I'm not sure how that's connected? The point is just that with stuff like the child and childcare tax credits, the US very clearly has a natal policy already, so the policy questions involve efficacy and efficiency rather than the broad "should this be an area of policy action at all."
I’m not sure how it’s not connected? I’ve been told my whole life that queer people depress fertility rates. If fertility is a maximand, then it follows that we should suppress queerness. At least to some degree.
(If fertility isn’t a maximand, then we can worry about other goals, like ensuring human dignity and autonomy. The pursuit of those other goals may raise or lower fertility, but we probably don’t have to worry about it.)
It can make sense to worry about all of these goals. There should always be multiple maximand.
One (hard, lots of tradeoffs) question is: what natal policy should the US have? I have no idea, although I also think abortion access and queer rights are important. The other (easier, empirical) question is: does the US currently have a natal policy, to which the answer is imo unequivocally yes.
It’s like asking, “Does the United States have a national macrame policy?” In one sense, clearly not. In another, we now tax imported yarn, and we still have consumer product safety standards. Is that a coherent national policy on macrame? (Do we need one?)
(Does the fact that we were already legislating in that area, just less than deliberately, serve as warrant for a vigorous (“coherent”) policy with many new requirements?)
This isn’t a perfect analogy, but it helps to get at my concern, which is narrow and focused on setting a precedent. The United States has WAY more of natal policy (pro- and anti-). But the fact that the policy exists shouldn’t prove much in terms of the purposes of the state.
Right this was your original analogy, which I disagree with (I think family policy is very intentional), but I think at this point we’re just repeating ourselves.
We do lots of completely unintentional family policy too!
Not really? At the margin in modern society encouraging same sex marriage and surrogacy can be a different way to increase fertility. A vastly, vastly better way imo.
But we both know that’s not how it’ll play out. If you’re among the empiricists, encouraging same sex marriage isn’t *clearly* pronatal. If you’re among the Republicans, SSM is said to deny of the basic facts of reproduction. In all I’d rather insist on human dignity and individual choice.
I get sucked into the natalist argument, but I only agree to the extent that I think children are humans who should be allowed to thrive.
Yes insisting on human dignity and individual choice is always critical and stuff like laws against abortion are always wrong. But I just am never really willing to accept "you shouldn't care about X because it might lead you to bad policy positions" arguments as a rule. I would prefer to simply
oppose the bad policy positions. Also I haven't done a bunch of research on this and am not really able to certify these results but this study found a positive effect of SSM on births. lerner.udel.edu/wp-content/u...