The right’s birthrate panic has become a governing project: fewer choices for women, more coercion through law.
Originally published in Jill Filipovic’s Substack Throughline, under the headline, “The Plot Against American Women.”
Since Trump’s re-ascendance to the White House, the reactionary conservative movement has become the most aggressive and unfettered it has been in my lifetime. And they are getting very, very clear on what they think an acceptable life looks like for women:
- Settle for any man who decides he wants you.
- Don’t go to college.
- Marry early.
- Have as many babies as possible.
- Quit your job (or don’t pursue one in the first place) to stay home full time and depend financially on your husband.
- Shoulder the blame if you wind up married to a jerk.
- Wind up impoverished if you divorce.
- Face social condemnation if you fail to follow the tradwife script.
- Contraception should be illegal or at least hard to get; same for IVF and other fertility treatments.
The reactionary conservatives of the New Right are not simply pronatalists who want lots of babies; they are people who want to impose a strictly patriarchal model of the family on all of us, which has certain kinds of women having babies, and other women punished for deviating. And that requires giving men greater rights and freedoms, while allowing women fewer.
This isn’t hyperbole. It’s a plan they wrote down and published.
Last month, the Heritage Foundation published “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.” Think of it as Project 2275, a detailed plan that is mostly about how America can spend the next two and a half centuries undoing the feminist progress we’ve made.
And it’s not just Heritage: Some of the most prominent thinkers (“thinkers”) of the New Right are obsessed with increasing (white) birthrates, and the curtailments of women’s freedoms that would be required to get reproduction to where they want it (infinite). Many of these “thinkers” are terminally online brain-rotted misogynists, but they have heavy sway over the terminally online brain-rotted men currently running the U.S. government. (If they’re asking Claude how to invade Venezuela and capture Maduro, they’re definitely turning to Bronze Age Pervert for his thoughts about women’s rights.)
… The forces of the New Right want to use the full force of the state to impose a national patriarchy.
The tech bronatalist right may be in favor of things like IVF and commercial surrogacy, but the broader right is not; they believe—not wrongly—that the only way to get women having an average of three-plus babies apiece or more is to subjugate them. Or, perhaps, this is backwards: They’ve long wanted to subjugate women for the sake of it, and this new birthrate discourse has given them a new argument in favor of an old cause.
The rhetoric on the right has gotten so extreme that even Meghan McCain has spoken out about it:
… to which the conservative response was, “Actually, it’s better to shame women.”
Here’s Katie Miller, wife to Stephen Miller (who by the way got married at 28, when her husband was 34; not exactly a “young” marriage):
Katie Miller is right: If you focus on settling, you can probably find someone to marry at any age. Maybe that’s how she wound up married to Stephen Miller.
The fundamental problem with the conservative life script for women is that when women have choices, we don’t tend to the follow the conservative life script.
For any of you reading who are under the age of, say, 45: How old were you when you met your partner, if you have a partner? (I was 30).
If you’re over 45, think of the younger people you know: How old were they when they met their partner?
Overwhelmingly, the Americans who marry are meeting their spouses in their late 20s and into their 30s (and beyond). The average age of first marriage for an American woman is a touch older than 28, and for men it’s 30. These couples have largely not been together since they were 16 and simply chose to wait a decade-plus to wed. It took them a while to find the right person—and to become a person who felt mature enough and themselves enough to tie themselves to another for life.
This is a good thing, if what you care about is happiness and human flourishing. It is a bad thing if all you care about is women doing their maximal reproductive and wifely duties. And the only real way to force women to do their maximal reproductive and wifely duties is to, well, force them.
I am not exaggerating when I say that the forces of the New Right want to use the full force of the state to impose a national patriarchy. I read through the Heritage Foundation’s plan to save America by saving marriage. Here is the plan, in Heritage’s own words, with a little translation from me.
