does anti-natalism work?
and were 25% of blacks sterilized?
There is one phenomenon which transcends race, class, religion, culture, and politics: fertility decline. There is no group on Earth — not even the Amish! — who have not seen some statistical decrease in the number of children per woman over the last 40 years. What is driving this? Globalism? Wealth? Chemicals in the water? Declining testosterone?
Everyone has some idea of the culprit, and as with every large, complex, globalized trend, there are probably multiple factors. Housing, education, religiousness, sexual equality, access to contraceptives, pornography, diet, obesity, individualism, hookup culture, declining social trust, and forever-chemicals all might play a role.
I am appreciative of Lyman Stone’s efforts to cover the extremely vast and complicated topic of natalism and demography as it interacts with economics.
Lyman Stone is Director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, Director of Research at Demographic Intelligence, and a PhD candidate at McGill University. He has written for The Atlantic, Vox, National Review, The Federalist, The New York Times, and his work has been covered in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
Whether you are a natalist or an anti-natalist, or just a curious person who wants to understand sociology, the first priority is to figure out which factors are most important, and to what extent. Even if I disagree with Lyman’s goals and motivations, I feel I have something to learn by listening to him.
Recently, Lyman claimed that 25% of South African women over age 40 were sterilized. He claims that this was part of a larger conspiracy to genocide black people.
I looked up South Africa’s bioweapons program, Project Coast, and found this quote: “Fertility control studies comprised 18 percent of all projects.”1
The entire program lasted 12 years, and was halted in 1993. In 2025 dollars, the entire program amounted to $500 million USD, and its annual average expenditure was only 0.02% of South African GDP. Since fertility was only 18% of the total program, this means only 0.004% of South African GDP was dedicated to fertility research.
For comparison, if the United States spent that percentage of GDP, it would come out to ~$998 million, which is less than half the operating budget of Planned Parenthood. So, essentially, South Africa had a secret underfunded version of Planned Parenthood.
Keep in mind that, during this entire period, White Supremacist Apartheid South Africa had some of the strictest abortion laws in the world.
Why were the South Africans researching fertility control? Were they trying to genocide the black race?
The reasons provided was:
to sterilize specific known terrorist and insurgent groups in Angola (not for use within South Africa)
to sell contraceptives to the WHO in exchange for cash to circumvent sanctions.
The rumors that an anti-black vaccine was being developed was incorrect. This was propaganda made up by the ANC; communist propaganda.
were 25% of women sterilized?
From the 1998 South African Demographic and Health Survey (SADHS): among women aged 40–49, only 9.3% had been sterilized (tubal ligation).
The 2016 SADHS shows that for women aged 40–49, sterilization rates were approximately 7.8%, only 1.5% down from 1998. Not much of a change.
Sterilization wasn’t a result of “evil genocidal racists,” unless you’re claiming that the South African government in 2016 is also run by evil genocidal racists.
While Apartheid South Africa promoted family planning, sterilization was not the main tactic, and coerced cases were limited. The decline reflects broader contraceptive trends, not the end of apartheid.
White sterilization rates were… higher!
If the goal of the Apartheid government was to exterminate blacks, they did a bad job of it by offering family planning services to whites:
Starting in 1970, the government directly provided free family planning services to residents of townships and white-owned farms. Relative to African residents of other regions of the country, the share of African women that gave birth in these townships and white-owned farms declined by nearly one-third during the 1970s.
How did they accomplish this?
The national government in South Africa expanded its provision of family planning services by establishing thousands of stationary and mobile clinics, sending family planning advisors door-to-door, and offering free contraception.
It was easier to obtain contraception in white areas than in black areas:
Residents of homelands who lived near white area boundaries were sometimes able to travel to white areas to obtain contraception… African residents of white areas generally enjoyed easier access to family planning services than did African residents of the homelands… African women living in white areas were consistently more likely to use contraception and be visited by family planning advisors than were African women living in homelands.
Anti-natalism in South Africa was a success; fertility decreased significantly:
The decline in African fertility in white areas in the early 1970s strongly suggests that the corresponding surge in government provision of family planning services in these areas helped women have fewer children. The national government achieved its immediate objective of slowing population growth.
What was a failure was the natalist policies of South Africa:
The government encouraged immigration from Europe, urged white families to have additional children, and expanded direct provision of family planning services. [But this did not stop white demographic decline.]
When Lyman claims that “African women were sterilized,” he might be referring to the use of injectable contraceptives:
The development of more reliable oral and injectable contraceptives in the 1950s and 1960s allowed women greater autonomy, and these forms of birth control became central to public family planning campaigns aimed at women in many countries. The government of South Africa heavily promoted the injectable contraceptive Depo Provera, oral contraceptives, and intrauterine devices, and these became the most commonly used forms of contraception among African residents. Because Depo Provera was administered on a three-month schedule, mobile family planning vans were able to travel on regular routes through rural areas, increasing the reach of the family planning program beyond residents that lived near stationary clinics in cities.
