What Elon Musk’s children’s ideology is all about

However, the study that Guilette cited is controversial among experts – among other things because not all men were examined using the same methods. Dolores Lamb, who researches male infertility, explained: “The numbers are simply not robust.” Lamb sees a similar problem with a 2017 study, whose author Shanna Swan explained that sperm counts in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand fell by 52 percent between 1973 and 2011.

Lamb’s criticism: Swan directly compared a large number of studies from different decades and completely different regions, although conditions and methods sometimes differed drastically. Swan disagrees and warned in an interview that according to her calculations, the average sperm count in some regions could be zero.

The truth is: Sperm counts decrease with age and are, on average, significantly higher in young men than in older men. According to experts, sperm count can depend massively on external factors. These include the state of health, the time of the most recent ejaculation or the time of year. The fact that sperm counts appear to be lower on average than in the 1970s is primarily an indication of an aging society. Urologist Scott Lundy points out that the number of sperm generally has little influence on male fertility, but rather their quality and other health factors.

Natalists like Oz, Kennedy and Musk are united by the concern that the USA cannot reproduce sufficiently without migration. Sociologist Luke Munn wrote in May 2024: “The problem for natalists is not that fewer people are reproducing, but who is reproducing.” Natalism is close to ethnonationalism and understands the nation in particular as an ethnically uniform body of people that is as uniform as possible. The right-wing terrorist Brenton Harrison Tarrant, who killed 51 people in a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, Australia in March 2019, wrote in his manifesto: “It’s about birth rates, it’s about birth rates, it’s about birth rates!”