Repronews #59: Denmark now providing women IVF for up to 2 children
UK MP proposes banning cousin marriage; sub-replacement India; Heritage's natalism; NYT on Musk's family & natalism; the first UNESCO director's eugenics
Welcome to the latest issue of Repronews! This will be our last issue of the year. Wishing you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Highlights from this week’s edition:
Repro/genetics
Denmark expands free funding of IVF to women wanting a second child
British MP introduces bill to ban cousin marriage
Population Policies & Trends
Concern in Indian states rises about sub-replacement fertility and rapid aging
Heritage Foundation researchers argue higher ed subsidies hurting fertility
The New York Times reports on Elon Musk’s Texas family compound and natalist activism
Genetic Studies
Further Learning
Why Julian Huxley, the first director of UNESCO, promoted cosmopolitan eugenics
Repro/genetics
“Denmark expands free IVF to those wanting a second child” (PET)
As of 1 December, state funded IVF treatment is available to Danish women wanting a second child.
The initiative fulfills a commitment made by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (Social Democrat) in her 2024 New Year’s message.
“If you eagerly want a child but cannot have one, it is a great pain,” said Interior and Health Minister Sophie Løhde on Denmark’s TV 2. “We in the government want to strengthen assistance for involuntarily childless individuals, so as many as possible have the opportunity to create the family they dream of.”
Funding is available to women referred to public sector fertility clinics for treatment before they turn 40. Private clinics offer treatment until the age of 46. There is no upper age limit for men.
Previously, public funding for IVF was limited to women and couples trying for their first child. Earlier this year, Denmark doubled the number of funded attempts at IVF at public fertility clinics from three to six.
One in eight children in Denmark is now conceived following fertility treatment.
Interest in IVF treatment is expected to rise up to 50% with the change, raising concerns about waiting times, which have reached five months in some areas.
Under the new policy, agreed between Danish regional and central governments, regions must take steps to reduce waiting times and increase local capacity for fertility treatment.
The new policy also aims to address concerns about Denmark’s declining population growth. The current fertility rate in the country is 1.5.
The government has allocated 150 million Danish kroner ($20.9 million) in the annual budget to cover the costs of expanding funding.
British MP introduces bill to ban cousin marriage (PET)
British Conservative MP Richard Holden has proposed a bill banning marriage between first cousins, arguing the increased risk of children with birth defects constitutes a public health issue.
He also argued that the practice can threaten women’s freedom, due to concerns that some women are forced or pressured into cousin marriages.
“I have outlined the risks to health, freedom—especially for women—and the cohesion of our society. For me, those risks tip the balance against personal freedoms,” Holden told Parliament. “the legislation is about more than individual marriages; it is about the values and foundations of our society and our democracy.”
According to Alison Shaw, professor of social anthropology at Oxford University, children of first cousin marriages carry approximately double the risk of inheriting a serious disorder than children of unrelated people.
While incidence of first cousin marriage in Western countries is low, communities such as Irish Travelers and British Pakistanis have higher rates.
Independent MP Iqbal Mohamed, argued that a ban would be difficult to enforce. “Instead, the matter needs to be approached as a health awareness issue and a cultural issue, where women are being forced against their will to undergo marriage,” he said. “A much more positive approach would be to facilitate advanced genetic test screening for prospective married couples … and more generally to run health education programs targeting those communities where the practice is most common.”
Earlier this year, Tennessee banned marriage between cousins. Norway imposed a ban on marriage between close relatives in 2023. Sweden and Denmark are also considering action.
PET opposes the proposal, preferring instead promotion of premarital carrier screening and genetic counseling.
The Labour government currently has no plans to change the law on marriage.
More on repro/genetics:
“IVF lite”: World’s first baby born using procedure that matures eggs outside the body (BusinessWire)
“Prenatal genetic tests spot ‘hidden’ cancer in mothers” (PET)
Book review: Egg Freezing in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective (PET)
“Designer babies are teenagers now—and some of them need therapy because of it” (WIRED)
“More men without kids are getting vasectomies, doctors say” (CBC)
Policies & Trends
“Why a nation of 1.45 billion wants more children” (BBC)
Last year, India surpassed China as the world’s most populous country.
