How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Fertility Polarization

It's going to be okay even if self-identified liberals fall to ~0 TFR

It is now widely understood that having babies is essentially a right-wing activity. I’ve written here on Substack about how it really just is now right-wing to love your family. At the Institute for Family Studies, I’ve written about the growing partisan gap in fertility. This gap is not because liberals live in more expensive cities or something; liberals actually just don’t want as many kids and, as I described above, just do not value family as much.

But in this post, I’m going to break this issue down further. Specifically, I’m going to respond to this take from Ivana Greco , which I’ve seen shared by lots of people, I think including Patrick T Brown , Cartoons Hate Her , Ann Ledbetter , and Darby Saxbe :

A worst case scenario, in my mind, is that having babies suddenly becomes politically polarized, and thus liberal women are shifted further away from having babies in reaction to their disgust at people like Elon Musk trying to raise the birth rate. Here, in my mind, is where the pro-natalist movement may end up being ironically counterproductive.

In this post I will:

1. Remind us all of the facts: having babies already is politically polarized. We’re there. And we got there without any help from pronatalists. Denying this reality is crazy.

2. Unpack why fertility has polarized: it’s because of a change in the role of sex and sexuality in politics.

3. Explain what that means for fertility going forward, namely, there simply is no hope for liberal women’s RELATIVE birth rates unless and until another social change much bigger than pronatalism.

4. As a result, the path forward for pronatalism is to try to raise the “average” birth rate even if doing so actually increases the left-right fertility gap: because closing that gap isn’t possible right now.

5. And actually, this is okay: the left-right fertility gap is actually telling us something important about how to do successful pronatalism.

---

Having Babies Is Politically Polarized

Let’s start with the facts again! Consider these graphs:

In the solidly “red” counties, fertility isn’t rising. It’s basically flat. The peak-red counties had ~2 kids/woman in 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024. But the peak-”blue” counties had ~1.7 in 2012, ~1.6 in 2016, ~1.4 in 202, and ~1.3 in 2024.

The blue-er the county, the more fertility has fallen in the last decade or two.

We can see this as well in completed fertility data from the General Social Survey: fertility in the 1970s liberal women aged 40-54 actually had higher fertility than other women! But today, conservative women are highest. GSS fertility data is generally pretty low-quality so we shouldn’t read too much into this, but it’s certainly suggestive of a change.

I can also look at recent births using the D.I. Family Survey. Here’s estimated fertility rates in DIFS for women ages 18-44:

That adds up to a TFR of 1.75 for conservative women, 1.54 for moderate women, and 1.31 for liberal women.

The key point here is not to say “Nothing bad happened with conservative fertility.” A lot of people wrongly look at these graphs and think, “This is proof that the liberals of the 2000s have turned away from family.” But that isn’t what these graphs most likely prove! What they actually prove (with one exception I’m coming to) is more likely that over time people are increasingly selecting into parties based on family dispositions.

What we’re seeing is a realignment. The parties are realigning on fertility. In the latter 20th century, parties realigned on racial politics, which flipped the south Republican. In the 21st century, the parties are realigning on fertility.

You can find tons of Bush voters who are also Biden voters: and you can predict the switch by identifying Bush voters with unusually low numbers of children. Likewise, you can find tons of Obama-Trump voters: and they tend to be Obama voters with kids (at least among whites). In 1995, when Republicans claimed to be the party of family values, an astute observer could be forgiven for not taking the claim too literally. In 2028, it’s within the realm of possibility that the estimated fertility rate for 90% Republican counties could turn out to be double that of 90% Democratic counties: it’s not at all ambiguous which party “values family life” at least in their own lives.

---

The Parties Are Realigning Around Sexual Behavior

The reason for this realignment isn’t mysterious. Democrats are increasingly definitionally the party of sexual nontraditionalism. The rise of LGBT activism, the virtual extinction of “pro-life Democrats,” and the increasing dependence of the Democratic party on single young women for their electoral success (and yes, extended singleness for young adult women is, for better or for worse, “nontraditional sexual behavior”) are all basically indicators of the extent to which the Democratic party simple is, above almost all other commitments, “the party of sexual nontraditionalism.” This is so true that I would wager that if Aella broke out fetishes by political partisanship, she’d be able to show us that high-taboo fetishes are more popular on the left than the right.

If you want a sort of funny example of “the left as the party of sexual nontraditionalism,” look no further than a fun recent post by Cartoons Hate Her, in which she articulates the unusual fashion moment in which women find themselves: dressing to be sexually appealing to men is now almost intrinsically unfashionable; fashion simply means repelling men; and yet conservative women continue to dress in ways that present the feminine form in a way desirable to men! The simple reality is that while clothing serves many purposes, “being desirable to the opposite sex” has always been one of them: that liberal women in particular are totally deviating from that always-and-forever norm is truly “sexually nontraditional.”

The Male Gaze is Uncool

In my view, while I think Richard Hanania’s argument that bad mental health for people on the left is related to therapy culture isn’t totally offbase, I think it’s hard to ignore the fact that every single deviation from vanilla-normie sexual behavior is also correlated with poor mental health, and that in GWAS, the handful of nontraditional sexual behaviors we have genetic studies of show that the genes related to these behaviors are mostly genes related to high-risk behaviors and poor mental health outcomes generally. I don’t think people become Democrats because they are sad or therapy-cultured. I think they fundamentally become Democrats because the Democratic party is friendly and welcoming to their sexual behaviors, and sexual behavior is one of the most personal, potent motivations humans experience. But sexual nontraditionalism happens to also be associated with somewhat poorer mental health. Perhaps therapy culture feeds into multiple of these dynamics as well, but I don’t think it’s the prime mover, though I could be wrong.

But the thing about sexual nontraditionalism is that what most of it has in common is a more distal tie to reproduction than sexual traditionalism. Sexual traditionalism tends to be pretty reproductively efficient: that’s because human sexual “traditions” largely developed in contexts where inter- and intra-social competition was quite ferocious and mortality rates were quite high, and as such lineage extinction was quite common, and thus societies promoted norms which encouraged people to adopt reproductively efficient behaviors.

It’s important to recognize this shift is not about feminism. Most of the conservative women still having ~2 kids are basically feminists: they support full women’s legal equality, they support women’s economic participation, they are likely to have education and work histories similar to their husbands at least pre-baby. Practically speaking, universal basic feminism is a fait accompli in the United States, and the rise of sexual nontraditionalism is pretty clearly a phenomenon among men and women, including in cases where it seems pretty clearly in contest with many varieties of feminism: see JK Rowling’s opposition to transgender ideology as a case where sexual nontraditionalism ends up running into feminist opposition. You might be able to tell a story where feminism creates conditions for the rise of sexual nontraditionalism, but you could point to a dozen other factors too.