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Simone Collins is sitting in her 18th century cottage in Pennsylvania, dressed in a black pilgrim pinafore with a wide collar, bouncing one of her four children on her lap. It is 8.30am and she looks a little tired – she runs several businesses, a foundation and is currently pregnant with her fifth child, though she and her husband Malcolm plan to have more. “At least seven,” she declares, “and as many as I can physically carry – 12 would be even more brilliant.”
The US couple, aged 37 and 38, ardently believe that the world needs to have more babies or risk civilisational collapse. They have become the poster children for pronatalism, a movement that believes falling birth rates are a big problem for society. And that big families are the answer.
For the last five years, they have spread the word about their goal by opening up their home for interviews and photoshoots. They claim to have used special technology, during the IVF process, to screen their embryos for traits such as intelligence.
“The studies let us know what our genetic predilection for IQ is,” they told an undercover reporter in 2023. “We will never choose a child who is less privileged in IQ than either of us.”
Geneticist Adam Rutherford describes the data used as “fraudulent and racist, drawn from hopeless sample sizes that wouldn’t constitute valid scientific evidence to anyone vaguely interested in truth.
“These assertions are recapitulations of historical ideas of scientific racism.”
The associations with extreme views in the movement is one of the reasons some people don’t like to call themselves pronatalists. Catherine Pakaluk is one of them. “I think there probably are some people who are just pure eugenicists or white supremacists,” she says. “I find it disgusting and reprehensible and I have no interest in ever being aligned with people like that.”
The question that remains is, where does all of this leave pronatalists – and just how much power do they wield? According to some onlookers, their impact is already being felt. “There’s definitely strong influence from pronatalists in the Trump White House,” claims Ms Cohen. “I think an outstanding question is how this will all overlap with efforts to restrict birth control and contraception, and how this will affect debates around spending like on childcare funding.”
He also believes there might be resistance to some pro-family policies, pointing out that at least some of the Republicans in control of Congress don’t like the idea of family support. “They think that it’s welfare to the undeserving.”
The attention gleaned by the Collinses, and by the recent conference, is undoubtable. But one expert suggests they are doing little more than stirring up controversy.
“If you go to Capitol Hill, and talk to members of Congress or governors in states across America, they don’t necessarily even recognise the problem,” argues Mr Brown.
As he puts it, “the incentives of the internet” aren’t always the incentives of a successful mass movement. “And what gets attention is provocation and being edgy and crossing the line. That gets clicks, that gets followers.
“[But] that to me is not how you end up changing the political dynamics.”
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