Elon Musk’s Pronatalism and Business Growth Mania Hurts World Survival!

By Donald A. Collins | 5 February 2025
Church and State

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

Do you think that the growth of human numbers since 1960 from 3 billion to over 8 billion and still rising might offer a sliver of concern to most of the world’s people about the capacity of our earth to avoid a Sixth Extinction as our resources for sustaining human numbers now exceed the Earth’s capacity?

Surprisingly many who apparently don’t worry, including Elon Munk with his six children and certainly not the behavior of most businesses, whose sacred mantra is endless growth of customer consumers.

One would think that, instead of urging endless growth economically, someone might consider the fact that adding more humans to our numbers can only exacerbate our existing problems.

Yesterday, Waffle House, with its 2100 stores, just raised its egg price 50 cents per egg, its most favored ingredient, surpassing waffles! Recall most voted for Trump over egg prices!

Recently, there were several letters to the Washington Post, taking both sides of this argument for fewer people or more people.

Musk is not alone as you can read about the Pennsylvania couple cited in an article below.

This attitude clearly demonstrates Munk’s successful attempts to close USAID, since 1961 one of whose main objectives has been to provide family planning means to enable the world’s poorest women to only have the number of children they desire. Having personally traveled to many of these poorer nations and seen the need for USAID help, I find Musk’s behavior dangerous and disgusting!

This action against USAID also strikes at the heart against the only policy, which can eventually bring peace and stability to the world. That policy must be to enable women to attain equality in every respect as now so broadly worldwide only accorded to males.

Human numbers and overall population are going to decline rapidly by 2100 regardless of pronatalism.

Decline in human numbers is being driven by the simple fact that most women are seeking different roles than to be mothers and housekeepers, and the effect of that is so clearly reflected by anyone who watches US television and sees the number of powerful women who have come with education and drive to many positions of public notice and effectiveness.

Clearly, the Trump administration’s focus has been entirely against giving women options about fertility control while at the same time attacking any effort to restrain economic growth which can only occur for a time because endless growth on a finite planet is impossible.

If pronatalism is at the heart of Trump’s administration’s policy, he is bucking a trend, which will not be overcome as women continue to fight against closeting their lives in constricted roles.

Here are several partial quotes from the Washington Post 2/1/25 anti-natalist letters.

1. What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks.

2. Readers make the case against boosting birthrates. And one young reader writes about kids, bikes and cars.

3. Regarding the Post’s June 2 editorial, “The great population bust”:

4. Instead of putting the fate of the entire economic system on the shoulders of women, we should untangle our economy’s success from the birthrate. Endless growth — whether that’s of the population or the economy — is an unachievable fantasy. Infinite growth on a finite planet is doomed to fail. If we continue to ignore that fact, we’ll miss our chance to build a just and sustainable economy, to slow the climate and extinction crises, and to protect a future where all kinds of families can thrive.

5. this is no time to double down on an ideology that exalts economic growth above all else. If the goal is human well-being and not the enrichment of those already favored by an economy that has produced record wealth inequality along with dire ecological calamity, then now is the time to reject growthist ideology for good.

6. A strong social safety net should be standard in rich countries such as the United States — and would add far less to the national debt than the billions we send into the bottomless pit of military conflict. But we should have such policies as a matter of decency, not as an attempt to increase birthrates.

7. International donors, led by the U.S. Agency for International Development, have promoted family planning for decades with very positive results. Smaller families have led to improved family health and nutrition, education of children, empowerment of women, greater life expectancy, higher family incomes, improved workforce participation, and reduced infant and maternal mortality.

8. We’re living way beyond our means, and we’re not getting value for all the dollars we’re spending. We should meet this challenge by performing rigorous oversight of essential services, right sizing our budget to put resources where we get a demonstrated return on investment and focusing on what really matters. Instead, this budget cuts and spends capriciously with political rhetoric and skullduggery in mind rather than the city’s best interests.

You can read from the Washington Post 2/1/25 letters several partial quotes from these writers here.

Now here is the partial quote from a story of a couple named Collins (not my relatives!!) who are practicing what seems to be pronatalist insanity.

This will be her sixth pregnancy since 2019, and, if all goes well, Collins will bear her fifth child by December. She approaches each way an endurance athlete does a marathon. She and her husband, Malcolm, have waited exactly nine months since the birth of their last child, Industry Americus (“Indy” for short), to give Simone’s body adequate time to recover.

She goes through a barrage of exams, starting with a hysteroscopy and a uterine biopsy to “get the lay of the land,” and “very detailed” bloodwork. She will take the hormone medication necessary for transferring a frozen embryo into her uterus. At home, she exercises, walking for hours on a compact treadmill she keeps at her desk, and “eats really well”: plain yogurt, no added sugar; hard-boiled eggs; a “slurry” of blended vegetables.

When it’s time to give birth, Simone will have a Caesarean section — because of complications that arose when she delivered her first child, Octavian George, all the births have been C-sections. With each surgery, the risk of future complications — including death — increases. But Simone, 37, wants to do this at least three more times — ideally as many as 10. They have 32 embryos left.

While pronatalism is not embraced or articulated by most people, it is embraced by many businesses and by those who mindlessly are not thinking about the effect on our future lives. Trump’s repeated claims that the environmental crisis is a hoax. Too many believe the planet offers endless supplies from nature so we can properly nurture endless increases in people! Or some may say “Well I will be dead by then!”

The Trump administration defiles more and more proven effective governance traditions. In ignoring and constantly castigating its Democratic colleagues as total enemies, some retribution must come but on us all. Listening advise or caring about anyone but himself are not Trump’s (or Co-President Musk’s) virtues.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”, “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”, “On the Precipice of Political Disaster in 2024”, “Democracy at Red State Risk”, “Does Trump Go to Jail or to The Oval Office?” and “Trump: Pardon or Punish?: The Nixon Precedence Was Not A Trump Coup Denied!”.

Why Musk and Other Tech Execs Want as Many Babies as Possible | WSJ

Baby Bust: Why Conservatives are Obsessed with Birth Rates Now

The Growing Threat Of Christian Nationalism

Why Trump Is Partnering With Christian Nationalists | Robert Reich

Be sure to ‘like’ us on Facebook

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here