VIDEO. Who are the pronatalists, who are controversial in the United States?

With his nine children, multi-billionaire and Tesla boss Elon Musk is a model of the pronatalist movement that is all the rage among Silicon Valley billionaires. It’s about having as many children as possible to fight against the decline of humanity.

In a tweet from August 26, 2022, Elon Musk considered that “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a far greater risk to civilization than global warming.” It thus reflects the concerns of certain high-tech entrepreneurs, who worry about the declining birth rate in Western societies.

The temptation of eugenics

But the pronatalist movement sometimes turns to eugenics. This is the case, for example, with Malcolm and Simone Collins who have become standard bearers of this ideology. They even created an association on the subject, Pronatalist.org. Convinced of their genetic superiority, the couple resorts to in vitro fertilization and selects the “best” embryos, depending in particular on the risks of “polygenic diseases”.

Malcolm and Simone Collins hope that the children will in turn have many descendants and that they will thus be able to influence the future of the human species. They did their math: if, over 11 generations, each of their descendants has eight children, the Collins will outnumber the current world population.

The concerns of pronatalists are reminiscent of those of far-right movements in the United States and in all Western countries. In France, support for the birth rate in certain circles is sometimes linked to the “great replacement” theory. Similarly, in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban launched a birth support plan with the slogan “We want Hungarian children, immigration is a surrender”.