Fertility decline and ‘low fertility’ are now global phenomena. Over half the world’s population live in countries where fertility rates are deemed “below replacement level,” just as increasing numbers of young people are questioning whether, when, why or how to have children, to procreate or not. Alarmist prognoses warn of collapsing welfare systems, uncared-for ageing persons, insolvent pension systems, and economic stagnation as fewer young people enter national labour forces and strict migration policies are enforced. As a direct response, heads of state around the world have begun actively encouraging their citizens to have more babies while launching a string of pro-natalist policies and programmes. Nowhere has this transition been starker than in China. In October 2022, following decades of strictly enforced anti-natalist family planning policies (known as the ‘one child policy’), President Xi Xinping, in a remarkable about-face, pledged “to establish a policy system to boost birth rates and bring down the costs of pregnancy and childbirth, child rearing, and schooling”.

In this talk, I introduce the notions of natalisms and procreative deliberations as a way to move beyond the "problem" of fertility decline, the binaries of pro- and anti-natalism, as well as individualised models of reproductive decision-making and practice. We need an analytic that can capture ensembles of moral justifications, state-led politicisations and socio-cultural circulations that together shape procreative deliberations if we are to account for a multiplicity of co-circulating natalisms across different cultural and political landscapes. It is these natalisms that inform what can be said and understood about the benefits, obligations, responsibilities, difficulties or dangers of procreation in situated ways and from different subject positions. 

Ayo Wahlberg is a Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. Working at the nexus of anthropology and science and technology studies, Ayo has carried out social studies of traditional herbal medicine (in Vietnam and the United Kingdom), reproductive and genetic technologies (in China and Denmark) as well as chronic living (through the multi-country VITAL project). Ayo is the author of the award-winning Good Quality – the Routinization of Sperm Banking in China (2018), co-editor of Mundane Genomics: DNA After the Hype (2025) and Senior Editor of the inter-disciplinary journal BioSocieties.