Let’s not leave the baby-making debate to Musk and Vance – the left has a stake in this too | Gaby Hinsliff

Rightwingers calling for higher birthrates may be disturbing, but having children is the ultimate gesture of confidence in the future for us all

Roses are red, violets are blue. Rightwing politicians around the world want women to have more babies, and if you find this idea the opposite of romantic - well, me too.

Pronatalism's cause is not exactly helped by having as its best-known figureheads JD childless cat lady" Vance and Elon Musk, seemingly on a personal mission to reverse what he calls the underpopulation crisis". Even Nigel Farage, a twice-divorced father of four who takes the firmly libertarian view that private lives are no business of the state, squirmed when tackled on the subject this week, before eventually venturing that the west had kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture" and that of course, we need higher birthrates, but we're not going to get higher birthrates in this country until we can get some sense of optimism". But do progressives, who are after all supposed to be in the optimism business, have a stake in the baby-making debate too? A new collection of essays published this week by the cross-party Social Market Foundation (SMF) thinktank argues that they should.