When news broke last week of Elon Musk’s 13th child, from the fourth mother, congratulatory remarks included acclaim for the baby’s “incredible genetics.”
Two days later, media mogul Andrew Tate reminded followers, “If all your children come from one woman, you are not a conqueror.”
The comments probably do not coincide beyond timing, mainly because Tate says these sorts of things all the time. But the two men do exist in the same sphere of right-wing nonconservatism embraced by conservatives nonetheless. The glaring characteristic they share is an anti-family strain — Musk of the “genetic-determinst” Right that prizes child production, and Tate of the depraved “manosphere” that avoids marriage at all costs.
While the millions of young men who constitute Musk’s and Tate’s followings are severely misled, they are not here the main concern, which is conservatism as a concept. These days, it is informed by how the government interacts with unorthodox right-wing figureheads such as Musk. Yet it is the near-official position to take a neutral stance on decisions in the realm of sexuality, marriage, parenting, and the chronology of it all: a custom that stunts the cultural progress needed for pro-life causes.
And so, Musk’s child production, perhaps his most beloved mission, receives a green light. For Tate’s part, approval comes in the form of endless publicity. Many rail against his views, but he is increasingly welcomed into the fold of the Right. It is hard to deny that Tate’s platform energized some male voters in the last election. It appears the Trump administration may even help loosen his Romanian travel restrictions.
This is a culture issue, particularly regarding the value society places on human life. Musk’s angle is an obvious gene-obsessed dismissal of the traditional family model, and Tate shouts from a deep hole of inverted masculinity. Thankfully, not everyone will reach the extremities where these two reside. Still, everyone can participate: The germ is not the logical extremes we see showcased, but the family-destructive posture so easy for the public to assume.
It was the pleasure of President Donald Trump, however, to sign his most recent executive order “protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.” He wants to promote fertility and help couples overcome obstacles — a good intention. But it pushes supposed neutrality into implicit advocacy for Musk’s (and Tate’s, to a degree) lifestyle. It binds us to the cultural devastation of the present.
For many reasons, there is a dedicated anti-in vitro fertilization bloc among conservatives: Embryonic destruction and human commodification is one key rationale, along with detriment to the marriage structure. Add to that the more Catholic defense that childbearing needs to occur by specific natural means, whereas IVF involves quite the opposite.
We know that IVF subsidies do not increase fertility. Lyman Stone, senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, wrote a succinct analysis of research on this simple fact, all of which concludes that IVF benefits older, richer, and gayer couples while delaying fertility overall. Lowering the buy-in cost only provides false hope in an extremely low live birth rate. And realistically, the strongest effect that accessibility will have is encouragement for couples to put off children, and for women to put off marriage in general.
It validates the notion that Republicans are merely pro-birth. We are concerned now with numbers and with gratification, but not with flourishing. And marriage, after all, is deeply connected with flourishing. The more IVF promotion, the harder it is to reject the left-wing conspiracy that fertility is not rather an anti-woman, far-right conspiracy.
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Rather than a restorative solution to infertility, IVF is the storied rebellion we call the Fall. It argues that there is a better way to life than the preset design and pursues acceleration toward that end. It wants to argue that marriage is incomplete without biological offspring and that children are the end of family life, but it cannot: Having children is only the beginning of the end. Seated antithetical to parenthood is the grasp for agency that girds IVF.
Discard ethical questions and distrust the biological process, and of course IVF will not seem like a rebellion. But what that throws to the wayside is fact. Implicit approval of anti-family lifestyles has landed us with such inventions as IVF, and in turn, societal attachment to IVF will bind us all the more to anti-family dispositions. Ultimately, it communicates a new ideal separate from the family unit.
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