A joke, yes, but one based in truth — and instantly recognizable to anyone who had come of age in the previous decade, when high-school sex-ed classes became ground zero for the government’s efforts to stem the early Nineties epidemic of teenage pregnancies. The holy grail for these educators was, indeed, ABSTINENCE, whose virtues were promoted via state-sanctioned programs that were sometimes subtle and sometimes not.

The messaging varied from place to place and along political lines. Conservative and religious schools tended to opt for morally inflected programs if not all-out slut shaming, including one lesson in which sexually active girls were memorably compared to used pieces of scotch tape. Meanwhile, the more secular, science-based institutions used the specter of sexually transmitted diseases, and specifically AIDS — then a virtually guaranteed death sentence — to persuade impressionable youths that sex simply wasn’t worth the risk. At the same time, a spate of after-school TV movies proliferated on the subject of teen pregnancy, including the Lifetime original Fifteen and Pregnant (featuring a young Kirsten Dunst) and its male-centric counterpart, Too Soon For Jeff (starring teen heartthrob Freddie Prinze, Jr as the titular Jeff for whom it is too soon). If the state was obsessed with stopping teen pregnancy, the culture was fascinated by it, especially as the dawn of reality TV ushered in an era of storytelling that was less cautionary, and more voyeuristic. In 2009, MTV’s 16 and Pregnant debuted its pilot episode to 2.1 million viewers. By 2014, it had run for five seasons and spawned five spinoffs.

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As goofy as much of the abstinence programming was, it was also undeniably successful: the teen birth rate began plummeting in 1991, and as of 2023 had fallen to just 13.1 births per 1,000. The thing was, the generation of young women who had cut their teeth on teen pregnancy trauma porn ultimately graduated into a world where the non-teen version didn’t seem all that great, either. The mommy wars were in full swing, and the media awash in dire personal essays by women bewailing the horrors of motherhood. The message was clear: having kids would destroy your professional life, your body, your marriage, your identity. As Millennials advance toward middle age, the impact of all this anti-natalism has become starkly evident: in 2023, the American birth rate hit an all-time low of 1.62 births per woman, well below the replacement rate.

The fertility crisis has been a point of interest on the Right for some time. At the mundane end of the spectrum is a growing evangelical zeal for big families, homemaking, and tradwife content on TikTok; at the other end is Elon Musk’s apparent intention to single-handedly repopulate the world with his own progeny. But it is also a chief concern of the Trump administration, which has been reportedly considering various policy initiatives aimed at increasing the birth rate. According to a recent story from the New York Times, Trump aides have been courting pro-natalists in White House meetings, hearing proposals on everything from a cash bonus for baby-having, to improved family leave policies, to education programs aimed at helping women better understand their menstrual cycles.

Perhaps needless to say, the notion of a state-sponsored baby boom has been met with skepticism and no small amount of anxiety from critics, who were already nervous about the possible influence within Trumpland of the conservative policy plan known as Project 2025, and who perceive pro-natalism as a Trojan horse for other ickier initiatives. Feminists worry that what begins as an initiative to get women to have more babies ends with those same women retreating forever from the professional sphere to care for them while their husbands bring home the bacon, no doubt from some manly job like coal mining or bear wrestling. Abortion rights proponents — already on high alert for signs of pro-life sentiment coming out of the White House — fear a slippery slope where the administration starts by merely encouraging childbirth, but eventually makes it compulsory. And the focus on fertility, which necessarily emphasizes certain biological realities vis-à-vis where and from whom babies come, has raised the hackles of some progressives including Atlantic writer David A. Graham, who in a new book suggests that pro-natalism is just how conservatives put a family-friendly gloss on their darker desire to persecute trans and nonbinary people.

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These fears may come to pass, or they may prove overwrought. But it hardly matters: the Trump administration’s pro-natalist project doesn’t need to be evil to be doomed. The government’s Nineties-era quest to suppress the birth rate succeeded not because of the strengths of its programming and policy initiatives, but because it was the opening salvo in what ultimately became not just a nationwide but global shift toward women having fewer children later — or not having them at all. As Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out, birth rates have been plummeting all over the Western world. And all of those policies currently under consideration — and more — have been tested elsewhere to no avail. It’s true that women who already have children generally report that they would have liked to have more. But it is also true that the percentage of American women with no children at all has nearly doubled within the past 40 years, and that of these, a significant percentage is childless by choice.

Perhaps this would have always happened, the government’s anti-teen-pregnancy campaign notwithstanding. In a highly individualistic culture that emphasizes personal freedom and fulfillment, maybe it was inevitable that having made motherhood optional, many women would go a step further to conclude that it was also undesirable. But this is the uphill battle faced by would-be policymakers hoping to spark a baby boom: all the tax breaks and incentives in the world cannot engender the desire for children where it doesn’t exist.

Meanwhile, the government’s pivot from cheerleading abstinence in the Nineties to begging for babies in 2025 suggests that even if the state holds a certain amount of sway over sexual activity and family formation alike, it is a blunt instrument for effecting a change as delicate as this one. The crusade against pregnancy and unprotected sex looked like a good thing when it decimated the teen pregnancy rate — but now we may understand that its net result was not to persuade women to delay childbearing until a more “appropriate” age, but to scare them off it permanently.

