Be Fruitful and Multiply: Why the West Stopped Believing in Itself—and How Trump’s Baby Bonus Exposed the Century of Decline
Recently I defended a Trump administration proposal that dared to do the unthinkable: reward people for having babies. The plan included modest financial incentives and educational programs focused on menstruation and fertility—essentially, a simple message to young women: motherhood matters.
The response was swift, shrill, and revealing. Most of the vitriol came not from radicals or fringe activists but from exactly the demographic you’d expect to be comfortable, confident, and secure: liberal, educated, mostly white women. To them, the very idea of encouraging childbirth was not just offensive—it was a direct threat to their autonomy, their ideology, their place in the world. It was characterized as sexist, misogynist, and even racist (evidently in the sense that only the “right” (read white) sortbod people are somehow encouraged to reproduce, and definitively in conflict with the pro-choice, women’s liberation movement. There were some logical objections about the need for economic reforms to finance parenthood, but that's what Trumponomics is all about. But mostly it was a really extreme visceral emotional reaction that went beyond even the usual Trump Derangement Syndrome histrionics.
I was taken aback by the intensity of the pushback, which was prompted by the simple question “Are you against reproduction?” The ferocity of the blowback persuaded me that many of the commenters, perhaps subconsciously, are. And it occurred to me that somehow, some way, we have,!as hyper-self-conscious and overeducated creatures, lost our way.
And that’s when it struck me: this isn’t about policy. It’s about faith—faith in the future, faith in family, and ultimately, faith in civilization itself. Or rather, the total collapse of that faith.
Welcome to the Contraceptive Century. A hundred-year-long retreat from reproduction, tradition, and self-belief. A period in which the West and Westernized societies including Japan and the Communist world slowly convinced themselves that the most moral, enlightened, and forward-looking thing they could do was… stop having children.
From Commandment to Confession
Once upon a time, the foundation of Western civilization was simple and profound: Be fruitful and multiply.
That commandment—found in the very first chapter of Genesis—is not just religious doctrine. It is the original pro-natalist imperative, woven into the heart of Judaism, Christianity, and the cultures that sprang from them. It’s what allowed Western civilization to expand, build, and endure—not just materially, but spiritually.
The biblical worldview saw children as a blessing, not a burden. Family was the basic unit of meaning, not just economics. The future was not something to be feared or managed but welcomed with joy and sacrifice.
This attitude persisted for centuries. Even during times of plague, war, and poverty, people had children—lots of them. Why? Because life was hard, and hope required renewal. Because the Church taught that the family was sacred. Because people believed, deep down, that tomorrow was worth preparing for.
But something changed in the 20th century. The two world wars shattered confidence. The rise of secularism eroded the religious framework. Feminism reframed motherhood as servitude. And above all, the West fell in love with the idea that it had too much—too much power, too much wealth, too many people.
Instead of being fruitful, we were told to be ashamed.
The Selfishness of Communism, the Selflessness of the West
Here’s the irony: for all the West’s supposed imperial arrogance, its real flaw was excessive humility.
While Western democracies turned inward, worrying they were too dominant, too rich, too white—communist regimes around the world seized control of reproduction itself.
China’s one-child policy wasn’t just population management. It was a totalitarian assertion of rational planning over divine mystery. The same spirit pervaded the Soviet Union, where abortion was the go-to method of birth control and the state dictated the size and shape of families.
Communism, for all its utopian slogans, is grounded in a brutal calculus: people are mouths to feed, not souls to love. And if the state can’t feed them, they must not exist.
Capitalism, by contrast—especially when rooted in a Judeo-Christian ethos—has always assumed the opposite: that every person is born with dignity and potential, that the market can adapt, and that abundance will follow effort. It is, at root, a theology of hope.
You can see this in the generational optimism of postwar America. Baby booms. Suburbs. Little League. PTA meetings. The idea that if you worked hard, your children would live better than you did.
But somewhere along the way, even capitalist nations began importing communist assumptions. Birth control became standard. Abortion became sacred. Environmentalism became a secular religion that said fewer people meant a better planet. The new ethic was no longer what God will provide. It was you’re on your own, and the planet’s dying anyway.
