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Date of Publication: October 4
Year of Publication: 2023
Publisher: IPS Inter Press Service
Author(s): Nandita Bajaj
According to the United Nations, at least 12 million girls are married before they reach the age of 18 every year, and more than 650 million women alive today are married as children. Around 257 million women globally face unintended pregnancies due to a lack of access to contraception, abortion care, and counseling.
There’s an insidious new tactic emerging for selling right-wing ideology to wider audiences, evident in last month’s Budapest Demographic Summit for “family-friendly thinkers and decision-makers,” the upcoming pro-birth Natal conference in Austin, Texas, and the recent film “Birthgap.”
They all peddle pronatalism, a set of norms and policies that exhorts and often coerces women to have more children to raise fertility rates, often coupled with alarmism over alleged “population collapse.”
Pronatalism is on the rise to counter the growing push for gender equality, contraceptive access, and women’s educational and economic empowerment. It is connected to totalitarian policies dictating reproductive choices, the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the religious anti-abortion movement, and tech elite futurism.
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