right wing handwringing over birth rates has always unsubtly been a combination of wanting more white babies/wanting control over women, so it's bothersome that the popular response to that is just pointing out the cost of living. "we Would be having more kids if you guys made some positive changes to society" and such. pronatalist sentiment is becoming so much more explicit that I don't think many self-styled progressives are ready to reconcile with the fact that many women simply do not want to have children. we already see how women are demonized for refusing to undertake the thankless burdens of their mother and grandmother's generations lol, I can't imagine how full abdication from child rearing will come across to some people.
I can't even see "we Would be having kids" as a strategic approach to get conservatives to consider advocating for a higher quality of life considering that they truly could not care less if you, specifically, are poor. it's true that more couples would have kids if it was cheaper, but that will not be enough for these types until women's subservience is codified. even now, they consider the lack of child rearing in today's insane society to be a matter of selfishness. they view themselves as completely different animals than you. they have and will continue to advocate for more advantages for people of their specific backgrounds and income brackets to reinforce this lol.
I think this rhetoric also ignores that the right wing want the inverse for Black and brown people - this logic of “raise living standards and we’ll have more kids” is a white perspective that ignores white supremacist medical violence, forced abortions, forced sterilisation, mass deportations, mass incarceration, police murder, imperial aggression, and forced removal of children from families as institutional programs of population control (Canadian residential schools, for example, were built for this exact purpose).
Increasing white birth rates is only one half of the equation for the right wing, and this raising-living-standards rhetoric fails to address this completely. Even in the outlandish scenario where the right wing accepts this logic and institutes robust welfare programs, do people think the state will offer these things to black, brown, and indigenous people? In any scenario where this happens it would just be Aryan UBI