They are explicit: Have fewer women go to college; push women to marry and start having babies when they’re very young; ban same-sex marriage; ban IVF; limit contraception access; strip basic rights even to physical safety from children; penalize single mothers; and impose conservative Christianity as a national religion.
On Curtailing Women’s Rights:
“The state and federal governments should recognize the natural differences between men and women. They should also preserve this distinction between the sexes in law against attempts to replace it with tendentious and subjective concepts, such as ‘gender identity.’”
What that means: The law should discriminate against women. Heritage leaders have said this repeatedly.
They recently hired Scott Yenor, who says professional women are “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome,” and that “the heroic feminine prioritizes motherhood and wifeliness and celebrates the men who make it possible.” He advocates for the end of anti-discrimination laws and says it should be possible for companies to legally “support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage.” And “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.”
“Instead of celebrating the nuanced expressions of femininity, the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s commanded a crusade that promoted sexual, financial, and familial ‘freedom’ for women. Women were encouraged to ‘liberate’ themselves from a patriarchal culture that insisted they stay at home and raise a family.”
What that means: Sexual, financial and familial “freedom” for women is bad. Liberation from a patriarchal culture is bad.
“Fertility rates tend to be higher in less-developed countries, but as nations industrialize, several factors conspire to reduce birth rates. These include the proliferation of birth control, more prospects for women to receive higher education and work outside the home, the delayed financial independence of young adults, and the government’s role in old-age Social Security.”
What that means: The Heritage Foundation is looking to limit birth control, higher education for women, work for women and Social Security.
“Today’s adults may favor autonomy and personal development over raising children more than earlier generations did. Thus, greater opportunity cost rather than greater actual cost may be a better explanation.”
What that means: I actually think they’re right on this, but what they aren’t explicitly saying is that there are greater opportunity costs for women today than there were in past years.
Men have always been able to have children, rely on women to raise them, and still pursue fulfilling work, hobbies, friendship and travel.
Women, on the other hand, once gained significant social status by having children, and now see the other things they love—work, hobbies, friendship, travel, autonomy and so on—threatened if they reproduce. The Heritage plan is not to make it easier for women to be fully-formed human beings and mothers. The plan is to make it harder for women to be fully-formed human beings so that motherhood will be their own path to personal fulfillment.
“Often, dating app users who are marriage minded suffer from what sociologist Brad Wilcox describes as the ‘soulmate myth,’ which he defines as ‘the idea that marriage is primarily about feeling an intensely emotional connection with the one that makes you happy and fulfilled.’ This contrasts with the historic understanding of marriage as being centered on a shared life of duty and virtue. The same idea can be captured in three words that are emblematic of the dating scene today—fear of ‘settling.’”
What that means: It is frivolous to try to find someone with whom you feel you have a unique and profound connection. Instead, you should marry out of a sense of duty. You should settle—or at least women should.
On Curtailing Contraception and Banning IVF:
“A large share of the blame for the present malady lies in moral and cultural trends that have both fed and been fed by government policy. Chief among these is surely the sexual revolution, which separated the sex act from marriage and childbearing. It is not just that sexual mores were revolutionized. Technology and policy also played key supporting roles. Starting in the 1960s, the Pill and other contraceptives swept the country—which promised to reduce the unwanted consequences of casual sex with multiple partners across a lifetime.”
What that means: They see women being able to control our own fertility as the root of the problem. And they’re right: Women being able to control our own fertility is one of the most powerful tools women have for independence. Women who cannot control their own fertility are under greater patriarchal control. The right has already succeeded in stripping the right to abortion from American women. It was never about saving babies; it was entirely about forcing women back in submission. Trust that, when they identify contraception as the tool that shoulders “a large share of the blame for the present malady,” they are telling you that they are coming for contraception next.
