Neglect of systematic social injustices

My first objection to pronatalism has to do with the latter’s neglect of the broader social and normative landscape against which individual decision-making about procreation takes place. To make a medical analogy: we might say that benign renditions of pronatalism like incentivising measures engage only with something akin to symptom management, rather than uncovering the aetiology of low fertility. This captures the criticism that pronatalist states are mistakenly concentrating their efforts on shifting individual preferences, motivations and attitudes (ie, symptom management) as the primary solution for low fertility, rather than recognising that the nuances of one’s relational, social and economic environment (ie, aetiology) holistically interact with and inform individual choices (and may even restrict them). While I am personally hesitant here to use such medicalising language for the issue of procreation, I do so in order to illustrate the crude ways that pronatalist practices in countries like South Korea has worked like a band-aid, rather than a sustainable treatment or ‘cure’.

In other words, the problem-targeting by the state is often localised to nudge individual behaviour on singular issues, and in so doing fails to put together a more complete puzzle as to why seemingly family-friendly methods to boost birth rates simply don’t work. To be clear, this is not to say that countries in general shouldn’t try—no matter how imperfectly—to address the issues and barriers that people who already want to have (more) children face. I take no issue, in principle, with proposals like increased child allowances, more generous parental leaves and other ‘family-friendly’ benefits. Indeed, many Nordic countries have been declared ‘successful’ for their ability to ‘[combine] high levels of maternal employment with high average fertility among working women’,21 using precisely this ‘family-friendly’ model, although the Nordics are not at replacement level for TFR either. But ‘family-friendly’ policies obviously do not exist in a social vacuum, and so we must without exception always take account of the nation-specific background context—especially with regard to inequalities and other social injustices—against which citizens of ‘reproductive age’ weigh up pronatalist incentives.

For example, increased child benefits in the face of ongoing gender inequalities, both at home and in the workplace, may not be enticing to women who can still expect to be penalised professionally and overburdened by domestic duties in patriarchal cultures like South Korea.22 Women already face steep gendered inequalities in the workplace—South Korea has the highest gender wage gap in the OECD at 31%23—but once they have children, these inequalities are only exacerbated by cultural expectations for women to become full-time mothers, rather than for them to return to work. In fact, increased participation of women in the labour force has already been weaponised against them by the current South Korean government, which has framed women’s careerism and feminism as culpable for the societal erosion of family values and low birth rates.24

Against this sociocultural context, even low-stakes interventions like state-sponsored dating events are entirely misguided: it treats fertility like a volitional issue, as if what is needed is to convince people, especially women, that they should simply value marriage and children more. But positioning marriage and childbirth as desirable in the abstract is a redundant bargain, as this does not by itself provide guidance on how women might resolve practical motherhood dilemmas, like balancing maternal responsibilities with professional life. So it is unlikely that such interventions will budge the group (eg, women) that the state likely perceives as warranting the intervention in the first place. As presented herein, pronatalism fails to fully acknowledge the reality that the reasons for why marriage and birth rates are down cannot be disentangled from the variegated social and relational concerns that institute real barriers for people—both men and women—in the context of procreative decision-making.

An underexplored aspect here is that despite ways that public blame has primarily castigated women’s rather than men’s preferences[ii], it is not obvious that men are more eager for marriage or children in this patriarchal context. In East Asian countries, ‘expectations of a clear gender division of labor within marriage remain strong’.25 However, it may be difficult to reconcile these gendered norms with the current social obstacles people are facing in reality. Men experiencing economic precarity especially may not feel up to the task of navigating financial uncertainty alongside traditional expectations to become the primary provider for a family—even if they would otherwise wish to settle down and have children. The fertility intentions and prospects of women can thus be affected just as much by men’s decisions to delay marriage and childbearing under conditions of economic insecurity, as their own. Moreover, it appears that some South Korean men with experience of parental leave come to realise upon being thrust into an intense caregiving role for the first time that they ‘had no idea looking after a child was this hard’.26 Paradoxically, then, going on paternity leave could have the effect of attenuating, rather than strengthening, men’s desires to have any more children—at least in social settings where public provisions for childcare are lacking, and where men tend to already be overworked.26 In turn, South Korean women’s fertility intentions are likely to be shaped by men’s support (or lack thereof) with childcare and household chores.27 28 So even a regime like paternity leave—which on the surface seems like a perfectly reasonable tool to encourage childbearing while intuitively combating gender-asymmetric caregiving norms—may not quite have the desired effect, due to these background tensions.

This shows us that simplistic pronatalist interventions are unlikely to be nuanced enough to fully address the dynamic and divisive social complexities which underlie the experiences of men and women of ‘reproductive’ age. The social challenges and injustices which make it difficult for citizens to imagine childbirth and childrearing as a feasible and desirable life path, are not to be underestimated in pronatalist calculations. Of course, we should further recognise that some of the reasons for why people are not having children may not be congruous with individual willingness at all, but due to factors beyond their control, such as changes in sexual and reproductive health caused by environmental pollutants. It is surely a step in the right direction to make assisted reproductive technologies (ART) available for those who require assistance with reproduction in this context, as this might help recover unrealised fertility to some extent.29 But even here it is important to recognise that in practice, uptake of ART by interested groups can be limited by powerful cultural scripts. For instance, extramarital births are rare in South Korea due to heteronormative family norms which temporally order marriage and childbearing.7 This may stigmatise ART access (and general family support) for citizens who deviate from this arrangement, like unmarried couples, single women, or lesbian aspiring mothers.

