Want to Make America Great? Make More Americans.
My talk at the 2025 Natalism Conference.
Tech vs. Trad Natalism
Hello, fellow natalists! And hello to all the natalist-haters here. Welcome! I also want to thank my husband for unshackling me from the stove so I could be here today. He’s so good to me. Thanks, honey!
There is a Flannery O’Conner quote I used on the first page of my book, Domestic Extremist: “Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you.” And that’s why we are all here tonight.
When I spoke at this conference in 2023, I made the case that the easiest way to raise birthrates was to make motherhood great again—to somehow convince more fertile young women to start families. For those of you who only speak NPR, that means convincing America’s uterus-havers to remember that they have uteruses—before it's too late.
Did it work? It’s too soon to say, but some reports indicate that 2024 actually did have a slight uptick in births.
Bad news: it was all anchor babies.
I’m going to use my brief time to quickly address three things, first, why are a lot of young women rejecting marriage? Second, can technology save them? And finally, some thoughts on why approaching life from a more “Trad” direction may be our best shot at fixing the crisis.
There are some in the media who think I’m a “far right extremist.” I think it’s because I had 5 kids with the same lucky guy. But let me quickly explain what I believe, and you guys can decide. First, I believe that if a baby could choose, he or she would choose to be born to married parents who are their biological mother and father. A baby would choose siblings. And, they would choose to be with their mother as much as possible, instead of handed to strangers to raise.
This is where I get into trouble, because I also think that mothers should aspire to be with their babies, even if they are unable to, and not treat a baby’s demands like crushing inconveniences, or career suicide.
And finally, I think liberal feminism backfired. It promised women liberation from the patriarchy but delivered only enslavement to their jobs, genetic suicide, and a lifetime addiction to narcissism and consumerism.
Here is what I DON’T believe: I don’t think women should be submissive to their husbands, or treated as inferior beings, or, obviously, abused or mistreated in any way.
My book reviewer for the Washington Post claimed that by encouraging women to get married, I am denying and even ignoring terrible things like domestic abuse and rape. Yes, those things exist, and obviously are awful. But this is a common perception that liberal feminists have—they think all men—especially your conservatives—are rapists. Maybe because the only men they know are male feminists, and if you’ve met any, you know.
Want more proof that the Washington Post is fake news? My reviewer also described my kitchen as “suspiciously stagelike” and one I never seem to clean. First of all, when did she break into my house? And second, my kitchen is the opposite of stagelike. We have five children, okay, and four of them are teenagers, and a bunch of dogs. But she was right about one thing—it does look like I never seem to clean it!
What’s Wrong With Women?
The default factory setting of American women these days is to jettison marriage and family in favor of living their best lives. The new Snow White movie reimagines the princess as a political leader who don’t need no man.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal bears this out. Women are no longer interested in being brides. Marriage and even falling in love has been reduced to a side quest, a game no one wants to play because they don’t like the prizes and think they can’t win anyway. The star of Snow White, Rachel Zegler, made headlines when she described the original prince charming as a “stalker.”
“A 2022 Pew survey showed only 34% of single women were looking for romance, versus 54% of single men. Young women tout their “boy sober” status on TikTok. “Dating apps make people feel like there might always be a better option,” said Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland. A 2023 AEI survey of college-educated women found that half blamed their singlehood on an inability to find someone who meets their expectations. Less than a quarter of single men said the same.”
Meanwhile, fashion bloggers are posting about zoomer girls who wear what they call “Man Repeller outfits.” These are young women who purposely wear ugly and unflattering outfits in order to ward off male attention.
Which actually is a smart survival strategy for girls living in London and Berlin.
One popular man-repeller fashion account on Instagram posted that she wonders if these trends are “representative of the growing divide between American Gen-Z men and women politically. Perhaps women are participating in these trends out of exhaustion with men's behavior more generally or perhaps resentment for men's contributions to the current political climate.”
This is Fuck-you fashion as revenge for Trump. But…maybe this trend is helpful. These outfits might save you time and heartache. If you encounter a girl with green hair dressed like an Oompa Loompa, or snow white—RUN.
Instead of trying to woo the Rachel Zeglers of the world over, I propose we focus our support on young women who might actually like men and be interested in forming long term relationships and having families. I was curious to know how big this cohort was, so I asked Grok. Voting for a Republican is one way to guess roughly how someone feels about having lots of kids, so that’s the filter I used. Grok estimates that the number of women between 18 and 35 who voted for Donald Trump is around seven million.
