The Pro-Natalist and Pro-Life Case to Make Birth Free, by Kenneth Craycraft

By Kenneth Craycraft, First Things, Sept. 9, 2024

Kenneth Craycraft is author of Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America. He and his wife are the parents of nine children and grandparents of ten.

In 2024, the United States, along with the rest of the world, is facing a population time bomb that will have devastating economic and social consequences in the coming decades. But it is not the kind of calamity that anti-natalist doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb (1968), have been wrongly predicting for decades. The coming social upheaval will be a result of declining birth rates and shrinking populations. The solution to the coming catastrophe will not be fewer but more births—and to create a culture that welcomes life rather than destroys it. Perhaps no public policy concern is more urgent than increasing birth rates. And no concrete proposal will do more to facilitate that than to make birth free.

“Free birth” is a policy proposal that would spread the cost of birth—from prenatal care, through birth, and well-baby care for infants—across the entire tax-paying population. The discussion to make birth free was energized by Elizabeth Bruenig’s Atlantic article “Make Birth Free: It’s time the pro-life movement chose life,” published right after the Dobbs decision. Bruenig summoned pro-lifers to shift their advocacy to concerns about the cost of carrying a child to term and delivery. …

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