Articles CLOSE YOUR EYES AND THINK OF ENGLAND Pronatalism in the British Print Media

Faced with declining fertility rates, media in Britain are reacting with anxiety about cultural annihila-tion. To look at how nationalism inflects concerns over biological and cultural reproduction, the authors analyze coverage of falling fertility and rising immigration in Great Britain in major newspapers in 2000-2. They find pronatalist appeals to be common and especially directed at women but varying in how women’s duty to the nation is framed. Appeals characterized as begging, lecturing, threatening, and bribing express different relationships between individual interest and the national good and offer posi-tive and negative views of women. The political leanings of specific newspapers affect how they connect biological reproduction to the cultural threat seen in immigration. Even positive views of women as mak-ing rational reproductive choices are tainted by alarmist views of immigration as a threat to national survival