Let’s steelman the term “sterilization” to include a 3-month contraceptive as a form of sterilization. Were African women pressured into taking these contraceptives against their will?
There is little evidence that the apartheid government forced residents to involuntarily avert births. Sterilization and abortion—two forms of birth control that have been used coercively in China, India, Sweden, and elsewhere—were relatively rare in South Africa. By the late 1980s, less than 5 percent of African residents had been sterilized, while white residents were more than twice as likely to have been sterilized. Except in strict circumstances, abortion remained illegal in South Africa until 1996.
Let me repeat this: South African whites were twice as likely to be sterilized as blacks.
White fertility fell alongside black fertility:
In the early 1950s, white residents comprised 19.0 percent of the population and had a total fertility rate of 3.4 children per woman.
By the early 1960s, white residents comprised 16.8 percent of the population and had a total fertility rate of 3.3 children per woman.
These values continued to fall throughout the apartheid era and stood at 12.7 percent and 1.7 children per woman in the early 1990s.
Nothing that South Africa was doing was unique:
Although particularly overt, the politicization of family planning was not unique to South Africa. Many governments have targeted family planning to particular groups, including rural residents in Mexico, members of lower castes in India, and poor residents in the United States.
The opposition to contraceptives mostly came from communists:
African leaders generally advocated against family planning… The African Communist newspaper summarized the skepticism: “The so-called national family planning program is being used to perpetuate White domination and the oppression and exploitation of the Black majority.”
As in the case of Pol Pot, the ethos of communism in Africa was to massively expand poverty and misery in order to mobilize the masses against those who are productive and educated. In this regard, their values were aligned with natalism.
How much money did they save?
Between 1970 and 1994, the apartheid government spent $778 million (2012 USD) on family planning and population development, yielding an estimated cost per averted birth between 1970 and 1994 of at least $152 ($778 million ÷ 5.134 million).
The murder rate in South Africa is 45 murders per 100,000 people. By preventing the births of 5.1 million people, this means that the Apartheid regime prevented 2,310 murders through its family planning program.2 If the socio-economic cost of murder is $17.25 million, then the Family Planning program saved $39.8 billion for the cost of only $778 million. Even adjusting for inflation from 2012, that’s still $39.8 billion saved for the cost of $1.1 billion. Much cheaper than fighting a Civil War.
Summary
Over the last half of the twentieth century, the total fertility rate nearly halved among African residents of South Africa but barely declined in Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole. This remarkable decline in fertility occurred during the formation, expansion, decay, and dissolution of the apartheid state in South Africa. Starting in the early 1970s, the national government provided free family planning services in white areas of the country. Although many African leaders expressed apprehension, over the following two decades rates use of contraception by African women doubled and birth rates fell.
Sterilization was more prevalent among white women, who had better access to healthcare, because it was voluntary, not forced.
In fact, post-apartheid allegations of forced sterilization have stronger evidence, particularly targeting HIV-positive women between 2002 and 2015.3 A 2020 report by the Commission for Gender Equality documented 48 cases of coerced sterilization in public hospitals, but this is still not indicative of widespread policy. If anyone is trying to forcibly genocide black people, it’s the ANC with its destruction of the economy and law and order, not the Apartheid regime.
Claims of genocidal sterilization campaigns, such as those linked to Project Coast (Apartheid’s chemical weapons program), are conspiratorial. You could claim that Project MKULTRA is evidence that the government is brainwashing us all with psychedelics, as Joe Rogan and Alex Jones love to imply.
The truth is that government funded research is not equivalent to policy. Governments fund all sorts of nefarious plans for invasion and genocide, but never follow through on them. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated anti-fertility research but found no proof of mass sterilization. Even if the South African government had an intention to commit genocide, it never developed or followed through on these plans.4
If we are to conflate contraception with sterilization, then 64% were sterilized, which includes injectables and pills. Since the end of Apartheid, this figure has slightly dropped:
In South Africa, the percentage of sexually active women using modern contraceptive methods has slightly dropped, from 64% in 2003 to 60% in 2016.
This is a tragedy which should be amended with all speed.
Contraceptives worked. From 1998 to 2016, the TFR of South Africa fell dramatically. Anti-natalism works, unlike natalism, which is a waste of money and makes us more polluted, less safe, dumber, and poorer.
Does anti-natalism work?
