Pronatalism
Pronatalism is a set of social and institutional pressures placed on people to have children, often driven by forces such as patriarchy, religion, nationalism, militarism and capitalism. Paper One treats it as the critical driver acting on the population lever of overshoot.
Positive and negative feedback
Positive feedback is expressed through glorification of motherhood and large families, and through financial incentives and subsidies for childbearing, including assisted reproductive technologies (an industry projected to reach $41 billion globally by 2026). Negative feedback is expressed through stigmatisation of contraceptive use, abortion, and life paths that don't fit dominant cultural narratives — single adults, childless and childfree people, LGBTQIA+ people, adoptive families, and those who regret parenthood or don't have the "right" number of children. Depending on the degree of patriarchal and institutional control in a given culture, this stigma can escalate to physical and emotional abuse, divorce, economic marginalisation and social ostracisation.
Economic and political self-interest
Economists, political leaders and corporate elites regularly argue that high fertility ensures a steady supply of workers, consumers and taxpayers. Neoliberal feminism — described in the paper as feminism of the privileged, colonised by neoliberal ideology — has, by advocating for women to "have it all," reinforced a mandatory-motherhood narrative that has in turn been exploited by the assisted-reproduction industry.
Coercion versus rights-based policy
Rights-based family-planning policy — giving women the means to control their own fertility through education and access — proved highly effective: Thailand, Indonesia and Iran saw fertility rates fall from over six to under two within decades. By contrast, coercive policies (China's one-child policy, forced abortion and sterilisation in Puerto Rico and India) caused serious human-rights violations and backfired by tainting all family-planning efforts with the association of coercion, strengthening and legitimising pronatalism. Currently, half of all pregnancies globally are unintended, and 257 million women are unable to manage their own fertility due to oppressive pronatalist norms.