This story was originally published by the Daily Hampshire Gazette, “Your Tax Dollars Are Funding the Patriarchal Family—Courtesy of Trump.”
“One in three Americans are under-babied,” said Trump’s Medicare and Medicaid chief Dr. Mehmet Oz last week, echoing JD Vance’s contempt for “childless cat ladies.”
Guided by evangelical supporters, the Trump administration is eroding longstanding civil rights laws protecting women and girls in education and the workplace, restricting access to contraception and abortion, and weakening social support systems for single mothers and their children.
Their strategy entails advancing policies and rhetoric that pressure women to marry men, exit the workplace, prioritize childbearing and give birth to as many babies as possible. The goal of this full-scale attack on women’s economic independence and bodily autonomy is to make the patriarchal family the center of American life.
To achieve this goal, the Trump administration is using multiple levers of federal power—and taxpayer dollars—to coerce women and girls into marriage and motherhood, and erect barriers to college education and careers.
Closely following the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy agenda, the Trump administration has implemented policies to punish low-income single mothers and incentivize “biblical marriage.”
To block access to education, they cut federal loans for graduate education in the urgently needed fields of nursing, social work and teaching—fields dominated by women—and ended Biden-era college debt forgiveness programs, which disproportionately benefit women.
To push women out of their jobs, they eliminated workplace protections against sex discrimination and refused to enforce the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act—a 2022 law requiring employers to accommodate pregnant women and new mothers. To push women into marriage, Republicans have slashed federal funding for food, housing and childcare for single mothers.
But Project 2025 was just the start. In January, the Heritage Foundation doubled down in a new report, “Saving America by Saving the Family,” with a more detailed plan to push women into marriage, motherhood and economic dependence by using federal power to promote “natural marriage,” defined as a heterosexual marriage with a breadwinner, stay-at-home caretaker and biologically related children.
Using an agricultural metaphor, the report demands “America’s key institutions … get serious about ‘planting’ and ‘feeding’ the virtues that strengthen families while ripping out the deadly weeds—the cultural toxins, perverse regulations and policy incentives—that undermine those virtues.” It calls for nothing less than a “culture-wide Manhattan Project that marshals America’s political, social and economic capital to restore the natural family.” They condemn same-sex marriage, no fault divorce and childcare outside the home.
To fund the patriarchal family, the Heritage Foundation proposes the federal government:
- end social safety net programs for single mothers;
- make cash payments to heterosexual couples to marry;
- give married heterosexual parents tax credits for each baby they have and, after two children, give a 25 percent “large family bonus” for each additional child; and
- redirect federal childcare dollars to mothers who stay at home to care for their children while their husbands work.
- Heritage also recommends eliminating government regulation of housing and the workplace, including civil rights enforcement and lowering taxes.
Their 150-page report of detailed policy recommendations leaves nothing to chance.
Then, on Mother’s Day, the Trump administration launched its latest weapon: Moms.gov—a website claiming to offer “resources, information and help for new and expecting … mothers and fathers who face difficult or unexpected pregnancies.” On the homepage is a headless, legless torso of a heavily-pregnant white woman with long blond hair in a yellow tulle dress embroidered with flowers, arms cradling a massive belly in a field of tall yellow grass. Animated pink and blue baby footprints march up the sides of the image as the viewer scrolls down the page.
Right below this image, the website links directly to the antiabortion movement’s “Options Line”—a data collection tool run by Heartbeat International, an evangelical organization with a global network of unregulated pregnancy centers. These centers lure pregnant women and girls by pretending to offer unbiased information about abortion. Then, they collect their personal and health information, lie about the safety and efficacy of abortion and contraception and try to coerce women and girls into carrying unwanted pregnancies to term.
Research has shown that these centers share women’s private medical information with law enforcement; lead women to believe they have healthy pregnancies when they in fact have life-threatening ectopic pregnancies; use expired sterilization solution to clean transvaginal ultrasound wands; use unlicensed volunteers who have not been subject to criminal background checks to perform ultrasounds; and touching the bodies of minors without parental consent. When states have attempted to regulate these unlicensed pregnancy centers, the $2.5 billion dollar industry deploys right-wing law firms to block these efforts, claiming First Amendment free speech and religious rights shield them from any transparency or accountability for the harms they cause.
Your tax dollars are funding this extremist religious agenda of patriarchal marriage, stay-at-home mothers and reproductive coercion.
If you’re angry, good. The midterms are coming.
