Would anyone be surprised if they were? After all, progressives have spent decades championing abortion at all phases of pregnancy right up to birth -- and sometimes immediately after. Over the last decade, they have taken up the Queer Movement's transgender campaign and demanded pediatric sex-change therapies that leave adolescents neutered for life. Their climate-change agenda emphasizes the need for population reversal and rails over the insult to Gaia that human procreation creates.
They're not exactly kid-friendly, in other words. But don't just rely on instincts and political posturing on this question, because actual data shows that progressives practice what they preach. Financial Times analyst John Burn-Murdoch reviews the results of a study on declining birth rates in the developed world, including the US, and the impact of political ideology on procreation. While those rates are declining in all categories, they are collapsing among progressives.
If demographics are destiny, the Left has a big problem, Burn-Murdoch warns:
NEW: Progressives have a birth rate problem
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) August 29, 2025
For all the talk of a general fall in births, the drop is overwhelmingly driven by people on the left having fewer kids.
By ceding the topic of family and children to the right, progressives risk ushering in a more conservative world. pic.twitter.com/FmpYEsGVio
Burn-Murdoch wrote extensively about the data at the Financial Times, but his essay sits behind the paywall. He did offer quite a bit of commentary on Twitter this morning about the data and implications of a November 2024 study published by Biodemography and Social Biology. Titled "Demography leads to more conservative European societies," authors Martin Fiedler and Susanne Huber conclude that self-selection may well push Western societies farther to the Right:
Using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (a total of 66,188 participants from 15 European countries) and the European Gender and Generation Survey (a total of 121,248 participants from 12 countries), we investigated i) whether differences in political attitudes and attitudes toward family values (i.e. attitudes toward homosexual couples, attitudes toward female reproduction) are associated with differences in the average number of children, and ii) whether such an association between fertility and attitudes affects the population share of these attitudes in subsequent generations. We found that in most of the countries analyzed, right-wing (conservative) individuals have, on average, more children and grandchildren than left-wing (liberal) individuals. We also found that the proportion of right-wing individuals increases from generation to generation. Since political attitudes are presumably evolved traits that are socially and genetically transmitted from one generation to the next, these findings may suggest that demographic differences can lead to shifts in prevailing political attitudes. Thus, to some extent, demography may explain longer-term political trends.
Burn-Murdoch posits the same potential, although with an obvious slant as to the nature of the outcome:
On the one hand, pro-natalism often implies constraining individual liberty and setting back women’s progress. As such, the left’s aversion to worrying about birth rates is perfectly natural.
But: the consequence of this emerging ideological slant in birth rates is that each successive generation gets nudged rightwards, increasing the likelihood that conservative politicians (who want to constrain individual liberty and set back women’s progress) get elected.
Well, not so fast. The problem with that direct-line thinking is that it assumes that parents are the only influence on political trajectory for their offspring, an assumption at which most parents would scoff. Children do get cultural and political formation from their parents and family for the first few years, but then the education systems begin exerting a large influence on both, with those effects escalating as these children go further into outright indoctrination systems at the secondary and post-secondary levels.
The Left made sure of that by transforming education into indoctrination decades ago. The Trump administration has attempted the first serious pushback against the Marxist Long March Through The Institutions in half a century, but thus far has mainly focused on post-secondary schools. Elementary and high schools and their curricula remain under the firm control of the progressive Left, who remain determined to form children and teens into progressive activists rather than well-adjusted citizens with enough education to think and act independently.
That is the main reason for the growth of the school-choice movement and the parallel home-schooling movement. Widespread implementation of either or both would go much farther in reducing the progressive footprint than the self-selecting oblivion of progressives in their procreative choices. And it's the reason that the educational establishment controlled by the progressive-Marxist elite in the teacher unions fight so hard to stop both. On occasion, they will even claim to own the children they indoctrinate and that parents have no legitimate right to choose curricula, although as Terry McAuliffe found out four years ago, parents have a way of translating that insult into votes.
That brings us back to Burn-Murdoch's strange notion that conservative outcomes mean less freedom. The last few years prove that to be absurd, especially in the context of compulsory education. Conservatives want to open up those choices, while progressives zealously guard their legal monopolies on education so as to inculcate children into their preferred ideologies. Meanwhile, education outcomes erode nearly as dramatically as the chart Burn-Murdoch uses to chart fertility rates in the West. Progressive governance has mainly attempted to encroach on speech, commerce, education, and even social media to constrict choices and dissent, especially during the Joe Biden Regency. Given the nature of the Financial Times, his perspective doesn't surprise, but it's still problematic in analyzing the possible impacts of these trends.
Finally, let's note that this outcome is inevitable. Progressivism is built on nihilism, operates on fear and panic, and uses both as manipulations to access power. When people buy into nihilism and despair, they are far less likely to act in ways that express hope and faith, even in a secular sense, and perhaps most especially in procreation. It's no accident that the manifestations of progressivism in the Queer Movement are explicitly anti-procreative, with abortion and sterilization through "gender affirming care" high up their list of priorities. They are promoting a culture of death and destruction, and generally speaking, will pursue that by any means necessary.
They are not heading toward oblivion. They are marching toward oblivion -- and want to drive us all before them on that path. It's time to break the monopolies of indoctrination and offer our children a better vision of life and the future than the Left's panic porn.
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