Pace’ the great replacement theory, this isn't entirely or even primarily about race, it's more about culture. You can look at this from numerous perspectives one of them, being, of course, race, the other being religion. If you include secular, humanism, and communism as sort of anti-religions. The other great religions of the world, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism share with Christianity and Judaism, the encouragement of reproduction, which makes sense because societies that discourage reproduction generally, don’t do well within a Darwinian context.
The Great Divergence — Population Growth Since 1900
Population Growth by Region (1900–2020):
Europe (mostly Caucasian) 1900: 0.4 billion 2020: 0.74 billion Growth factor: 1.85×
North America (mostly Caucasian) 1900: 0.1 billion 2020: 0.37 billion Growth factor: 3.7×
Latin America (racially mixed) 1900: 0.075 billion 2020: 0.65 billion Growth factor: 8.6×
Africa (Black African) 1900: 0.13 billion 2020: 1.34 billion Growth factor: 10.3×
Asia (non-Caucasian, includes China) 1900: 0.95 billion 2020: 4.6 billion Growth factor: 4.8×
Communist Legacy of Population Control:
China: ~400 million births prevented through one-child policy
Soviet bloc: Abortion normalized; family autonomy subordinated to state planning
North Korea: Fertility filtered through loyalty and regime survival
The New Theology of Decline
Feminism, environmentalism, technocracy—they all feed the same spiritual void that communism formalized. And the net result is the same: fewer babies, more fear, and a quiet refusal to believe that the West is worth continuing.
How else do you explain the rage at Trump’s baby bonus? Or the endless mockery of Hungary and Russia for their pro-natalist policies? Or the fact that even raising birthrates as a public goal is considered dangerous and fascistic?
It’s because the modern elite no longer believes in reproduction. Not just practically, but philosophically. Children are seen as carbon emitters, career disruptors, and vessels of intergenerational trauma.
Worse: they are a reminder that you are not the endpoint of history.
And in a narcissistic culture, that’s the ultimate threat.
Why This Matters Now
Donald Trump’s real offense isn’t his rhetoric. It’s his refusal to play by the civilizational death cult’s rules. He insists that America is good. Those babies are good. That borders matter, families matter, and we’re allowed to want our culture to continue.
This is not extremism. This is not a theocracy. This is not “white nationalism.”
It’s just civilization. Normal, sane, adult civilization.
And the only people who see that as dangerous are those who have bought into the lie that we are the problem.
The Path Forward
We need a return—not just to policies that support life and family, but to the faith that once made those policies obvious.
That means:
Reclaiming religious language about children as blessings
Treating parenthood as a noble calling
Encouraging marriage, not delaying it indefinitely
Creating economic conditions that support families, not penalize them
Rejecting ideologies that frame fertility as oppression
We have to stop apologizing for existing. Stop deferring to those who see birth as a burden. Stop outsourcing our future to bureaucrats and ideologues who don’t even like kids.
Because in the end, this isn’t about Trump. It’s about what kind of civilization we want to be: One that survives—or one that sterilizes itself for the sake of ideological purity.
You can see it reflected in popular culture if you watch a selection of mid-century or earlier classic movies versus anything made after 1970. In the earlier cinematic era, Pregnancy is always almost universally welcomed as a blessed event, Whereas, in later films, it’s almost viewed as some sort of a sexually transmitted disease, an unpleasant side effect of recreational sex that must be dealt with as a women’s health issue with prevention or surgery.
A great juxtaposition is the two versions of the film The Day the Earth Stood Still. In the 1950s original, a powerful alien visitor comes to earth to warn the human race to stop the nuclear arms race and offers to protect it from war, with sort of a ghost in the machine solution called Klatu, a giant robot guardian. In the 1990s remake, the alien comes to Earth to destroy the human race and save Mother Earth from humanity, although in the end, he changes his mind deciding we have some redeeming qualities.
Say what you want about Trump, but his “fertility initiative” is yet another thought-provoking aspect of Trump 2.0.