Pronatalism has a marketing problem: one that makes ordinary Catholic parents the best hope of convincing the next generation to have families of their own. Imagine telling a child he or she was conceived in a conscious effort by Mommy and Daddy to “outbreed the libs” or “prevent our economy from collapsing.” The picture is equal parts ridiculous and unsavory, for any parent understands that political and financial motives are hardly the reasons their own children came into existence.
The pronatalism movement—a subculture documented by Kody Cooper for Word on Fire—responds to the global collapse of fertility rates, a problem documented by outlets like The Economist, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. But in attempting to convince young people to become parents, its messaging goes awry. Cooper rightly points out that factions of the movement embody a problematic eugenic tendency.
The Technonatal Right affirms “the autonomy of the will to sever procreation from the marital union and to ‘rationalize’ child production into a scientific process overseen by lab coats to identify children with desired traits and eliminate those without,” Cooper writes.
The Catholic Church’s deposit of teaching on children and parenthood can remedy the thinking behind these flaws, and even pick up where the movement fails.
Yet even factions of the movement which would spurn this eugenic sentiment in favor of natural procreation too often frame parenthood as a politically and economically motivated decision, rather than a radically selfless act of love. In doing so, pronatalists lose the support of the audience they most need to convince: young women. The Catholic Church’s deposit of teaching on children and parenthood can remedy the thinking behind these flaws, and even pick up where the movement fails.
The pronatalism movement, if it is to succeed, desperately needs to convince the next generation of young people to become parents, or at least aspire to parenthood in their near future. Young men aren’t automatically on board with the movement’s ideas, but they are more likely than their female counterparts to want children, attend church (where they will often hear pro-family messages and befriend people with children), and even attend pronatalism conferences. Free Press reporter Madeleine Kearns attended the 2025 Natal Conference and estimated both the speaker lineup and attendees were roughly 75 percent male.
Young women, by contrast, are less likely to want children, and have more at stake in that choice. By their natures, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum recovery demand an incredible amount of a woman’s time, energy, and bodily autonomy. Men make many sacrifices to become fathers, but none analogous to childbirth or breastfeeding. The incredibly personal, physical undertaking of motherhood makes economic and political arguments for parenthood all the more laughable to young women.
I am a twenty-something college-educated young woman, a member of the population pronatalists have the hardest time persuading. I have always wanted children. So the fact that I—and many of my female peers like me—find pronatalist talking points off-putting and even repulsive indicates how poorly they will work to convince young women who are not inclined to desire motherhood.
In much of pronatalist rhetoric, children become means to outbreeding one’s political opponents or preventing economic collapse, rather than ends in themselves. This sort of messaging does not work very well to convince young women. This instrumentalization of children as pawns in a national strategy game goes against an intuition Pope St. John Paul II attributed to all women.
“Perhaps more than men, women acknowledge the person, because they see persons with their hearts,” wrote the pope in his 1995 Letter to Women. “They see them independently of various ideological or political systems.”
A radical love ought to lie at the heart of every man or woman’s decision to become a parent.
While the pope likely had in mind children and adult persons, his observations are equally true of unborn persons. A radical love ought to lie at the heart of every man or woman’s decision to become a parent. Even women who do not share in the intellectual tradition of the Church can intuit the difference between this kind of love and the off-putting pronatalist rhetoric as motivations for parenthood.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), in a 1996 pastoral letter entitled “Economic Justice for All,” wrote that to use human beings as economic pawns is an offense against the dignity of the human person.
“All human beings, therefore, are ends to be served by the institutions that make up the economy, not means to be exploited for more narrowly defined goals,” the USCCB said. “Human personhood must be respected with a reverence that is religious. When we deal with each other, we should do so with the sense of awe that arises in the presence of something holy and sacred. For that is what human beings are: we are created in the image of God (Gn 1:27)” (EJ 28).
If man was created as “the only creature on earth which God willed for itself,” husbands and wives must join God in the act of co-creation with the same purity of intention (Gaudium et Spes 24). Fortunately, most ordinary parents already live out this life-giving love, exemplifying the best of the pronatalist message without its messiness as a movement. They, more so than most pronatalist influencers, can inspire young women to want families of their own.
If this is to happen, older adults cannot be dismissive of young women’s concerns about marriage and motherhood. Through no fault of their own, many young women grow up without examples of healthy, thriving marriages in their family or community—and the broader culture certainly wasn’t delivering them. These young women lack a pattern to follow, or even the simple assurance that they could be happy and fulfilled as wives and mothers. Others have reasonable concerns about the financial ramifications of marriage and the high cost of child-rearing in an economy that, if not in a recession, is at least “uncomfortable.”
Perhaps, even more than a better pronatalism, we need more ordinary, committed parents to model to young women a future characterized by prudence, joy, and fulfillment. Gen Z—like every generation of teenagers and young adults before them—is tired of being lectured, especially when they sense the lecturer holds them in disdain. They are far more attentive to witness, which in turn can open the door to life-changing mentorship. A single encounter with a mother who clearly loves her children and is enthusiastic about her way of life is worth more than dozens of pronatalist articles and social media posts.
Catholic parents must respond to young women’s worries with empathy, practical advice, and—most importantly—a “you can!” For all its talk of female empowerment, fourth-wave feminism expresses very little faith in the women who would like, even one day, to become mothers. It takes a good deal of courage to buck societal norms by even opening oneself to marriage and parenthood. Young women need a vote of confidence.
The Church can succeed where the pronatalism movement fails, correcting the instrumentalization of children and bringing young women back to the oldest, best, and most compelling reason to become mothers: love.