Out of the Box in America: On the ‘Natalism’ Phenomenon

By Ginan Rauf

The Op-Ed columnist David Brooks has just informed us that there is a little known movement sweeping across the United States called “natalism.” Birth rates are falling “all across the industrialized world,” and this appears to be causing considerable anxiety among the family values crowd.

But “natalism” is not just about reversing a demographic trend. It is about constructing an identity, one that privileges parenthood as the most elevated human activity, and in the case of breeding women, the only elevated human activity. Natalists, according to this account, are “more spiritually, emotionally and physically’’ invested in their children than those selfish urban types who prefer un-American activities such as watching sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and--horror of all horrors--foreign travel.

Natalist moms presumably watch family values films or should I say, blockbusters like Beethoven in which decadent uppity women pursuing disposable income are duly flung across the suburban backyard for putting on airs. Natalism then is all about putting selfish women back in their place (or the exurbs) where children can be raised in “clean, orderly and affordable spaces” otherwise known as purified havens of white flight.

The natalist enclave is proudly provincial in its wholesome rejection of all things foreign with the possible exception of consumer products like Chinese toys, German SUV’s, Japanese cameras, and of course Arab oil so that all those self-sacrificing moms can keep driving their precious kids to more soccer—oops, football--games. Gotta protect them from all that “bad influence” as Brooks tells us people with money are wont to do.

More insidiously the term natalistic works to further divide Americans and to box us all into one dimensional identities that are mutually exclusive and deliberately constructed to keep us segregated. Why must Brooks, for instance, slyly conflate a taste for sophisticated films with an insufficient commitment to parenting?

Can’t a good mom put her kids to bed, rent a movie at the end of a hectic day, and then finally sit down to enjoy a sophisticated American film such as Age of Innocence? Is it inconceivable for good parents to introduce their children to sophisticated films and cultivate their artistic sensibilities or does that smack of immorality? Or must a good mother be a self-sacrificing saint whose life is devoid of all worldly pleasure so that she may continue to breed more children for the orderly burbs?

And since when has there been a direct correlation between the number of children a family has and its moral values? Brooks writes, “The people who are having big families are explicitly rejecting materialistic incentives and hyperindividualism. It costs a middle-class family upward of $200,000 to raise a child. These people are saying money and ambition will not be their gods.” So if a family has two children and acts fiscally responsible and considers college costs and raises them to the best of its ability and bears in mind that the natural resources of the earth are running out then somehow it scores lower on the spiritual barometer just because its members attend religious services less regularly and happen to live in the blue states?

Perhaps we must all submit to the fertility God instead? Or does that only apply to the red states where white fertility rates are higher? How easily the natalist slips into the nativist rejection of all things foreign and a celeberation of, dare I say it, "racial purity."

Ginan Rauf is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University currently completing a dissertation in comparative literature focusing on Arab migrant communities, including the Mizrahim. She is an Arab-American worried about the direction of her country.