Governing Reproductive Futures through Moral Panic: Anti-Gender Mobilizations, Demographic Anxiety, and the Populist Moralization of the Family in Turkey and Finland

In the contemporary political conjuncture, demographic decline has become a key political problem across diverse contexts. Often articulated through populist imaginaries of national rebirth and moral restoration, its political salience cannot be reduced to population numbers. The rhetoric of demographic decline is reworked within anti-gender politics as a moral and affective discourse tying population anxiety to the preservation of the heteronormative family, the control of women’s and sexual minorities’ reproductive agency, and the protection of the nation’s moral boundaries through the temporal governance of social reproduction. This paper investigates the weaponization of this rhetoric in Finland and Turkey, conceptualizing it as a process of crisification of politics and symbolic boundary-drawing, and as a temporal category through which reproductive futures are reimagined along religio-conservative lines. It asks: (1) How is demographic decline articulated as a moral crisis of the family and the nation’s future? (2) How do anti-gender actors define which forms of reproduction and kinship count as legitimate, whose reproduction secures the nation’s future, and whose undermines it? (3) How do these discursive constructions enable illiberal political projects in distinct regime contexts? Finland, a liberal-democratic welfare state facing a populist upsurge, and Turkey, an authoritarian-populist, religio-conservative regime, both reveal how demographic anxieties are politicized through anti-gender mobilizations. In Turkey, demographic decline is embedded in a pro-natalist authoritarian discourse, where feminist and LGBTQ+ claims are framed as civilizational threats undermining the “natural” family and the nation’s moral continuity. This produces a moral panic legitimizing alliances between state actors and Islamist anti-gender mobilizations, feeding the expansion of authoritarian, familialist policies. In Finland, demographic decline is narrated through concerns over welfare sustainability and cultural cohesion. While articulated within an egalitarian national imaginary, the discourse of the idealized “Finnish family” implicitly privileges heteronormative and ethno-cultural forms of reproduction. Juxtaposing these cases, the paper reveals the temporal, affective, and ideological modalities of the discourse of demographic decline and conceptualizes reproductive futures as a site of populist moralization and regulation, where demographic anxieties and gendered nation-building intersect.