Without investigating the systematic and structural social struggles which underlie people’s procreative motivations and choices, pronatalism will only operate as a stopgap measure which fails to confront the root causes of declining birth rates. If times are so desperate for the pronatalist, it is all the more important for those setting the pronatalist agenda to simultaneously address social, structural and environmental patterns which influence birth rates, rather than to treat fertility as a surface issue only (eg, individual incentives taken out of their social context).

Reinforcement of oppressive or paternalistic social norms

An interrelated problem which arises out of the neglect of background social conditions within which procreative decision-making takes place, is the reinforcement of social injustices. I do not deny that multiple parties—including aspiring parents, children and the state—can plausibly benefit from reproduction and support for family-making. Nevertheless, promoting childbirth through pronatalism can come at the ethical cost of burdening groups who are already under immense pressure to procreate by default. This includes women perceived as being of childbearing age, or any other citizens of reproductive age who are seen to deviate from child-making aspirations.

It has been, and will continue to be, primarily women who bear the embodied costs of pregnancy, motherhood, care and upkeeping the goods of family life in general. In the South Korean context, which is influenced by Confucian philosophies, patrilineal family-making norms augment a rather demanding—and also restrictive—role for women. As wives, they are traditionally expected to be obedient and subordinate to their husbands (and their parents-in-law); at the same time, they are expected to exemplify their homemaking and childrearing responsibilities.30 Thus, the social pressure placed on women to abide by this feminine destiny is, historically, deep-seated in the cultural imagination.

This glaring fact is often missing entirely from pronatalist logics. It is clear that by not questioning or acknowledging the potential wrongs of gender-based ideologies normalised in the sociocultural environment, pronatalism can serve to prop up problematic traditions as the gold standard for women’s life trajectories. As Laura Purdy points out, ‘pronatalism would not necessarily push women to be children’s primary caregivers, but misogyny guarantees that it does so; geneticism, a strong preference for genetically-related children also reinforces pronatalism, along with belief in a so-called maternal instinct’.11 The project of pronatalism, even if not explicitly intended to endorse the (mis)treatment or oppression of women, can conveniently act as an enabler or vehicle for ideological frameworks which unduly frame women as defined by adherence to wifely and maternal duties.

Thus, endorsement of pronatalism without critical attention to its connections and intersections with restrictive gender roles is morally wanting. Something that should be given greater weight in discussions about reasonable pronatalist incentives is the fact that its ‘success’ greatly depends on the willingness of women’s bodies and labour. Being blind to the agency and interests of the women who stand to be most impacted by child-making would not only be unethical but also uninformed with respect to the factors which contribute to the hesitancies women face around the decision to procreate. Even for those women already willing to undertake childbearing efforts, much more could be done in general by the state to counteract the ill effects or vulnerabilities generated by this unique dependency, and to reassure women of their agency and livelihood against everything they are traditionally expected to endure. This could take the form of better advocacy and funding to mitigate intimate partner violence, obstetric violence, maternal mental health issues, domestic inequalities and other issues that have repercussions for mothers and women in general. Efforts to de-polarise and de-stigmatise public dialogue around feminist issues could also be a conciliatory step to ensure that women—as agents heavily implicated by state-level decision making about birth increase strategies—are being heard, represented and supported in the making of pronatalist designs, rather than merely subjected to the latter. It is thus ironic and unfortunate that feminism and women’s independence have chiefly been blamed for the issue of low birth rates, rather than viewed as the key to improving the ethical prospects of pronatalism in gender-divisive cultures like South Korea.

Besides specifically feminist concerns about whose bodies must actually bear the brunt of pronatalist values, there is also the fact that all kinds of people—not just women—are simply not interested in settling down and having children. People who choose to be ‘childfree’ is a growing trend around the world.31 Yet it remains the case that societies are organised in such ways that, ‘by fiction and by fiat, parenthood is the ‘natural’ condition, and to live one’s life as a family member is the natural desideratum’.32 Reinforcing pronatalist values naturally pathologises people who choose to go against the social script of marriage and babies, as is evidenced in the fact that singledom tends to be associated with loneliness, and in that child-free couples are stigmatised as selfish, materialistic persons with unfulfilling lives.33 34 In pronatalist contexts, we can see why the concept of being joyfully unpartnered or child-free may be ill-tolerated or taken as inconceivable altogether. Far from successfully advancing any pronatalist cause, however, this pathologisation of people without children discourages further understanding and investigation into the various reasons people may have for not having children.

