Miranda Brady is an associate professor in communication and media studies at Carleton University and author of Mother Trouble: Mediations of White Maternal Angst After Second Wave Feminism.
It’s an old adage that trends in the United States will inevitably make their way to Canada. But there are some things worth staving off before they creep north.
One such trend is pronatalism, an ideology aimed at encouraging prolific childbirth, which can involve religious undertones but also official state policies.
Conspicuously absent from the pronatalism espoused by conservative pundits is that mothers assume most of the risks in having children. Pronatalists like billionaire Elon Musk claim that prolific child-rearing will help sustain the economy and address an impending population decline. Mr. Musk, who has fathered at least 12 or 13 children with three or four different women, boasted on social media that he is “doing [his] best to help the underpopulation crisis,” noting the perceived decline as “the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”
However, demographers have argued that pronatalism amounts to a Ponzi scheme that puts pressure on younger generations to support aging populations, and they disagree with the estimated population declines predicted by Mr. Musk and his compatriots. Inevitably, with pronatalism, mothers will be left holding the bag.
Mothers already face formidable challenges. They carry a disproportionate work burden in society, when accounting for their paid and unpaid labour. Mothers also face financial and economic risks as they are paid less than men, as well as women who don’t have children; this is often referred to as the “motherhood penalty,” which can affect financial security.
Raising children is expensive. In November, 2023, Statistics Canada reported that in one-parent households making less than $83,013 a year, the average cost of raising a child to age 17 is $231,260. This amounts to spending about $14,000 a year on child-rearing, an amount that can be untenable in many Canadian towns and cities given the increasingly high cost of living. Many children also do not leave home at age 17, and continue to require financial assistance even if they do. If mothers need social supports, they tend to bear the burden of providing evidence of need and often have to negotiate state surveillance systems that track the provision of welfare. One Ontario grandmother told the CBC in January that she was recently contacted by a collections agency about the government daycare funding she received almost 30 years ago, when she was a lone parent in nursing school.
While most mothers face challenges, they are greater for some. The motherhood wage gap is more pronounced for Indigenous and immigrant newcomer mothers in Canada. Lone mothers, who head about 80 per cent of one-parent households, are also more likely to face poverty and food insecurity. Mothers in crisis also struggle to access support. A CBC survey based on November, 2019, data from 527 domestic-violence shelters across Canada found that an average of 620 women and children were turned away each day, owing to capacity in most cases. That equates to about 19,000 excess requests each month.
Even if potential parents have enough money to support a brood of children, this does not guarantee they are good parents or loving partners. Such has been the experience of Claire Boucher, the Canadian musician who goes by Grimes and has had three children with Mr. Musk. Ms. Boucher claims she was unable to see one of her children for months because of a messy custody battle, and that her ability to defend her legal rights as a parent has been no match for the tech billionaire’s vast wealth and resources.
With pronatalists in the current White House administration, like Vice-President JD Vance, who infamously called women without children “childless cat ladies,” it is also clear that their vision of pronatalism imagines the “right” kind of mothers. As borders are locked down in the United States and those without legal status are deported, “birthright” citizenship status has come into question. A quasi-religious, neo-liberal and xenophobic form of pronatalism is taking shape. Mass deportations are a clear indicator that the current administration is not so much concerned with a dwindling population as they are with shaping the demographics of the American population as they see fit.
The overturn of Roe v. Wade in the U.S., and the re-election of Donald Trump alongside his pronatalist cabinet members, will inevitably mean that the most vulnerable in American society – the mothers and children most prone to impoverishment – will be pushed further to the margins. Mr. Trump once claimed that his administration would “take care” of women and be their “protector.” Please forgive us, Mr. President, if we don’t take your word for it up here in Canada.