These are the women, unmarried and married, who we should be doing our best to help. The others are likely to have Planned Parenthood punch cards and IUDs cemented to their cervix. They’re tough nuts to crack.
Can Reproductive Technology Save Us?
None of these numbers are great, of course. Some people have already crunched all these numbers and decided that new technology, from Tinder to Crispr, will make the baby printer go brrrrrr.
But we know that dating apps have mostly succeeded in one thing: depressing the marriage rate. Well, two things, if you count the chlamydia epidemic.
And reproductive technology, for all the hype, only represents about 2% of all births in the United tates. In other words, IVF babies are a rounding error in the total number born each year. Couples who do IVF because of infertility have on average just 1.2 children.
And of course, IVF is just the start. I am told that we are soon getting IVF for everyone, surrogate mills, embryonic genetic editing, factory baby farms filled with Matrix-style artificial wombs, and more.
You’ll soon be able to have a baby well into your 60s, even your 70s! Without a husband, or a wife or a female, of any species! Doctors will be able to germinate embryos out of some cuticle clippings off your big toe! There will be hydroponic grow rooms full of bespoke newborns on every corner! We’ll have to give up on names and just call them by their number, as Elon Musk has started to do.
A quick note on IVF: Yes, I am a Catholic, and therefore not a big fan of IVF, but like a lot of you, I have friends and family I love and respect who used IVF. My best friend used IVF. I have IVF nieces. But like other Catholics, I have serious qualms about the byproducts of the process. But neither I nor JD Vance or the Pope is going to outlaw IVF. That toothpaste is out of the fallopian tube.
But I admit that I’m relieved that I am not languishing in a cryo lab at negative 321 degrees Fahrenheit. My feet get really cold at night.
In the end, IVF is not going to save us.
And, either is embryonic genetic testing, which I’ve also been hearing about lately. IVF parents can test babies for genetic defects and things like hair color, eye color, and more.
Let’s be honest. How many of you or people you know and love would have been left behind by genetic testing? Imagine waiting for your mother to get your first test scores. Like waiting for your SAT score, but the stakes are a little higher. What happens if you beat out all your siblings and make it out alive, but one day you flunk 10th grade Chemistry.
Your parents paid an extra $20K to make sure you weren’t a retard, and you failed them. And what if you have bad skin, or baby fat, or a stutter? What if you can’t throw a ball or run fast? Imagine giving birth to a carefully screened embryo and then they die of childhood cancer. Do you get a refund?
I worry that this sort of testing, like dating apps, may set parental expectations a little bit high. It forces parents to judge kids the way people judge each other on Tinder and Hinge. Just wait until zoomer women have the power to test all their male embryos for height. Not a single male under six feet tall will ever be born again. Men, 5-11 and under, you’re all going extinct.
And they find out the baby will have early onset male baldness, Sayonara, Norwood!
It will be a world filled with six-foot-three super genius gigachads with full heads of hair—this is the dystopian hellscape we’re going to be living through.
At best, these technological miracles will be the purview of the very rich and the very picky. None of it will materially increase the birth rate in our lifetimes. Most women who do IVF stop after one because it is so emotionally and physically exhausting. The cost, the invasive procedures, the unpleasant optics, and the moral questions stop most couples before they beat the replacement rate.
But set aside those pesky moral issues. The real problem with reproductive technology is, in a word, the hype. It’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thanks to the promise of technology, you can wait as long as you want—and so, you do. You can postpone marriage indefinitely—so you do.
As we speak, millions of otherwise fertile women are being told they can wait, essentially forever, to start a family, if they freeze their eggs or save up for emergency IVF in their 40s. They are literally being psy-opped by the fertility industry into running out the clock—until they run into the wall.
No one is telling them the truth, which is that even with IVF, your chance of giving birth plummets dramatically as you get older. The longer you wait, the fewer kids you have.
The Trad Option
So if technology can’t save us, what will? Well, like the Lorax, allow me to speak for the trads. By trad I mean people who mostly are doing it the old-fashioned way. The normies. The men whose testicles are not yet filled with microplastics and the women who survive college with their body parts and minds intact.
The real trads, of course, are not worried about the birth rate or population collapse. That’s not why they’re having big families. They are doing it because they want to create something of value that goes far beyond a crypto wallet or a 401K.
