Thanks @rcenteno.bsky.social! Let us know if you have any thoughts!

This is part of a larger book project with @mfroman.bsky.social tentatively titled Making Americans: The Racial Politics of Reproduction. We welcome any and all feedback on the project as we move forward with additional studies.

Bottom line: White backlash to demographic change is not only about who enters the country, but also who is born into it.

Our findings show:
🔹 Demographic change can shift even “fixed” attitudes like abortion.
🔹 Reproductive politics isn’t just moral or religious—it’s racialized.
🔹 White backlash may increasingly target reproduction, not just immigration.

We refer to this logic as racialized Malthusianism: the fear that out-groups will reproduce, erode in-group dominance, and reshape the political/racial order. This connects contemporary “Great Replacement” rhetoric to a longer history of racialized population control.

We replicate with experiments: When prejudiced Whites are primed to think about population growth, their support rises for assuring Latina women---but not White women---have access to abortion, contraception, and sterilization.

Across large-N surveys and original data, we find:
➡️ Whites in places with more Latino growth are more supportive of legal abortion.
➡️ This effect is absent among non-Whites.
➡️ It’s driven exclusively by Whites higher in prejudice.

We test whether prejudiced White Americans support abortion as a means of limiting non-White population growth.

Most research on White backlash to demographic change focuses on immigration. But today, the U.S. is diversifying less through immigration and more through non-White births.