Pro-natal fertility policies and eugenics
I am reading this volume at the moment, which presents fertility case studies across a number of countries. It was published in 2015, so it is a bit out of date relative to the past decade’s ongoing and broadening fertility decline. But I was struck by the chapter on Singapore and the initial phase of the country’s pro-natal policies in the mid-1980s, which were strongly influenced by so-called positive eugenics. From the relevant chapter:
“ (… ) in 1984, the state implemented selective pro-natalist policies, described as the “eugenic phase” of Singapore’s population policy. Educated women were given incentives to reproduce under the “Graduate Mother Scheme,” while sterilization cash incentives were offered to less educated women.”
As the authors—Gavin W. Jones and Wajihah Hamid—go on to explain, this overtly eugenic policy was quickly abandoned. Still, it made me to think more broadly about the extent to which eugenics have driven pro-natal policies, either overtly or implicitly, since WWII, and what this history can tell us about modern policy design as governments attempt to raise birth rates for women facing different opportunity costs of childrearing depending on educational attainment, and opportunities in the labour force.
To get an overview, I tasked ChatGPT with a Deep Research run on this topic, distinguishing between examples of positive eugenic pro-natal policy—policies that incentivise groups perceived as having superior status to have more children—and negative eugenics—policies that encourage, or even coerce, some population groups to have fewer or no children, while maintaining a stable or rising birth rate for a “fitter” core population. As always, there is an element of leading the witness when tasking an AI with such a report. Even so, I find the Deep Research function a powerful way to get past the initial, often relatively unstructured, stage of research on a topic that would otherwise take a long time to complete.
GPT explains further on the experience in Singapore:
“Having successfully curbed its birth rate in the 1970s (“Stop at Two” campaign), the government grew alarmed by a new trend: better-educated women were having far fewer babies than less-educated women. In a 1983 speech, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew warned that Singapore could be “depleted of the talented” in the next generation if educated women remained single or childless . He explicitly linked parents’ education to the “quality” of offspring, implying that well- educated mothers would produce more intelligent children.
Singapore’s eugenic pro-natal phase had three components: the Graduate Mother Scheme, under which relatively well-educated women with three children or more were given preferential access to schooling; a government matchmaking agency designed to help and encourage well-educated women to find a partner and start a family; and a negative eugenic component, under which cash was offered to women with little or no education to be sterilised after having two children, alongside higher hospital fees for higher-order births among this group.
This eugenic pro-natal phase quickly proved unpopular and politically controversial, and the overall pro-natal policy was adjusted accordingly. Even so, according to the research cited by GPT, it retained a positive eugenic slant into the late 1980s and 1990s.
More generally, examples of post-WWII eugenic population policies show that most programs had a substantial dark side, in that they were primarily negative in nature. Economic incentives—or, more often, borderline coercion—were introduced to reduce births among minority ethnic groups, people with learning difficulties or disabilities, and, more broadly, poor and low-educated populations. This was frequently implemented through draconian sterilisation programs, some imposed without explicit consent. Such policies were found in Sweden, China, India, and Peru, indicating that eugenic population policies emerged in countries with a wide range of cultural and political histories. These experiences, and others like them, give eugenic fertility policies their deservedly bad reputation. Typically, these policies aimed to shift population composition not by supporting fertility among the in-group—the well educated, wealthy, or majority—but by suppressing fertility among minority groups, often through coercion or outright force.
Inadvertent (reverse) eugenics?
Overt eugenics have rightly been expunged from most pro-natal government programs. But modern pro-natal policies run the risk of reintroducing eugenics through the back door, albeit in the opposite direction to what is usually understood by the term. If the trade-offs and opportunity costs of childrearing differ across income groups—and economic intuition strongly suggests that they do—modern pro-natal policies could inadvertently introduce reverse eugenics by supporting fertility among low-income and low-educated women at the expense of fertility among more highly educated women.
The simplest example is a flat-fee baby bonus, which will affect marginal incentives more strongly for women with relatively low incomes. The research cited above highlights one such case in Poland.
Empirical evidence suggests that when financial incentives are skewed toward lower-income parents, the composition of births can shift. A striking example is Poland’s “500+” child benefit, introduced in 2016. It initially paid a generous monthly sum (around $125) for every second and subsequent child, regardless of income, and was later extended to the first child. Research by Gromadzki (2024) found that the policy generated a short-term baby boom primarily among lower-income families. Before the benefit, higher- and lower-income couples had similar birth rates. After its introduction, birth rates among low-income couples rose sharply relative to those of higher-income couples. Within a couple of years, the bottom 50% of households accounted for 58% of all births, up from 51%, meaning a greater share of children were born into poorer families following the incentive.
This is controversial territory for policymakers. Few pro-natal programs explicitly aim to penalise well-educated women, though in some particularly warped incentive structures—hello, the UK—one wonders whether policymakers have fully considered the implications of their means-testing algorithms. Social scientists continue to puzzle over why one pro-natal policy after another falls short of materially lifting fertility.
The economic answer, while not definitive, is straightforward. Pro-natal policies fail because they do not adequately compensate women for the opportunity cost of having children, an opportunity cost that is rising over time due to increasing returns to women’s own human capital formation, as well as to that of their children. The key insight is the interaction within the quantity–quality trade-off in fertility: rising returns to human capital encourage parents to invest more in child “quality” rather than quantity, while also increasing the returns to somatic investment by mothers themselves. I think this is a major driver of tempo-related declines in fertility, which ultimately translate into foregone births as stated fertility intentions collide with the realities of modern life and, tragically, the declining fecundity of women in their late thirties and forties.
As a result, modern pro-natal programs fall into the trap of spending substantial resources trying to persuade well-educated women to have children, while failing to cover their opportunity costs. At the same time, these programs have more success raising fertility among low-income women and families, reinforcing the logic of a reverse eugenic effect. Means-testing naturally amplifies this dynamic. The economically optimal solution, if the objective is to raise fertility, would be to pay well-educated women and families more to have children, explicitly recognising their higher opportunity costs. But such policies, in most Western countries, have roughly the same political viability as a snowball in hell. As returns to human capital formation for young women continue to rise—both in absolute terms and relative to previous generations—I suspect modern pro-natal policy programs will continue to disappoint.