Demographic Decline Can't be Addressed by Bigotry

Birth rates are low in many economically developed countries, but right-wing nationalists aren't offering solutions

New data continue to show declining birth rates across the world’s advanced economies. France’s fertility rate of 1.79 in 2022 was high for Europe, though this is little consolation, since in 2023 the rate dropped by 7%. In Italy, the same data showed the country languishing at 1.24 live births per woman in 2022. That number fell to 1.2 in 2023. In 2023 in the United States, births per woman hit 1.62–a hundred-year low.

Policy analysts and commentators are rightly concerned about this trend. Aging populations create less economic activity, and put pressure on social welfare programs, with fewer workers to help care for an increasing number of retirees. But many of the countries facing this demographic challenge are also being roiled by debates over immigration and LGBTQ rights that are driven by right-wing movements with narrowly prescribed ideas of citizenship and the family.

Immigration provides an easy solution to the economic problems of low birth rates and an aging population, but despite the benefits, right-wing parties across the West have become increasingly opposed. At the same time, right-wing politicians and commentators in many of these countries are pushing to limit access to IVF treatment, surrogacy, and adoption for same-sex couples. Such approaches belie their proclaimed concern for demographic decline, revealing visions of heterogeneous and culturally conservative national futures.

In France, conservative protesters took to the streets in 2019 when President Emmanuel Macron introduced a bill to legalize IVF treatment for single women and lesbian couples. They carried signs that read “Where is my father?,” and, “We’ll fight to stop children being conceived without a father, you don’t make children in laboratories.”

They barely make children the old fashioned way in France these days, but that did not deter the law’s opponents. It passed in 2021, over objections from right-wing members of France’s Senate, but surrogacy remains illegal, hindering family-building for many couples. The government also enacted the strictest immigration law in decades, limiting social security benefits and job opportunities for foreigners, in a defensive move against Marine Le Pen’s far-right movement. It prompted the resignation of Macron’s Minister of Health.

In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has called surrogacy “inhuman” and “uterus renting.” She advocates a ban on international surrogacy—it’s currently illegal in Italy only if done domestically—and has put forward legislation to this end.

Meloni’s policies on the broader rights of same-sex parents make the purpose clear. In 2023, her government barred local authorities from listing same-sex couples as parents on birth certificates. Her bill outlawing overseas surrogacy comes with the threat of two years in prison and fines exceeding $1 million. For same-sex couples, particularly men, these policies close off the path to having kids. 

Italy’s push for an increased birth rate is impossible to disentangle from its hardline policies on immigration and LGBTQ+ rights. Meloni has dabbled in Great Replacement conspiracy theorizing. And her efforts to rouse the nation to have more children, such as cutting value added taxes on diapers and formula, have to be set against her attempts to cut same-sex couples out of the legal rights and social experience of parenthood.

In the United States, Michigan was the only state to have criminal penalties for paid surrogacy arrangements and Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s effort to remove them met resistance from the state’s Republicans. Only two of the Michigan Legislature’s seventy-two Republicans backed Whitmer’s package, prompting the governor to declare in alarm, "Either you support families or you don't."

Much of the new American right does not. For example, The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles calls surrogacy “evil,” and said that “every single adult involved in this should be imprisoned for life at least.”

The end of Roe v. Wade has also led to a peculiar new conflict over access to IVF. Most prominently, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are legally children, creating political problems for Republicans nationally. Some Alabama Republicans say it went too far, but they’ve yet to pass the promised legislation to resolve this issue. Nationally, Senate Republicans blocked a bill in February that aimed to protect IVF access, though Senators Ted Cruz and Katie Britt introduced their own IVF bill this week. 

Heightened talk about a “demographic winter” is not pure fear mongering. Declining birth rates do pose a serious challenge to advanced economies, and there is nothing inherently objectionable about trying to provide incentives for family building. What is clear is that right-wingers across the United States and Europe are happy to advocate for a narrow definition of family, and to impose onerous restrictions on the ability of those who fall outside their preferred social framework to build families of their own.

It’s a deviously regressive and exclusionary vision of what the family and the nation ought to be, one that will do little to prevent the decline these hardliners so fear.