I have resisted the word “pronatalism” for quite a while now. On behalf of the clarity of the language will all use and on behalf of all the people who want to talk reasonably about political issues, I am leery of words that don’t have natural opposing terms. No one is “anti-choice,” for instance; or “anti-life” and that makes their common opposites unhelpful.

That is the way I have been thinking of “pronatalism” until this morning, when I read this sentence in Victor Kumar’s column in the New York Times.

“But right-wing packaging should not obscure the genuine perils to which pronatalism is a response.”

For me, there is a lot to like about this sentence. First, it distinguishes the condition to which some people response with policies that are called pronatalism. What conditions are we talking about? Second, Kumar distinguishes between the response to these conditions and the “packaging” of the response. It is not hard to imagine that the response might be perfectly valid even if the “packaging” is unfortunate. Furthermore—second and a half—it is a very common experience to be in conversations in which everyone has stopped at the packaging level and no one is dealing with the condition.

That’s quite a lot to like.

The condition Kumar is dealing with is depopulation. It is a substantial problem for reasons he deals with in his column, but his point is that right wing politicians have taken over the issue and “packaged” it in ways that are consistent with their own ideology. This packaging has made the issue so distasteful to progressives that they have simply left it alone.

Not only that, but quite a number of liberal western nations in Europe are adopting measures to deal with this issue and are finding very little success. The exception seems to be France, for reasons that are worth paying attention to. France has adopted, according to Kumar, “national policies that provide parents with financial benefits like tax breaks that scale up with the number of children in a family.”

It is not hard to ridicule such a policy as “paying people to have children.” My own inclination is to make having children a more attractive prospect and I say that with no idea at all how to do it. But if young people are foregoing children because of the economic penalties associated with it, it does seem reasonable to reduce the penalties so that those who want children will choose to have them.

Ridiculing the policy as “paying people to have children” is an excellent example of “responding to the packaging” and paying no attention at all to the underlying issue. The fact that it was my own first response is sobering.