Leaders of two southern Indian states, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, have recently advocated more children.
Andhra Pradesh is considering child-rearing incentives to mitigate population aging. The state also scrapped its “two-child policy” in local elections (restricting people with more than two children from running in local elections) and reports say neighboring Telangana may soon do the same.
India’s fertility rate has fallen from 5.7 births per woman in 1950 to 2 today.
Fertility rates have fallen below the replacement level in 17 of the 29 states and territories.
The five southern Indian states led India’s demographic transition. Today all have fertility rates of 1.6 or lower per woman.
These states fear these trends will reduce their electoral representation and allocation of federal revenues.
“They fear being penalized for their effective population control policies, despite being better economic performers and contributing significantly to federal revenues,” said Srinivas Goli, a professor of demography.
India’s rapid aging will be a critical challenge. While countries like France and Sweden took 120 and 80 years respectively to double their aging population from 7% to 14%, India is expected to reach this milestone in just 28 years.
More than 40% of Indians over 60 belong to the poorest 20% of the population, according to the UN Population Fund’s (UNFPA) latest India Aging Report.
The chief of the Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has urged couples to have at least three children to secure India’s future. “According to population science, when growth falls below 2.1, a society perishes on its own. Nobody destroys it,” Mohan Bhagwat reportedly said recently.
Here’s how to actually reverse the baby bust (Federalist)
Jay P. Greene and Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation argue that subsidies are not effective in raising fertility rates and that the focus should be on eliminating governments programs discouraging childrearing.
Programs subsidizing childrearing in nations such as Hungary and South Korea have had only modest success, if any. Fertility rates were much higher when people had significantly lower incomes than today.
“In a society where birth control is widely available and children are not needed to work on the farm, some have resigned themselves to the idea that perhaps people just don’t want to have enough children to sustain populations.”
The authors fault highly subsidized student loans, government occupation licensing, and ever-expanding educational requirements for pressuring young Americans to stay in education for longer. “That has created an artificially extended adolescence for the bulk of American young people.”
“Alexander Hamilton was 22 when he became George Washington’s aide-de-camp and helped direct the war of independence. Albert Einstein was 26 when he published a paper on his special theory of relativity. Yet we deem our 20-somethings unqualified to do much of anything and expect them to remain in school for years, accumulating credentials with the help of government subsidies before we let them tackle real adult responsibilities.”
In 2021, the median age of women in the United States who have a child for the first time was 27.3, up from 21.4 in 1970. The median age of men when they first become fathers is also increasing, as is the average age of first marriage.
“There are diminishing returns to education,” the authors argue.
The authors claim tax disincentives against religious education are also suppressing fertility. Religious people are more likely to have children but “in most states, tax dollars can only be used to support a secular public education.”
According to Lyman Stone, a conservative demographer, low fertility rates among the non-religious and their growing share of the population account for “virtually 100% of the decline in fertility in the United States from 2012 to 2019.”
“Elon Musk Wants Big Families. He Bought a Secret Compound for His.” (New York Times)
Elon Musk has bought a compound in Texas where he envisions many of his children living nearby into adulthood. That way, family members would find it easier to stay part of each other’s lives.
A proponent of IVF, Musk believes strongly in increasing the world’s population. He has offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances, including the former independent vice-presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, according to sources.
“It should be considered a national emergency to have kids,” Musk posted in June.
In choosing Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate, Donald Trump brought declining birthrates to the forefront of this year’s presidential election.
Musk’s push for procreation aligns globally with world leaders like Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
In a biography published in 2015, Musk worried that educated people are not having enough children. “I’m not saying like only smart people should have kids. I’m just saying that smart people should have kids as well,” he said. “I notice that a lot of really smart women have zero or one kid. You’re like, ‘Wow, that’s probably not good.’”
Musk’s father, Errol Musk, has seven children with three women and has praised his son’s “good genes” and desire to have many children.
