Having as many babies as possible is not the only way to show you love humanity | Zoe Williams

Elon Musk is obsessed with falling birth rates, as is the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban. Why would leftwingers want to buy into their pronatalist' agenda?

Perpetuating humanity should be a cross-politics consensus," read an article in the Atlantic last week, but the left was mostly absent at a recent pronatalism conference." It's such a simple proposition - everyone loves babies and wants the species to perpetuate, right? - but pronatalism has provoked a ferocious battle on the American left. Should they be trying to engage meaningfully at a preposterous far-right conference? Or should the left stop self-flagellating and start organising?

But what is pronatalism - and is it really borderline fascist? I don't want to think about slippery, bad-faith, rightwing claptrap any more than you do, but in an era in which US politics can sneeze and the world catches encephalitis, we do, regrettably, have to think about bad-faith everything, all the time.