“What About In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)? … Supporting care that improves natural fertility, lowers miscarriage risk, and strengthens overall health at a lower cost is squarely in line with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda. This care naturally includes restorative reproductive medicine (RRM), which addresses hormone imbalances, endometriosis, or metabolic issues that can often be cured with proper diagnosis and treatment. Men and women who want, but cannot physically have, children may find hope in the developed, and still developing, field.”
“… Policymakers should commit to protecting life from fertilization. In the U.S., technologies such as in vitro fertilization and preimplantation genetic testing routinely manipulate or destroy human embryos. Pro-family champions should fight to protect embryonic and unborn life in law. Such protection should extend not just to cases of abortion but to all uses of reproductive technologies and scientific research.”
What that means: They want to ban IVF.
On Giving Men More Power:
“A policy should never encourage efforts to intentionally separate a child from his or her mother or father, except in extreme cases involving immediate threats to a child’s life and safety.”
What that means: Abusive fathers should still have access to their children as long as they are not an “immediate” threat, whatever that means. Men who abuse their wives or female partners should still have access to their children. Rapists should have access to their children.
“Like two gravitational objects interacting, the law soon influenced and was influenced by culture on this score. No-fault divorce laws became nearly universal, and divorce rates skyrocketed.”
What that means: They want to end no-fault divorce, and especially to make it much harder for women to leave their husbands.
“In community property states, a spouse that earned little or no money during the marriage would be entitled to up to 50 percent of the assets acquired during the marriage and alimony support for years after the divorce. Because these aspects of divorce were not substantially changed with the advent of no-fault divorce, they act as perverse incentives for ending marriages that could otherwise have been saved.”
What that means: “A spouse that earned little or no money during the marriage” is almost universally the female spouse who did exactly what Heritage prescribed: dropped out of the workforce to raise children. No-fault divorce laws exist in part to recognize her contributions to the household, and to say that, just because she didn’t earn an income, that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t have access to the couples’ shared assets which, by working in the home, she certainly helped to create. Heritage says no: Women should be financially dependent on male breadwinners, and if they want to leave those male breadwinners, well, they should be left penniless—which of course means that women will be stuck in marriages they don’t want to be in, including abusive ones.
“Other [states] are re-examining some of the default presumptions of divorce and custody of children. For instance, in 2018, Kentucky became the first state to pass a law making 50–50 shared custody the default when couples divorce or separate. Its champions argued that courts historically favored mothers in custody disputes and treated fathers as optional—rather than equally important—to a child’s well-being.”
What that means: It is actually not true that “mom gets full custody” is the default presumption of divorce and custody of children in the courts.
The 50-50 shared custody default in Kentucky and other conservative states has been disastrous: It has meant men who are abusive to their wives and children are nevertheless given unsupervised access to those children; it has meant that rapists get custody of the children of their victims; it has meant that men who do not parent their children are given as much time with them as the women who do, which results in all sorts of abuse and neglect.
The standard for child custody should be the best interests of the child. When there are two functional parents who share childrearing duties, the best interests of the child are no doubt split equally. But let’s be real: There is a reason single-mother households are so much more common than single-father households. (The reason is that mothers do more of the work and fathers are more likely to abscond or slack off.) Mothers spend much more time with their children than fathers even in two-parent married households. In a contentious divorce, it is often in the best interests of the child to be primarily with their mother—that doesn’t mean entirely with their mother, but it does mean that the parent who is doing the bulk of the parenting pre-divorce should probably have the option of keeping it that way, and a parent who is abusive or neglectful probably should not automatically get 50 percent custody of the children they mistreat.
On Giving Children Fewer Protections:
“Pro-family policies should preserve and protect the rights of parents—and corresponding duties—to oversee the care, education, and upbringing of their children. These rights, like the inherent rights of individuals, precede the state. A just state does not create these rights but recognizes them.”
What that means: The state should butt out of everything from education to child abuse. If parents want to hit their kids, deprive them of an education, or deprive them of necessary medical care, that is a parents’ right. (Children, it should be noted, do not have rights, and women occupy a kind of middle ground between children who have no rights, and men who are considered fully imbued with rights.)