There are groups out there who have figured this out in time. We’ve all heard of trad wives. But do you know about trad undergrads? If you want to see young people who are well on their way to beating the replacement rate, pay a visit a Christian or Catholic college. Can’t find a spouse? Go enroll as a freshman at Steubenville or the University of Dallas or Hillsdale.
Every year, Thomas Aquinas college, in Ojai, California, sends out a school magazine filled with student wedding announcements. In the last issue, I counted over a dozen weddings among newly graduated seniors, out of a class of 100 kids. You don’t see that at Penn or Harvard.
Boys coming out of schools like this are highly motivated to make themselves into the kind of men one of these girls might want to marry. Girls at these schools haven’t spent four years getting blow job tutorials on the Call Me Daddy podcast, or in body count competitions with their bisexual polycule.
My son goes to one of these “ trad” colleges. He’s going to watch two of his fraternity brothers get married this summer—not to each other, of course. That only happens at Yale.
The True Meaning of Natalism
What is the Natalism movement about, in the end? Is it about TFR line go up – at any cost? All costs?
Before I became Catholic I asked a friend of mine who was pregnant with her sixth child how many kids she wanted to have. “As many as God wants me to,” she said.
Another good friend of mine was once asked why she had nine kids. I found her answer simple but shockingly profound. “I had them for them,” she said.
In the end, any healthy natalism movement must be about more than numbers and technology. It has to be about, simply, maternal love. We should do it for their babies, for our babies, out of infinite love for them.
And what children need most, in the end, is to be born to two loving parents who treat parenthood like what it is - a sacrificial lifelong vocation. And to be born free of any expectations of becoming a straight A super achiever, or 1600 SAT scorer, or varsity athlete, or a billionaire founder. To just be able to be.
That is why I am calling on people to start “raw dogging their lives”—in other words, to lean in to the zesty, natural process of meeting and mating and making babies.
The term “rawdogging” of course is a very rude, crude expression that originally meant having unprotected sex. Then it became a meme to describe any life experience you undergo without the aid of technology: airplane flights without ear pods or movies, for example. Just you, experiencing life, in all its ups and down. To us, that may mean trying to meet people in person. Get engaged senior year of college. Try quitting chemical hormones and experience real, natural physical attraction. Get off the apps.
Except for X of course. Stop over-medicalizing and optimizing everything in life. And then, maybe you too can raw dog your way to a big family!
And if it’s too late for you to do it, don’t worry, America because a small army of trad kids are on the way. To make America great again, it’s up to us to raise great Americans.
Hope to see you all at the next conference, Natalists!
—Peachy
(Top image credit:
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Bravo!! Here is to "trad" women/children/families!!
I do have to say one thing in defense of IVF. My wife and I (married in our mid-30s) tried for years unsuccessfully to have children. We tried diet, exercise, organic (and eventually non-organic) fertility treatment, prayer, everything. In our early 40s we had gotten to a point where my wife cried almost daily because we could not seem to get pregnant. I even had a dream which is one of the only dreams of thousands I can vividly recall where I was throwing baseball with a quiet sweet boy knew was my son.
Roughly 15 years ago, we decided to use IVF. Way back then the technology was such that they could not tell if a fertilized egg would turn out to be a Rhodes Scholar, but simply "red" or "green" (i.e., "viable" in medical terms). More prayers, more tears, and borrowing money discreetly from family members, we went ahead, and ended up with twins. FYI ... we did not "test" they fetuses for anything other than heartbeats. Why? Because no matter how they were born (if they were born), we would love them.
Fast forward to today. Our son is the last remaining male in my family. He plays sports and music, but not well enough to get into any "elite" college. My daughter dabbles at sports, music, and loves art. You will not see her work in any art gallery or international art show. Both attend Catholic school (mom and dad are Christians, but not Catholic). Before school every day, before meals, and before bed, they say their prayers and thank God for what He has given them, including loving parents and life. Mom and dad (me) joke that the only reason I survived a "bumpy" (to say the least) childhood and early adulthood was because God wanted my children to be alive. They bring us headaches, stress, and an abundance of bottomless joy.
As a postscript, we tried again, and after about 15 weeks, the faint heartbeat stopped. It was not meant to be. My wife ended up in the ICU after almost passing away from complications (she did survive). We learned a lot of lessons - ask God and He will provide, and always ALWAYS be grateful for what you do have.
A elderly neighbor once asked us why we had so many kids. We were expecting #6, our youngest. He paused for a second and then said with a smile, “I guess we just like each other.” Perfect answer.