A growing mountain of reports highlights one of the US’s most fascinating features: the fact that people in red states seem to breed far more than those in the blue ones, and are being newly encouraged to do so by high-profile figures who are desperate for a Maga baby boom. The vice-president, JD Vance, and his wife are expecting their fourth child, and Vance says he wants “more babies in America” – and, presumably, fewer of the people he derided as “childless cat ladies”. Elon Musk is reckoned to be a father of 14, and his views on reproduction reflect his contribution to the Trumpist procreation drive: “If people don’t have more children, civilisation is going to crumble,” he said in 2021. “Mark my words.”

In Europe, Italy’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, says she will somehow tackle a mixture of unprecedentedly low birthrates and ageing population known as the “demographic winter”. Before he was sent packing by voters, the infamous Viktor Orbán was on much the same page: “We need Hungarian children,” he said in 2019, announcing a lifelong exemption from income tax for women with four or more of them.

Such is yet another front in the world’s seemingly ceaseless culture war. Though it is far from the truth, falling birthrates are blamed on rampant liberal individualism, and comfortably off women who dare to want meaningful working lives. Clearly, the issue also plays directly into the new right’s consuming obsession with immigration, as well as highlighting the familiar insistence that however much the Earth burns, people and corporations should carry on doing what they damn well want.

On the face of it, all this might suggest that progressives should insist that falling birthrates are nothing but a good thing, and not just because they represent one of the most fundamental kinds of women’s liberation. Thousands of people have already taken that stance as a matter of personal choice, backed by climate........

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