On Imposing National Christianity:
“Given the profound effect of religiosity on family size, prudent pro-family policies should protect and reinforce the free exercise of religion. Free exercise is far more expansive than mere freedom of ‘belief’ or of ‘worship.’”
“The data are strong that religious people are more likely to get married, marry earlier, divorce less, have more children, and beneficially influence their children’s social development. Because religion has an outside impact on marriage and family, it merits outsized social and cultural support. One of the biggest impediments that religious Americans must confront, however, is widespread cultural and government-enforced secularism.”
What that means: Under the guise of promoting childbearing and the traditional family, the aim is to dismantle the separation of church and state. The right to freely practice your religion is not enough. The government should impose conservative Christianity wherever possible.
On Getting Women Out of Higher Education:
“Social pressures, from popular culture to guidance counselors to parents, now encourage almost everyone to go to college and delay getting married and having children.”
What that means: This is bad. Instead of encouraging young people (and mostly young women) to go to college, we should encourage them to get married.
“While getting an education, establishing a career, and saving money can contribute to stable family life, the culture treats these typically as goals in themselves and not as preparation or assistance for having a happy, healthy marriage and family life. The resultant message is to focus on oneself and find meaning through career success.”
What that means: This is bad, at least when women do it.
“Policies designed to boost college enrollment, however, have perhaps unwittingly helped to suppress family growth. … As analysts at the University of Pennsylvania explain, ‘Women who complete 4 years of college are less likely to have a child, while completion rates of 4 years of college rose 10 percent for women over the past decade.’”
What that means: Higher education for women gets in the way of them marrying young and having a lot of babies. Heritage wants them to marry and have a lot of babies. Therefore, higher education for women must somehow be curtailed.
On Stripping Rights from LGBTQ People:
“On top of these tectonic culture forces undermining family came the LGBTQ agenda which, through the Supreme Court of the United States, redefined marriage and severed it in law from its natural biological function and purpose of reproduction.”
What that means: They’re coming for same-sex marriage. The opposition to same-sex marriage has never been about “tradition.” It’s been about what same-sex marriage proves: That partnerships can be egalitarian, and that you do not need female subservience for a happy and stable relationship.
On Taking from the Poor:
“The welfare state kick-started the current crisis by punishing work and marriage… Marriage is one of the surest paths out of poverty and dependence. … The perverse incentives of the welfare state also expanded the fraction of non-marital births—especially among lower-income Americans and minorities. Ironically, insofar as public policy since the 1960s has encouraged childbirth, it has been among poor, unmarried women.”
What that means: It is good when wealthier (white) women have babies. It is bad when poorer (Black) women do.
The natural and best state of things is for women to be dependent on men. If women receive some help from the state, that is bad, because it allows those women to escape their obligation to depend on men. They want to slash welfare funding because it helps single moms, and they want women to be married before they give birth and are happy to punish families who don’t follow this script.
It would be great to end the marriage penalty in welfare programs, but that is not what Heritage means—they don’t want to keep giving support to poor women who wed; they want to cut off support to all women so that those women have to find men to support them, or starve.
“Congress should expand the Trump Accounts by creating separate Newlywed Early Starters Trust (NEST) accounts that support men and women who marry by or before the current average age of first marriage (about age 30) and that provide future retirement support for those who do not.”
What that means: The goal is not just for people to marry when they’re ready and in love; the goal is to get women to marry young, when they are less financially independent and more vulnerable (and, Heritage readily admits, more fertile).
“To recognize the investments involved and the societal benefits that accrue from large families, married parents that already have two or more children would receive a 25 percent Large Family Bonus for each additional child. To avoid repeating past policy mistakes that punished and disincentivized work, at least one parent would be required to be engaged in verifiable employment for the family to be eligible for the tax credit.”
