoted via state-sanctioned programmes that were sometimes subtle and sometimes not.
The messaging varied from place to place and along political lines. Conservative and religious schools tended to opt for morally inflected programmes if not all-out slut shaming, including one lesson in which sexually active girls were memorably compared to used pieces of scotch tape. Meanwhile, the more secular, science-based institutions used the spectre of sexually-transmitted diseases, and specifically AIDS — then a virtually guaranteed death sentence — to persuade impressionable youths that sex simply wasn’t worth the risk. At the same time, a spate of after-school TV movies proliferated on the subject of teen pregnancy, including the Lifetime original Fifteen and Pregnant (featuring a young Kirsten Dunst) and its male-centric counterpart, Too Soon For Jeff (starring teen heartthrob Freddie Prinze, Jr as the titular Jeff for whom it is too soon). If the state was obsessed with stopping teen pregnancy, the culture was fascinated by it, especially as the dawn of reality TV ushered in an era of storytelling that was less cautionary, and more voyeuristic. In 2009, MTV’s 16 and Pregnant debuted its pilot episode to 2.1 million viewers. By 2014, it had run for five seasons and spawned five spinoffs.
As goofy as much of the abstinence programming was, it was also undeniably successful: the teen birth rate began plummeting in 1991, and as of 2023 had fallen to just 13.1 births per 1,000. The thing was, the generation of young women who had cut their teeth on teen pregnancy trauma porn ultimately graduated into a world where the non-teen version didn’t seem all that great, either. The mommy wars were in full swing, and the media awash in dire personal essays by women bewailing the horrors of motherhood. The message was clear: having kids would destroy your professional life, your body, your marriage, your identity. As Millennials advance toward middle age, the impact of all this anti-natalism has become starkly evident: in 2023, the American birth rate hit an all-time low of 1.62 births per woman, well below the replacement rate.
The fertility crisis has been a point of interest on the Right for some time. At the mundane end of the spectrum is a growing evangelical zeal for big families, homemaking, and tradwife content on TikTok; at the other end is Elon Musk’s apparent intention to single-handedly repopulate the world with his own progeny. But it is also a chief concern of the Trump administration, which has been reportedly considering various policy initiatives aimed at increasing the birth rate. According to a recent story from the New York Times, Trump aides have been courting pro-natalists in White House meetings, hearing proposals on everything from a cash bonus for baby-having, to improved family leave policies, to education programmes aimed at helping women better understand their menstrual cycles.
Perhaps needless to say, the notion of a state-sponsored baby boom has been met with scepticism and no small amount of anxiety from critics, who were already nervous about the possible influence within Trumpland of the conservative policy plan known as Project 2025, and who perceive pro-natalism as a Trojan horse for other ickier initiatives. Feminists worry that what begins as an initiative to get women to have more babies ends with those same women retreating forever from the professional sphere to care for them while their husbands bring home the bacon, no doubt from some manly job like coal mining or bear wrestling. Abortion rights proponents — already on high alert for signs of pro-life sentiment coming out of the White House — fear a slippery slope where the administration starts by merely encouraging childbirth, but eventually makes it compulsory. And the focus on fertility, which necessarily emphasises certain biological realities vis-à-vis where and from whom babies come, has raised the hackles of some progressives including Atlantic writer David A. Graham, who in a new book suggests that pro-natalism is just how conservatives put a family-friendly gloss on their darker desire to persecute trans and nonbinary people.
These fears may come to pass, or they may prove overwrought. But it hardly matters: the Trump administration’s pro-natalist project doesn’t need to be evil to be doomed. The government’s Nineties-era quest to suppress the birth rate succeeded not because of the strengths of its programming and policy initiatives, but because it was the opening salvo in what ultimately became not just a nationwide but global shift toward women having fewer children later — or not having them at all. As Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out, birth rates have been plummeting all over the Western world. And all of those policies currently under consideration — and more — have been tested elsewhere to no avail. It’s true that women who already have children generally report that they would have liked to have more. But it is also true that the percentage of American women with no children at all has nearly doubled within the past 40 years, and that of these, a significant percentage is childless by choice.
Perhaps this would have always happened, the government’s anti-teen-pregnancy campaign notwithstanding. In a highly individualistic culture that emphasises personal freedom and fulfilment, maybe it was inevitable that having made motherhood optional, many women would go a step further to conclude that it was also undesirable. But this is the uphill battle faced by would-be policymakers hoping to spark a baby boom: all the tax breaks and incentives in the world cannot engender the desire for children where it doesn’t exist.
“The Trump administration’s pro-natalist project doesn’t need to be evil to be doomed.”
Meanwhile, the government’s pivot from cheerleading abstinence in the Nineties to begging for babies in 2025 suggests that even if the state holds a certain amount of sway over sexual activity and family formation alike, it is a blunt instrument for effecting a change as delicate as this one. The crusade against pregnancy and unprotected sex looked like a good thing when it decimated the teen pregnancy rate — but now we may understand that its net result was not to persuade women to delay childbearing until a more “appropriate” age, but to scare them off it permanently.
When it comes to pro-natalist policies, then, it might be wise to be careful what you wish for. No doubt there are women out there who might have had children, but didn’t, because of a culture that taught them to associate childbearing with thwarted ambitions and shattered dreams; no doubt there are others who eventually discerned their desire for children in spite of it, but tragically too late. And then there are the women who are old enough to have grown up marinating in that culture, but who are still young enough to bear children. Why should they trust the institutions now urging them toward motherhood, after a lifetime of hearing those same institutions warn them away from it at all costs?
As always, this is the hazard of the don’t have sex because you’ll get pregnant and die brand of social engineering. What happens when you teach an entire generation that if they obey their desires — for sex, for love, or for the kind of life that values home and family above education and career — the result will be a catastrophe that ends their life as they know it? They may actually believe you.