“You breed horses,” Errol Musk said in an interview in September. “People are the same. If you have a good father and a good mother, you’ll have exceptional children. If you have no children, I feel very sorry for you.”
In 2021, Musk’s foundation gave $10 million to the University of Texas to study fertility and population trends.
Musk has posted at least 67 times on natalism since 2021, 33 of them in the last year. “I’m doing my best to encourage more people to become parents and ideally have three or more kids, so humanity can grow,” he posted in February.
While pronatalists on the Christian right believe children should be conceived through traditional heterosexual marriages, Silicon Valley adherents accept a wide array of family structures as well as reproductive technology like IVF.
“There is an awful morality to those who deliberately have no kids: they are effectively demanding that other people’s kids take care of them in their old age,” Musk posted on X in 2023, in response to a video of dual-income couples bragging about having no children.
These trends have alarmed other global tech figures such as Skype co-founder and Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn and Telegram founder Pavel Durov.
More on population policies and trends:
“Meet the pronatalists—and their huge families”: A profile of Dr. Catherine Pakaluk, fertility scholar and mother of six (Times of London)
“South Korea’s obstacles to parenthood” (New York Times)
“Tokyo is giving its employees a 4-day workweek to try to boost record-low fertility” (Business Insider)
Internet access in China is associated with 3.4 percentage point increase in fertility intentions (population.fyi)
“Having kids makes you happier, but only when they move out” (New Scientist)
Genetic Studies
“Molecular atlas: Genetic and molecular changes occurring during ovarian ageing have been mapped to single-cell resolution” (PET)
“1 gene may explain 30 mysterious medical conditions” (LiveScience)
“Worldwide height variation explained” (Emil Kierkegaard)
“African men most at risk of prostate cancer: New study flags genetic causes” (AllAfrica)
Further Learning
Julian Huxley “the eugenicist of UNESCO” (Aeon)
Stefan Bernhardt-Radu, a researcher at the University of Leeds, explores why Julian Huxley, the first director of UNESCO after World War II, thought “eugenics held the key to a more evolved, harmonious world.”
Huxley, born in London in 1887, was the eldest son of Julia Arnold, an educator, and Leonard Huxley, a noted writer.
Leonard was the son of Thomas Henry Huxley, a famed zoologist who had been dubbed “Darwin’s Bulldog” and “Evolution’s High Priest” for his advocacy of natural selection.
Julian and his brother Aldous Huxley, who would write the novel Brave New World (1932), inherited their family’s love of both the Classics and biology.
Julian studied zoology at Oxford and wrote noted works on biology, but he had wide-ranging social, political, and philosophical interests.
Huxley believed nature’s cooperative and coordinated aspects should be imitated. This idea was inspired by the philosopher Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) and the idea of élan vital (the idea of general spontaneous self-organization in nature, now largely dismissed by biologists).
Huxley argued culture should aim for harmony. In an essay called “The Idea of Progress” (1917), he wrote that this process of coordination—the “increased harmony of parts”—was a primary evolutionary trend.
In his 1935 book We Europeans (1935), Huxley had campaigned against the racism of Nazi Germany, while remaining a eugenicist. He claimed statistics showed the reality of genetically-based differences between individuals.
American historian Diane B. Paul argued in Controlling Human Heredity (1995) that eugenics was a “diverse” movement with varied policies, which could include forced sterilization of the “feeble-minded” but also more consensual strategies such as genetic counseling or subsidizing fertility of the “genetically endowed.”
In his book Religion without Revelation (1927), Huxley argued science could create greater harmony in society by giving humanity a common vision of the future, based on our shared evolutionary past. This “scientific humanism” would become central to his project of eugenics at UNESCO.
Huxley believed the equalizing economic and social environment fostered people who were truly biologically endowed.
After a talk to the Eugenics Society in 1936, a review in the journal Nature argued his views on eugenics were “destined to become part of the religion of the future, or of whatever complex of sentiments which may then take the place of organized religion.”
In 1937, Huxley became the vice-president of the Eugenics Society in Britain and held the position until 1944.