What that means: The Heritage Foundation wants to funnel taxpayer money to families who have a bunch of kids, but only if the parents are married and one of them (dad) is working for pay. Women who have multiple children but who aren’t married to their partner, or who are stay-at-home moms whose partners die or are incapacitated? Out of luck. They are the “wrong” kind of family.
This is basically a cash transfer from secular America to conservative religious America, as religious conservatives are the ones who tend to have the largest families. And it’s a cash transfer from poor America to rich America: Poor parents often have multiple children, but they don’t tend to be married; married parents with large numbers of children tend to be wealthier.
The point isn’t to help the children who need it most. It’s to reward the families who comply with conservative ideology, and financially punish those who don’t.
“When it comes to welfare, the growth of the federal government displaced men from their traditional role as providers. Welfare moved the primary responsibility to provide for a family from fathers to the government. … The expansion of welfare programs, particularly AFDC, made the federal government the de facto husband for millions of poor women across the country.”
What that means: Women should be dependent on men. Poor women who can’t make ends meet should get no help from society (welfare is collective support, not just “the government”); they should find a man to rely on.
“The welfare state not only provided resources to the home, but also literally put a roof over millions of families’ heads,” the Heritage report continues. To be clear, they see this as a bad thing.
“In promoting new family policies, one must be mindful of mistakes of the past. For example, credits designed specifically to benefit poor single mothers may be well intended, but they have proven to incentivize single motherhood in poor communities and trap women there through marriage penalties.”
What that means: Don’t use tax dollars to help the poorest families. Use them to pay people for making choices you like.
“The Child and Dependent Tax Credit is most useful to middle-to-upper income parents of one or two children in high-cost jurisdictions. It incentivizes formal childcare over a stay-at-home parent or informal care arrangements by relatives or friends. As with some of the other credits mentioned above, while the CDCTC benefits some families, it also has some undesirable features for families. For instance, it disadvantages some traditional family arrangements and large families, and it weakens bonds among extended family members.”
What that means: They want to get rid of the CDCTC in favor of something that incentivizes women to stay home and does not help subsidize childcare. They instead propose a giant tax break that would only apply to married couples, only to couples where one spouse is working, and would give even more money to families who have multiple children under the age of four.
“The proposed [Home Care Equalization] credit will be available to married-couple families that are eligible for the FAM credit. This bonus will increase the maximum value of FAM by $2,000 for each eligible child under age five in the family and will otherwise follow the rules and parameters of the FAM credit. This means that, like the FAM credit, a family must have at least $30,470 in earned income to receive the HCE credit. The phaseout rate would be 5 percent on top of the phaseout rate of the underlying FAM credit and would start at the same income as the phaseout for the FAM credit.”
What that means: Families that have the fewest resources won’t get any extra help. If a father doesn’t make enough money, then a mother should work. If a father does make enough money, then the government should pay the mother not to work.
On the Necessity of Denying Climate Change:
“Moreover, fixation on carbon dioxide could very well distract from addressing such problems. Globally, human beings are releasing more greenhouse gases than ever before, but models have predicted far more warming than is observed in the real world. Moreover, contrary to model predictions, hurricanes and other extreme weather events are not growing more deadly or more common.”
What that means: This is from an entire section on climate change, and it’s worth noting that Heritage has been a major force in the Trump administration’s gutting of America’s efforts to curb emissions and clean up our air, water and land. They see the act of so much as recognizing climate change as a threat to their agenda—because the truth is that overpopulation does impact that Earth.
One solution would be to take aggressive action in fighting climate change so that individuals don’t need to feel like they have to make reproductive decisions based on the future of the planet, or fear that their descendants won’t have a livable planet to enjoy. Instead, the reactionary right simply denies climate change is a problem so that (in their theory) people will continue having babies without hesitation.
*
This isn’t a secret hidden agenda. This is the plan, written and published, in black and white. It is not a plan that most Americans, including most conservatives, support. But it is being imposed — unless we fight back.
