Reproductive control and attacks on citizenship go hand in hand

What birthright, birth rate and birth tourism anxieties reveal about the right's vision of national belonging

When the new administration issued a sweeping—and unconstitutional—executive order ending birthright citizenship earlier this month, I was reminded of how the political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson described nations as imagined communities.

The category of citizenship, after all, is a declaration of national belonging, a statement about who we imagine belongs in our community. The move to undo birthright citizenship is an assertion of who does not belong.

The order isn’t retroactive, and I wasn’t surprised by it, but I still found myself deeply unnerved. My parents, who are “good immigrants,” had me a few years after coming to the U.S. as graduate students, which would exclude me from citizenship under this executive order. If a two-page order could erase a part of who I am, what did this mean for my own sense of belonging?

I’ve always understood my national belonging, regardless of my official citizenship status, as conditional; I may be a born-and-raised American, but my roots will always be questioned. But this executive order showed me that my formal citizenship may be just as conditional.

Following the order, I also found myself thinking more about the “birth” part of “birthright citizenship,” and why the conservative movement is hyperfocused on birth: birthright citizenship, birth tourism, and the falling birth rate, all are topics of fixation for conservatives today.

Too often, we talk about immigration and reproductive access as two different issues, but it’s not surprising that these are two areas over which the right has heightened their legal and ideological assault in recent decades. Deciding who can come through our borders and who should be having babies within these borders is deeply enmeshed in the right’s broader efforts to control who belongs in America not just legally, but ideologically.

The nation, though, has always been gendered; women are drafted into the national project through their responsibility of birthing and raising the right kind of citizens. And women’s citizenship, too, is conditional on women’s willingness to subscribe to such an ideal. For this reason, reproductive access and abortion directly threaten the right wing’s national project by giving women a choice over how–or if–they participate in birthing citizens, which is why the right is so desperate to restrict both.

But for the right, only some women should even have the “privilege” (to use language from the recent executive order) of bearing American children. And ending birthright citizenship addresses a longtime bogeyman of the right, what is referred to as “birth tourism”—in which women from other nations assert their reproductive control and fly to the States for the purpose of giving birth in the U.S.

Along with “anchor babies,” the pejorative term claiming that illegal immigrants (usually from poorer nations) steal into the U.S. to have babies, “birth tourism” (usually from wealthier nations like Russia and China) threatens the right’s desire for the U.S. to become a full fledged ethno-Christian state. But it seems to me that an additional discomfort towards birth tourism comes from how it exposes citizenship as a commodity, where national belonging is easily bought and sold for the price of a plane ticket, undermining the right’s more favored perspective—the idea that national belonging is an intangible affect, which is performed through how “patriotic” we are.

As these ideologies show, national belonging is not stable. It’s wobbly, an audacious, red jello mold glistening on a church potluck table. Imagining communities isn’t simply about who can be in the community, but also about who in the community can participate in imagining the community. This is why the move to undo birthright citizenship, which not-so-subtly targets people of color, must also be understood alongside the move to restrict reproductive access and repeal no-fault divorce laws and the assault on trans people. This remaking of the “meaning” of American citizenship, to borrow language again from the executive order, is not meant to forge stronger communal ties or a stronger America by ensuring full and equal participation for all people who live within its national borders. It’s meant to prune out groups who are earnestly trying to re-imagine America for the better–that is, immigrants, feminists, queers–to make more room for those already allowed to thrive.

Thrive, and then multiply. And I mean multiply. Because the right wing is clear-eyed about the exploitation needed to ensure capitalist growth. With no immigrants to backfill the falling birth rate, the right sketched out its roadmap to replace the missing population long ago: ensure the appropriate type of people have a lot of babies.

And there is an entire movement devoted to bringing this agenda to fruition. Calling itself “pro-natalist,” this movement is an organized and scarily well-funded cocktail of male grievance, race science, tech hubris, and preening self-importance. Perhaps its most well-known adherent is the billionaire owner of X currently playacting at government reformer. He, along with white supremacists, tech bros, and Christian ethno-nationalists, latched on to the falling American birth rate as the biggest social problem, and their proposed solutions are harrowing. Together, they are helping to mainstream the extremist Republican politicians and talking heads who are arguing that women should not be able to divorce men, should not vote independently of their husbands, and should be forced into marriages through regressive tax policy. (Yes, Republicans want to fund billions in tax cuts for the wealthy through raising taxes on single parents.)

Anxiety about the “meaning” of citizenship and anxiety about who belongs in America, in other words, more than share a border (pun intended?) with anxieties about low birth rates. Because the vision for raising the American birth rate is also not about creating a nation with stronger ties. Rather, it’s about forcing women back into roles that they may not want to be in, and proudly not giving them any more help to do it.

This is why the predominantly male audience of NatalCon—the glossy new pro-natalist “conference”—cheered when a speaker mentioned resurrecting men-only spaces where “women are disadvantaged.” 2024 was the first year for NatalCon, which took place in Austin, of course. Apparently, many of male attendees were childless; for childless men, pro-natalism does not describe a shared value that they are working towards with a partner, but rather something that determines the characteristics of an ideal woman.

In this way, pro-natalism intersects with the dangerous anti-women rhetoric that promises that regressive politics will give more meaning to young men’s lives. This rhetoric frames young women’s ambition and feminism as the enemy to men’s future happiness.

As a Politico article covering the conference reveals, many in the pro-natalist movement view declining birth rates as the fault of a “default middle-class ‘life path’ offered by our educational system and corporate employers,” which allegedly convince women that they don’t want to start a family. This is a viewpoint that can easily absorb a list of grievances around wokeness, “gender ideology,” pronouns, divorce, repackaging all of them as threats to the project of national belonging in which only straight white men can lead and belong.

And if this viewpoint sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen this argument before, sometimes even presented as a “liberal” version of natalism.

Many of these right wing grievances erupt from a kernel of truth: it is difficult to have a family in America now. Social changes have created different conditions and expectations. But the underlying assumption is that women who don’t want children (or are ambivalent) don’t know what they really want, and some big, strong men need to come and tell them what to want, for their own good.

In the view of the growing pro-natalist movement, women cannot be trusted to be full citizens, and no matter their citizenship status, immigrants of color can never be fully American. Where many economists view immigration as a net positive for the American workforce— particularly considering the slowing birth rate, which means fewer future workers— the pro-natalists firmly disagree.

According to the founder of NatalCon, who is also a white nationalist, immigrants “can’t solve our population problem .. because they’ll eventually realize they were brought here to pay into Social Security for old white people.” Clearly unswayed by the idea of America-as-melting-pot, which has predominantly functioned as a liberal mythology, conservatives are now doubling down on white supremacy. Immigrants, according to them, are dark-skinned and agency-less, “brought here” (by whom, we aren’t told) rather than choosing to be here; the people in the U.S. who deserve Social Security are all white.

One thing is for sure: the current conservative movement has been better than the liberals in power at diagnosing the anxieties of the American people. Against the waning of American imperial strength, conservatives realize they need to assert American exceptionalism in another way. If the U.S. is no longer the leader in manufacturing cars (China), or crafting pop music (Korea), or men’s Olympic swimming (Australia), or innovating AI (China), perhaps making American belonging more exclusive— let’s say, the Hermès bag of citizenships— will be the trick to reassert dominance?

But without the ability to imagine national belonging outside of race wars and patriarchal control, the right won’t stop at their most recent assaults on American citizenship. It’s easy to see where this all might lead: say, policies that would shift focus from naming the wrong type of citizens to forcing women to birth the right type of citizens.

In fact, it’s already happening.