(LifeSiteNews) — Elon Musk, the world’s richest and most powerful pronatalist, has been clear about his worldview: More babies, at any cost. “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” he posted to X in 2022. “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” But the cost he is willing to pay is a high one — and recent comments by his own son, who now identifies as transgender, are a stark reminder of what those costs entail.
As I noted recently in First Things, the rise of the small but powerful pronatalist movement has highlighted a stark divide with the pro-life movement. The pro-life movement opposes abortion, IVF, and any other process that destroys or commodifies unborn life. Pronatalists like Musk aren’t particularly interested in the means of reproduction — just the end result. Musk himself has 14 known children with four women, at least five of whom were conceived by IVF (and likely more).
While some pro-lifers are pronatalist, not all pronatalists are pro-life. Musk does not, for example, support protections for preborn children in the womb. Asked about the Texas abortion ban in 2022, he replied, “I believe in maximizing individual freedom, so long as it doesn’t harm others. Extreme positions on either side of this debate miss the point.” Abortion, of course, is an act of violence that destroys a preborn baby and thus does “harm” others. Musk does not appear to recognize that.
Pronatalists like Musk want to boost the birthrate but do not seem to see that the “civilization” they seek to protect is only possible when the natural family flourishes. A recent online statement by Musk’s own trans-identifying son tragically highlights the dangers of abandoning the natural family. Xavier Alexander Musk, who changed his name to Vivian Jenna Wilson in 2022, recently posted about the agony he feels about his IVF origins.
“My assigned sex at birth was a commodity that was bought and paid for,” he wrote. “So, when I was feminine as a child and then turned out to be transgender, I was going against the product that was sold. That expectation of masculinity that I had to rebel against all my life was a monetary transaction. A monetary transaction. A MONETARY TRANSACTION. How the f**k I this legal.”
There is, as they say, a lot going on there. Wilson’s characterization of IVF is grimly accurate. His assertion of transgender identity is not. Regardless of how he came about, his sex was ultimately determined by biology, even if he was selected for implantation because he is male. Elon Musk has famously cited his son’s transgender identity as the reason he has gone to war against the “woke mind virus,” but he fails to recognize that the fundamentally unnatural, anti-family lifestyle he has chosen to lead and his decision to utilize IVF and surrogacy to purchase children has contributed to his son’s misery.
As children’s advocate Katy Faust put it on X: “Elon Musk’s son voices what many IVF kids feel- like they were designed and commodified. 75% of fertility clinics offer genetic screening. 73% offer sex selection. Some screen for eye color. 90%+ of IVF embryos are undesirable and thus destroyed. How is the legal, indeed.” It is a particularly grim irony that pronatalists like Musk champion a procedure that results in millions of embryos being discarded, and millions more being frozen in perpetuity.
Regardless of what good Elon Musk may be doing, his worldview has created moral chaos, and his children will suffer for the selfish decisions that he has made. Much has been made of the fact that Musk frequently totes his young children around, and it is true that we should celebrate the normalization of young families in public places. But we should be careful not to normalize the perverse form of pronatalism that Musk champions. When we are willing to procure children at any cost, the children inevitably pay the price.