Lyman claims that anti-natalism does not work, because it “cannot reduce the population of the underclass.” This is categorically, empirically false.
In 1960, South Africa, Namibia, and Nigeria had the same exact TFR. Today, the TFR of South Africa is significantly lower than that of Namibia and Nigeria. This great accomplishment is due to the wisdom and efficacy of the Apartheid State, which, if it continued, I’m sure would suppress fertility and provide greater security, safety, and prosperity for its black citizens.
When looking at a simple chart of TFR, the thing that stands out is the fact that TFR was declining dramatically prior to the fall of Apartheid. After Apartheid, however, TFR has stabilized. This is a bad thing, and has worsened lives for millions of black South Africans.
If the Apartheid regime had sterilized 25% of black Africans in 1998, then scenes like this, in 2021, would not have been as likely:
The median age of South Africans is 28. Assume that the median age of rioters is slightly younger, at 24. Had the South African government sterilized 25% of women after 1998, that would have reduced the size of these riots by at least 12.5%. But consider if the sterilizations were targeted at the poorest South Africans, and not just randomly. In that case, since rioters tend to be poorer than average, 12.5% is likely an underestimate.
Population reduction increases stability.
Since Roe v. Wade, 54 million babies have been aborted. 19 million of those were black.
Without abortion, there would be, at least, 60 million black people in America today. And since those 19 million additional blacks would also have children since 1973, 60 million is a very low estimate.
Since 2021, America has experienced Black Demographic Decline, from 41.72 million to 41.31 million in 2023. If this continues, in 100 years, there won’t be a single black person left in the country.5
In 2021, 163,863 black babies were aborted. According to natalists, this is a tragedy which must be stopped by “throwing a massive pile of no-strings-attached cash at families to help them have kids.”6
In 2022, 71% of women who received abortions made less than $30,000 a year. Only 29% of them made more than $30,000 a year. This means that abortion is disproportionately utilized by the poorest members of society.7
We also know that non-heterosexual women are much more likely to obtain an abortion, with lesbians having much higher rates of abortion than heterosexual women:
If we accept the hypothesis that LGBTQ women are more mentally ill than heterosexual women, then the net effect of abortion is to disproportionately decrease the fertility of the mentally ill.
Conclusion.
The relationship between fertility, pollution, economic growth, and security is complex. My purpose here was not to speak the final word on natalism vs anti-natalism — that would require me to write an entire book. Instead, I wanted to limit my scope to a serious investigation of the following claims:
The Apartheid South African regime racistly sterilized 25% of its population,
Its anti-natalist policies were not effective.
Contrary to these claims, I do not believe its actions constituted genocide (as claimed by third worldist communists), but I do believe it successfully reduced poverty and the risk of violence by averting 5 million excess births (50% of which would have been to single mothers).
In total, this essay is not sufficient in scope to “win” the natalism debate, and constitutes only a footnote in a much larger discussion. I could easily write another 2,000 words on the subject of population growth and animal welfare. Conveniently, Lyman believes that not only is animal welfare a false moral principle, but also, its purported proponents are just lying for wokeness points.
I do think factory farming is bad. I think the fact that the oceans are so full of mercury that fish have become poisonous is also bad. I think the fact that young South African men roam around looking for foreigners to kill is bad. I think war, poverty, and disease are bad. And I think favelas look very ugly.
There is strong evidence now that global intelligence is declining. This is a crucial fact for a discussion of natalism.
Below 100 IQ, human beings are not net contributors to the economy under western-style welfare systems. Even Chinese immigrants are net-neutral. The fact is that we cannot simultaneously sustain a growing population with declining intelligence and maintain western-style welfare. One of these two things must go.
Natalists claim that the welfare system cannot survive declining fertility, since this will lead to an inverted population pyramid, in which a smaller workforce will pay for a growing population of retirees. This is true: however, if you cut off the welfare of retirees, they don’t start stripping your power lines down for copper. On the other hand, if you have a population of hundreds of millions of economically unproductive young men, and you pull the plug on welfare, this is a huge security concern.
I would much rather be faced with a Boomer welfare apocalypse than a natalist welfare apocalypse. Both situations are unsustainable, but whereas one leads to old people being shuffled into shantytowns in Kansas, the other leads to mass violence. From the perspective of protecting critical infrastructure, one is clearly preferable to the other.
If this topic interests you, I highly suggest you check out my ongoing debate with natalist Peter Brookes. Although I am committed to the anti-natalist position, he has convinced me to change my mind on several points, including the heritability of fertility. Peter is the exemplar of a good debater.
Footnote on Leftism.
Defending Apartheid South Africa? Not very left-wing, huh?