When it comes to pro-natalist policies, then, it might be wise to be careful what you wish for. No doubt there are women out there who might have had children, but didn’t, because of a culture that taught them to associate childbearing with thwarted ambitions and shattered dreams; no doubt there are others who eventually discerned their desire for children in spite of it, but tragically too late. And then there are the women who are old enough to have grown up marinating in that culture, but who are still young enough to bear children. Why should they trust the institutions now urging them toward motherhood, after a lifetime of hearing those same institutions warn them away from it at all costs?

As always, this is the hazard of the don’t have sex because you’ll get pregnant and die brand of social engineering. What happens when you teach an entire generation that if they obey their desires — for sex, for love, or for the kind of life that values home and family above education and career — the result will be a catastrophe that ends their life as they know it? They may actually believe you.

Instead, it was extreme privilege that defined royals back then. Today a very large part of the public can afford fancy dining, expensive hotels, and foreign travel — at least from time to time — and most can expect to retire to a comfortable bed in a pleasantly ambient temperature. But not so long ago these were the prerogatives of only a small share of the population, at the top of which sat royalty.

Yet despite their elite lifestyles, monarchs and their consorts can tell us a surprising amount about how life in Britain has changed over the past 300 years, and in no department more than that of demography. In fact, the whole demographic story of Britain since the early 18th century can be told through the reproductive history of four queens.

Let’s start with Queen Anne who came to the throne in 1702. Her sister Mary had died childless in her early thirties — a death immortalised by the funeral music of Henry Purcell, who followed her to the graveyard within less than a year. Mary’s husband William III — first cousin of Mary and Anne as well as Mary’s fellow monarch — died some years later in his early fifties with no heir, so the throne passed to Anne. By the time Anne died, just short of 50 years of age, she had apparently had 18 pregnancies, and although one of her offspring did make it past infancy, he did not survive his mother. And so, with Anne’s Catholic half-brother excluded for religious reasons, the call went out to distant — Protestant — relations in Hanover.

The reason that Anne’s reproductive failures are of interest is that they stand as an extreme but not atypical example of the sad human condition for most of history, during which not even royalty could shield an individual from the cruelty of nature. This was the unchanging world which the Reverend Thomas Malthus described a century later, in which humans bred like rabbits and died like flies. Populations pressed forwards like Europe’s in the Middle Ages, only to be pushed back by plague or war. Ultimately humans stretched the limits of the planet’s carrying capacity at a time when crop yields were still very meagre and hunger never far off for most of the population.

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But the world which Malthus described as eternal was coming to an end. Already in Malthus’s day, death rates were plunging, life expectancies extending and the population growing rapidly. A few years after his death the young Victoria came to the throne: her reign would redefine population patterns in the British Isles and set a precedent which was to spread well beyond it. Victoria had nine children and each of them outlived her, even though she managed to live a good three decades longer than Anne. Again, this is exemplary of trends at the time but a rather extreme example; infant mortality remained very high and only began falling towards the end of Victoria’s reign. To be survived by nine out of nine children was indeed a feat, but far less miraculously atypical than it would have been a century or two earlier.

Britain’s population explosion under Queen Victoria was one of the most significant events of the 19th century. As well as providing a ready labour force to transform the country into the workshop of the world, it supplied a huge excess population that settled in colonies from Vancouver to Tasmania. The Anglosphere as we know it today could not have come into existence without the millions who left the British Isles and settled new lands, creating Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And until the latter years of the 19th century — when other European countries started to follow suit and export their surplus citizens — the people of the United Kingdom provided the bulk of the inflow that turned the United States from a handful of colonies hugging the Atlantic in 1800 to the behemoth it was becoming a century later.

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Just as Queen Anne and Queen Victoria represented the demography of their ages, so too did Elizabeth the Queen Mother. A Scottish aristocrat and one of ten, she married the future George VI, one of six. But, typical of a generation which came to reproductive maturity in the inter-war years, Elizabeth and her husband did not follow in the fertile footsteps of their parents but limited their progeny to two. Already before the First World War family sizes were shrinking, with a fertility rate in 1914 in the UK of about three children per woman. By 1939, it was down to two. This was the next phase in what we now call the demographic transition, a change which happened first in the UK then spread to the rest of Europe and to North America and in more recent decades to the rest of the world. After a period of falling death rates, a more urban and educated population produces fewer children, as they have more hope of their survival.

But demography would not be so interesting if it did not have twists and kinks. The Princess Elizabeth, our present Queen, defied the demographic trend of low birth rates and small families by marrying younger than her mother and having twice as many children. And again, she was typical of her generation. After the Second World War there was a perhaps inevitable baby boom as the men returned home and a certain amount of catching up took place in terms of family formation. But with some ups and down, the baby boom went on for the best part of two decades, creating the baby boomers of whom those of us born in 1964 (including Prince Edward) represent a final hurrah.

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After Elizabeth II’s final child was born, the country’s fertility rate again began to tumble. Each of her children has produced just two, representative of the country as a whole. And although the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have bucked the national trend by having three, Meghan and Harry certainly represent a large swathe of their generation by not only stopping at two but making an environmental virtue of the fact.

Perhaps it is surprising that so much of our demographic history can be seen through the lives of four women who were so exceptional in terms of their social status. But maybe we should not be shocked that, as well as being heirs to the throne, each royal generation also exists in its own time, influencing and being influenced by the wider trends around them.