Make America procreate again: among the MAGA fertility fanatics

O rdinarily Tim Adkinson, a trucker, sleeps in the back of his vehicle. But on a warm night at the end of March, he checked into a hotel in Austin, Texas. He had dressed up smartly: white linen shirt and chinos, hair brushed forward in an attempt to mask his receding hairline. On his wrist he wore a yellow paper wristband. This accessory was meant to signal to the people he’d meet that evening that he was single, open to dating and, most importantly, looking to procreate—a lot. “I’m 32 years old and I haven’t had any kids,” Adkinson told me. We were sitting next to each other eating a dinner of roast chicken and broccoli in the auditorium of the Bullock Texas State History Museum. It was the opening ceremony of NatalCon, a two-day conference that tasked itself with “gathering the brightest minds in the world in search of new solutions” to the global fall in birth rates. The 200-strong crowd was full of self-proclaimed pro-natalists: those who believe that people (at least people like t

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