Birth Rates Are Low. Can A “Fertility President” Fix That?

“I will not stop after twelve if I still have a uterus, but we’ll see how long that lasts.” That is Simone Collins, who with her husband Malcolm has five children, hopes for twelve, and is a leading voice in the pronatalist movement — the push to reverse demographic collapse by making America procreate again. On Smart Girl Dumb Questions, host Nayeema Raza sits down with the Collinses, Stanford business school graduates who have pitched executive orders to the Trump White House, drafted proposals for “motherhood medals,” and built a media strategy that deliberately weaponizes outrage. The conversation is less a policy debate than a live dissection of how the culture war is fought online — and what it costs.

The Pronatalist Diagnosis

The Collinses argue that falling birth rates are not a niche concern but an existential threat to civilization. They frame the problem not as a simple lack of children, but as a collapse in the kind of children being born — specifically, high-taxpaying, high-IQ children in wealthy post-industrial societies. “The real problem, at least originally, was with falling fertility rates with things like social security, the tax system,” Malcolm says. “They weren’t worried about people. They were worried about taxpayers.”