It is not my intention to defend genocide, racism, or segregation. I do not believe that the Apartheid policy of preventing black people from using the beach was correct. However, this doesn’t mean that the Apartheid regime did nothing good: it provided jobs, security, economic development, healthcare, education, private property rights, and prevented the kind of mass violence and genocide seen commonly elsewhere in Africa.
It was not a perfect regime, and by no means “left-wing,” but that does not mean it was evil incarnate or morally equivalent with Naziism, Maoism, or Stalinism. Pound-for-pound, the Apartheid regime engaged in far less genocide than America, Canada, or any of the other governments of Africa. If we add up all the racism of the caste system for the last 3,800 years, South Africa appears as a mere blip on the map of racism.
When put into historical context, the Apartheid regime was a fairly normal regime on the spectrum of morality. Its great sin was ending segregation a mere 30 years later than America — this seems significant to us, in 2025, but from a 1,000 year view, it’s not fair to act as if Apartheid South Africa was somehow beyond the pale. That is, unless you are a radical communist who hates America, and thinks all of western civilization is “beyond the pale.”
In 1932, I would have supported FDR. In 1980, I would have supported Carter. In 2016, 2020, and 2024, I believe that the Democrat was the better choice. I think the Iraq War was terrible, and Zbigniew Brzezinski was right.
I oppose the conservative movement. I oppose MAGA. I oppose anti-vaxxers and climate deniers. I oppose theocracy. I support reproductive rights and government funding for science and foreign aid. I think we should have free trade and freedom of movement with our allies, not tariffs, border walls, and deportations. We should be globalists, not nationalists. The Trump cult is sick, stupid, and wrong. We should build up our institutions, not tear them down.
I am not a radical extremist who thinks every Republican is Hitler. I hold liberal social views and mainstream economic views. I support the Deep State and resent populism in all forms. I believe the highest form of liberalism is when you protect high IQ minorities from mobs of peasants.
Abraham Lincoln was a white supremacist, but he was still better than the South. Defending the goodness of the Union doesn’t mean that I’m saying it was perfect— but it was better than the alternative. Apartheid was clearly better than the ANC. Racism is a sin, but it is a smaller sin than mass unemployment and mass murder. I’m not pro-racism, but I’m anti-anti-racism when anti-racism is a code-word for nationalist dictatorship.
The true ideology of the ANC is nationalism. Communism is just a crude excuse for their nationalism. Do you think the average ANC voter reads Marx and Engels? No, they are motivated by the belief that black people “own” South Africa, and whites are “foreigner imperialists” who don’t belong. They think that when a white man makes money, he must be stealing it from a black man. I reject that view entirely.
Leftism to me is about protecting minorities from majoritarian nationalists — and that includes protecting white people from black nationalists, too.
The best form of Liberalism is when you oppose:
The Medieval suppression of Cathars and Bogomils
The Tradcath massacre of Huguenots
The Hutu genocide against the Tutsis
The Stalinist genocide of kulaks and Ukrainians
The Maoist genocide of landowners
The Ottoman genocide of Armenians
The German genocide of Jews
and the black nationalist genocide of Afrikaners.
Liberalism is a political technology for protecting smart people from being slaughtered by dumb nationalist collectivists. Sometimes it gets rather silly, like the pronouns in bio and COVID masking, but the basic idea is still really good and absolutely necessary in the face of continual human degeneration.
If you think that makes me right-wing, then we have an honest semantic disagreement on what it means to be left or right at a deep level. But I’m not hiding, pretending, or lying about my views to grift or avoid cancellation. I could just not talk about controversial things, or I could call myself a Trump supporter, and get many more likes and clicks.
This is an underestimate, because it isn’t considering the fact that increased poverty due to population growth would have resulted in a higher murder rate.
It is the communist ANC, not the white supremacists, who are forcibly sterilizing women: bbc.com/news/world-africa-51637751
Of course, some of this decline is due not just to low birth rates, but to due to large intermarriage rates between blacks, whites, and Hispanics, which leads to people being counted as “biracial” or “mixed race” instead of black. Someone with a black parent and a white parent might be considered black (like Obama), but if that person has a child with a white person, eventually, the child will not be considered black anymore.
2022: “Hungary has found a policy that works: throwing a massive pile of no-strings-attached cash at families to help them have kids.”
For reference, the median income is $39,982, meaning that if abortion was used equally at all income levels, less than 46% of women who receive abortions should make less than $30k per year.
Out of curiosity, have you heard of VHEMT (Voluntary Human Extinction Movement)? A lot of your arguments sound like the ones they make.
> Sterilization wasn’t a result of “evil genocidal racists,” unless you’re claiming that the South African government in 2016 is also run by evil genocidal racists.
Well...