In response to the devastation of World War II, global efforts were made to establish a new humanitarian vision for Earth’s future, including the founding of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). From the beginning, UNESCO aimed to overcome prejudice and promote cosmopolitanism and interculturalism.
In 1944 Huxley attended a meeting of the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, an advisory group for the League of Nations which was about to be replaced by what would become UNESCO. Huxley pleaded, along with others, for science to be included in the institution, leading the “S” to be added to the institution’s name.
In 1946, Huxley became the first director of UNESCO. That same year he wrote a pamphlet to explain what he hoped to be the institution’s underlying philosophy. He formulated three aims for UNESCO:
First, continuing the evolutionary process of increasing harmony.
Second, making all environments equal (harmonizing them).
Third, educating people about the underlying inequality of humankind, and the need to equalize environments.
The new agency would be based on a “scientific world humanism,” allowing humanity to progress through science and control over the natural world. Cosmopolitanism was to be based on biological processes, enabling the next stage of evolution.
In his 1946 pamphlet, Huxley tasked UNESCO with promoting scientific knowledge about the dangers of over-reproducing and encouraging the use of proposed “birth-control facilities.” These would offer genetic counseling to people, helping them decide whether to have fewer children or none at all.
Huxley thought further human progress would be generated by fostering an increasing number of intelligent people. The greater the average intelligence, the better the world-mind.
Huxley’s pamphlet was published without approval by a Preparatory Commission and this it only represented his own views.
UNESCO was under pressure to preserve Christian principles in education. The Christian historian Sir Ernest Barker, who was a member of the Commission, swiftly protested what he thought was an “atheist attitude,” according to Huxley. His encouragement for birth control displeased some on the Commission.
Huxley had no liking for the established Church. He later wrote that “over-population was aggravated by the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church to what they called ‘unnatural’ (i.e., deliberate) birth-control.”
Under Huxley’s direction, UNESCO was to be an evolved brain leading a harmonious international order against prejudices, nationalistic narrowness and overpopulation.
Huxley’s tenure as the first UNESCO director was challenged from the very beginning. The U.S. did not support him, partly because Huxley had visited the USSR twice before his appointment and was outspoken about “cooperation.” The U.S. did vote for Huxley’s appointment, but on the condition that he serve for two years instead of the normal six.
“Huxley didn’t just settle for promoting education, fighting poverty and publicizing the dangers of overpopulation, as [Thomas] Malthus and [Francis] Galton had done. For Huxley, UNESCO was part of a much broader evolutionary vision aimed at increasing harmonization between members of a world society and with nature. He envisioned global interculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and world coordination. Just as cells in the body functioned better when coordinated by a brain, Huxley thought that world cultures could be better interconnected and harmonized by UNESCO. This coordination was not a short-term project. Even if birth control and eugenics were unpalatable in the mid-20th century, Huxley believed a time would come when more educated people would become aware of their advantages. For Huxley, eugenics was always future-oriented.”
More on human nature, evolution, and biotech:
Human nature
“12 things everyone should know about IQ” (Steve Stewart-Williams)
Evolution
“Dinosaurs grew stupid over time – and the same could happen to humans: study” (South China Morning Post)
“New, big-headed archaic humans discovered: Who is Homo juluensis?” (LiveScience)
Biotech
“Is China the future of biotech?” (Labiotech)
“Toward a safer and more secure bioeconomy” (Nature Biotechnology)
Agrifood
“We must use genetic technologies now to avert the coming food crisis” (New Scientist)
Lab-grown Japanese Quail lands on Hong Kong plates as Australian start-up Vow begins sales” (South China Morning Post)
“Why bananas are the original ‘frankenfood’” (GLP)
Health
“Gene-edited pig kidney transplanted into a third person, moving xenotransplants closer to trials” (STAT)
“A US farm breeds pigs for human kidney transplants”: Genetic modification makes the organs less likely to be rejected by patients’ immune system (ETV Bharat)
Disclaimer: We cannot fact-check the linked-to stories and studies, nor do the views expressed necessarily reflect our own.
Denmark expands free IVF. Shanghai, pop. 23 million, made the move last February. Expect the first results in 1Q next year.