Ideally, a tolerant and liberal society should present family-making as just one of many possible life paths from which free individuals may choose of their own volition. After all, family-making is plausibly a volitional right, rather than a duty35—otherwise the freedom people have to choose to procreate (or not) would not be possible. In a world where people have the right to choose to have families, it should be perfectly acceptable to see that some people might opt to have biogenetic offspring, some might engage in other forms of parenthood (eg, foster parenting), and still others may choose not to have children at all. In principle, those who have acceptable life plans other than reproduction should be treated on equal footing as those who plan to bear children, since this is a matter of individual choice. But state-sponsored pronatalism is obviously not neutral about what people should want or do—by attempting to incentivise greater childbearing with promises of financial rewards and other apparent benefits, it is overtly paternalistic (at best) in its insistence that citizens should choose to reproduce. The alleged ‘need’ for pronatalism, and commonplace condemnations of individual deviance from pronatalist norms, betrays an insecurity or suspicion that the supposedly natural right and desire to procreate may not be so universal after all.

What the observations above make apparent, in my view, is that pronatalism is not a self-evident or universal value. Rather, pronatalist schemes are rationalised by the uncritical leveraging of traditional gender norms, as well as positive biases about the benefits of child-making over and above other life values and pathways. In so doing, pronatalism upholds the status quo. Presenting the ‘choice’ of having (more) children as the best possible option for all adults of reproductive age unfortunately marginalises those who might not see the appeal or feasibility of that choice—be that women who would like to have children (under better conditions), single people who don’t want them, childfree couples, and so forth.

The undue instrumentalisation of persons

The final problem with pronatalist incentives I want to highlight is the fact that they fail to appreciate people as persons. Pronatalism essentially reduces people down to their potential fertility and productivity, as necessary vessels of (re)production. This is already evident in public obsession over TFR figures and the alleged threshold that should be reached in order to sufficiently ‘replace’ the working population. What is implicitly prioritised in pronatalism is the instrumentalisation of people’s ‘vital’ and ‘active’ years, and ensuring that people are engaged in (re)production. It is especially telling that, despite the world population being at an all-time high, a growing ‘ageing population’ is considered functionally redundant: the fact that elderly populations are increasing across the globe is inconvenient to the pronatalist precisely because they are a combination of costly and undeployable in the relevant senses. While raising the retirement age has been discussed as a potential strategy to mitigate the anticipated effects of demographic changes to the economy, it is an unpopular one.36

Yet the logics of pronatalism in the context of fertility decline are not as commonsense as they may seem initially. The commonsense objective of pronatalism is to secure a certain economic output (ie, growth) on the basis of a specific demographic makeup—namely, by ensuring that enough babies are born every year. This simply assumes that every person who comes into existence will fulfil their part in putting their fertility and productivity to maximal use. While this narrative may be perfectly acceptable to the garden-variety capitalist, it homogenises the landscape of human persons as equal units of productivity, without accounting for those who may not be able-bodied enough, fertile enough, or even motivated enough, to relevantly ‘contribute’ to society. That is, pronatalism does not fully appreciate the potential complexity and unruliness of free citizens and thereby fails to resonate with those who might struggle, or be hesitant, to (re)produce in all the normative ways. This flattening down of human persons as mere units of (re)production can constitute part of the way that, as elaborated in the previous section, pronatalism imposes and reinforces restrictive norms on people without appreciating why they might wish to act otherwise.

The instrumentalising and homogenising logic of pronatalism also fails to be sensitive to the fact that people of reproductive age right now are already refusing to reproduce conditions they don’t find acceptable, especially in the context of anthropogenic climate change37 and other social issues which are justifiably shifting preferences about procreation. The formation of ‘birth strike’ and ‘marriage strike’ movements in South Korea are illustrative of this issue: they speak to the plight of women who should be able to reproduce and may even have wanted to reproduce in different conditions, but are actively choosing to go on ‘strike’ under conditions that fail to dignify the deep-seated social problems they face.38 Taking such factors into account, it becomes possible to reframe and rehumanise the ‘problem’ of fertility decline as one that is, at its core, about the resistance of the citizenry to (re)produce, rather than a crisis about fewer babies being born relative to some hypothetical ideal number. Thus far, pronatalist states have missed the opportunity to recognise and take more seriously, in the here and now, the heterogeneous abilities and preferences of persons as persons.

Overall, it seems plausible here to say that treating people as persons first, rather than primarily as mere units of (re)production, would be a necessary ameliorative step for any ethics of pronatalism. To even begin to understand why persons of reproductive potential may resist the pronatalist script or be ambivalent to it, we cannot take trajectories of their (re)production for granted, or idealise a number of children as the final goal on the supposition that this alone will resolve the challenges of nationwide demographic transition. Instead, we must prioritise the attendant attitudes, beliefs, emotions and experiences that constitute one’s humanity. How do citizens come to trust, or distrust, population strategies endorsed by their state? What are the social conditions under which individuals would find the prospect of having children acceptable? What are the primary deterrents of individual fertility intentions at this moment in history? Answering such inquiries, of course, will require further qualitative exploration—be that inside or outside of academia—to shed light on the developing decision-making trends in human reproduction and bring first-personal perspectives into purview.