The pro-natalist movement professes a pious concern for dwindling birth rates, yet its loudest voices spend their waking hours diligently destabilizing society, undermining public trust, and spreading a pervasive anxiety. If their goal is genuinely to see more cradles filled, perhaps they might refrain from torching the very conditions—stability, confidence, and security—that persuade people the future is worth reproducing for.

But coherence has never been their strong suit. These populist prophets of fertility have, through their fits of ideological petulance, inadvertently constructed the most effective contraceptive yet devised: a climate of uncertainty, paranoia, and dread. After all, who would willingly bring new life into a world whose terms are dictated by people who prefer rage to reason, superstition to science, and tribal grievance to common humanity?

That such irony escapes them is no accident. The pro-natalist populists have little patience for reality, let alone the rigorous consistency of thought required to grasp their own contradictions. They prefer the cheap intoxication of cultural resentment over the sober responsibility of shaping a viable future. And we, sadly, are left to wonder: What could be more absurd—and more tragic—than crusading for birth in a world you’ve set aflame?