The Fascist Roots of the Far Right's Obsession with Childlessness and Population Management

“If we shrink, gentlemen, we won’t make the Empire, we’ll become a colony!” Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini told Fascist parliamentarians in 1927, reminding them with a wink to do their demographic duty. Years before Hitler came to power, Il Duce warned of a racial emergency, contrasting fertile peoples of color in Africa and Asia with Europeans who risked extinction.

“Cradles are empty and cemeteries are expanding," he declared. "The entire White race, the Western race, could be submerged by other races of color that multiply with a rhythm unknown to our own.” A “Battle for Births” followed: extensive social welfare assistance for new mothers, public prizes and ceremonies for prolific mothers, and, from the late 1930s on, a tax on bachelors over 25 years old. Abortion and contraception were banned and it was forbidden to mention them in the press, which pleased the regime's allies in the Vatican.

While the Fascist focus on growing the population was linked to Italy's perennially low birthrates, Mussolini's quote, which reflects his immersion in what we now know as Great Replacement Theory, reminds us that concerns with "childlessness" never occur in a vacuum, but are linked to concerns about race and "civilization."

Among today's far-right in Europe and America, Fascist ideas are finding new life. Misogynistic impulses to link women's societal value to their roles as mothers and limit or abolish their bodily autonomy find justification in the belief that populations must increase in response to fears of White extinction by non-White births.

In the United States, Vice-Presidential candidate J.D. Vance's offensive pronouncements about women echo Fascist notions of women as a tool of demographic growth, starting with his seeming belief that motherhood is the metric of a woman's worth to society. Anything that gives greater agency or independence to women in terms of their reproductive capacities and choices is seen by Vance as dangerous, from in vitro fertilization to abortion rights.

 Vance's apparent agreement with the comment made by extremist Eric Weinstein on a 2020 podcast episode that the main purpose of the "postmenopausal female" is to raise grandchildren is also in this vein. While exposing children to grandparents is a great gift, Weinstein's clinical assessment of the "postmenopausal female" as having no other societal value is chilling. Keeping women in the home occupied with children throughout their lives means women are not out of the home, leading in politics, culture, finance and other sectors.

The same fear of female autonomy, and the same misogynist sentiments, lies behind Vance's apparent feeling that women should be forced to stay in abusive marriages. Vance is well suited to be the political partner of Donald Trump, who partly decriminalized domestic violence during his presidency: economic impoverishment, psychological and emotional harassment, and other forms of non-physical abuse could no longer be prosecuted.

Vance's blaming of childless women for the supposed increased decadence of society and decline of civilization also has Fascist roots. The regime constantly juxtaposed childless women as morally unhealthy and representative of degradation (they were known as "the crisis-woman") with robust mothers of many children, who represented the best of Italian tradition and had shown their investment in the national future by giving birth multiple times.

And what to say about Vance's idea that childless people don't have a stake in society and thus deserve a downgrading of their rights based on their procreational status? In 2021 he made a remark that Americans with children should be able to vote more times in an election than their childless compatriots.

That someone with Vance's opinions is now a possible vice president of the United States says so much about how far to the right the needle has moved and how extreme the GOP has become. The kindred spirits of Vance and the GOP on such subjects are not the leaders of democracies, but the heads of illiberal parties and states and the private sector actors who boost their causes.

Vance would be right at home at this gathering of neo-fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, former Hungarian President Katalin Novák, and extremist billionaire Elon Musk, this last also obsessed with demography and prolific procreation by people with the right genes.

"Only children can save the world," wrote Novák, sharing the photo and plugging her brand new venture (she had to resign from the Hungarian presidency after she pardoned a pedophile): x-y, an organization dedicated to "saving nations" from "a collapsing global birthrate."

Novák, who identifies herself on X as a "Mother of 3, Christian, former President of Hungary," was the face of Viktor Orban's “pro-family” state as minister for family and youth affairs. “Europe has become the continent of the empty crib,” said Novák in 2019, eerily reprising Mussolini’s words.

Orban added the context that makes clear the link between race and demography. "We don't just want numbers, we want Hungarian children," he said, meaning the product of White, Christian, and one-man and one-woman unions.

As for Meloni, her positions on population and the family show her connections to her peers as well as to her spiritual mentor, Mussolini. Meloni identifies first as a mother, opposes "gender ideology, “LGBT lobbies” and same-sex unions that harm "the natural family," and promotes White motherhood as an antidote to population changes caused by non-White immigration.

Meloni's version of Great Replacement theory, which she calls "ethnic substitution," goes deep into conspiracy theory territory. "I think there is a deliberate plan to erase everything that identifies us: culture, Nation, family are under attack," she stated in March 2019, identifying Jewish democracy funder George Soros and the democratic European Union as masterminds of this plot. Her homophobic and anti-immigrant policies as prime minister are consistent with these extreme views.

Vance and his far-right colleagues may attack childless women and exalt mothers, but the truth is that they don't want everyone to procreate, at least inside the borders of their nations. Like authoritarians of the past, today's extremists see population management as the answer: encouraging some births, and finding ways to lessen others. Keeping out immigrants, making life difficult for immigrants established in their countries in the hope that they will leave, and —the most extreme solution, proposed by MAGA— expelling immigrants, up to 15 million of them, is part of this.

Population movement on this scale, proposed with the intent of re-engineering a nation, takes us back to Fascism. In his landmark Ascension Day speech in 1927, Il Duce provided a blueprint for a state that would promote demographic growth among the right kinds of Italians, protecting White Christian civilization. As for the others, “we remove these individuals from circulation just like a doctor does with an infected person."  That is exactly what Trump and Vance intend to do if given the chance.