In the very first paragraph of the Heritage Foundation’s lengthy new policy paper, “Saving America by Saving the Family,” the authors go all the way back to 1776 for inspiration. “In understanding their crowning achievement, Americans must recognize that the founding fathers were, quite literally, fathers: Fifty-four of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence married and had a total of 337 children among them — an average of six each.”
Reading this, I wondered: Are they counting the six children Thomas Jefferson had with Sally Hemings — whom he enslaved and who could not legally refuse unwanted sex — or not? What kind of example is that supposed to set?
That’s just the opening salvo of this confused, retrograde report, which leaves out a lot of important details from its rose-colored history of marriage and family in the United States. It’s a curious set of guidelines for the future, since it seems mired in culture war battles from the 20th century, unable to face the past 60 years of change.
The Heritage Foundation — the think tank behind Project 2025, which has had an outsize influence on executive branch policy in the second Trump administration — seems to want to take a time machine back to when women were financially dependent on men and gay marriage was not legal, but the authors can’t decide exactly how far back they want to go. They call the report “a culturewide Manhattan Project that marshals America’s political, social and economic capital to restore the natural family.” (“Natural,” in their parlance, is the marriage of a man and a woman.) Comparing their natalist dreams to the creation of the nuclear bomb suggests that they believe they can achieve their goals only through destruction.
The report’s authors know they can’t tell all women to be stay-at-home mothers (returning the country to 1960s employment levels for women) because that would contradict their other goal, to dismantle the welfare state and put even more work conditions on parents receiving government aid. So instead, they throw a few tiny bones to modern working parents: encouraging remote work, conceding that affordability of child care is a major problem and saying it would be nice if more corporations offered paid family leave out of the goodness of their hearts.
But the bulk of the paper is about ways to whittle down government support for anybody who isn’t part of a traditional married family, ideally with a male breadwinner. For example, the report tells families it is less than optimal for their kids to go to day care as infants but offers only an extension of unpaid family leave, a few cash payments and tax credits as a policy salve. “According to N.I.H. studies,” — the studies they link to are from 1998 and 1999 — “by age 2, toddlers with a history of many hours in nonparental care exhibited more behavioral problems (such as aggression and disobedience) than did children reared primarily at home.”
This report’s authors want women to think they have been sold a bill of goods by liberals who told them they could have it all. There are passages in the report complaining about the ’60s feminists Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and claiming that second-wave feminism destroyed the family.
The authors quote a Daily Mail article from 2008, which they credit to Rebecca Walker, the daughter of the feminist writer Alice Walker, to support their argument about how “rabid” feminists ruined marriage and motherhood. Rebecca Walker told me, “These are words taken out of context from a piece I did not write and publicly renounced. Obviously, I fully reject the Heritage Foundation weaponizing my name and any of my personal family history in support of their regressive and unconstitutional war against women and families in our country and beyond.”
Not content with quoting a questionable, nearly 20-year-old article, at one point the report’s authors valorize the fictional “Brady Bunch” for its family’s large brood and frugality. (“All of the kids shared a single bathroom!”)
It is telling that the Heritage Foundation issued a grand statement about how welfare wrecked marriage and children two days after the Trump administration froze $10 billion in funding for needy families in five Democratic-led states, which includes $2.4 billion for the Child Care and Development Fund.
At first, the administration froze child care funds only for Minnesota, after a YouTube video by the conservative creator Nick Shirley about day care fraud in Somali-run centers went viral. (The Times and local outlets had already been reporting on welfare scandals in the state, and some of his claims were undermined by The Minneapolis Star Tribune.)
But just as the administration used the pretext of Shirley’s video to sic Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Minneapolis — with ongoing, tragic results — it also used the pretext of the video to cut funding to states Trump sees as the opposition, despite showing no evidence of fraud in California, Colorado, Illinois or New York.
This comes after other attempts by the Trump administration to withhold or cancel Head Start (which provides free child care for children 5 and under from low-income families) funding all over the country in 2025. The stop and start of federal grants continues to cause chaos for programs. “Rather than making life easier and more affordable for our families, Donald Trump is stripping away child care from Illinois families who are just trying to go to work,” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois said this month.
When I read policy screeds like the one from Heritage, I always marvel at how we agree on some of the problems American families face but have completely different solutions. The Heritage Foundation states that housing affordability and a paucity of stable jobs for young people may be contributing to the downturn of family formation. The authors note that young Trump-voting men rank children “as their No. 1 measure of life success,” citing NBC News polling from September. That group ranks marriage as No. 4, far higher than any other group, including Trump-voting young women, who rank children sixth and being married ninth, which is where young men who voted for Harris rank marriage.
Instead of looking at these stats and thinking that maybe there’s a deeper problem if only conservative men are bullish about having children, the authors look at the stats and think: If our government only pushed religion and traditional marriage harder legally and culturally, everyone else would fall in line.
But even they can’t fully commit to the argument that Americans are somehow underrating “the natural family,” as they spend large chunks of the report listing the many, many ways the government favors married couples. “Federal tax law provides married couples with substantial advantages unavailable to unmarried partners,” they note, along with inheritance and immigration laws and Social Security, retirement and military benefits; the list goes on. The federal government spends $150 million a year on Healthy Marriage & Responsible Fatherhood grants, with little to show for them.
While I do not think measuring happiness is useful or accurate or the right metric here, the Heritage Foundation’s authors use it to bolster their arguments: They claim marriage and churchgoing will make citizens happier. Yet year after year, the Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — dominate the 10 happiest countries, according to the World Happiness Report. These countries are secular and are generous welfare states. Their marriage rates aren’t particularly high, and cohabitation is common.
Further, the authors claim that over the past 60 years, “casual sex, abortion, childlessness by choice and no-fault divorce became normalized, while marriage and the natural family became stigmatized.” Stigmatized? Moms “dominate influencer marketing,” according to PRWeek, and if the authors bothered to pay attention to what’s happening this century, they might be aware that one of the past year’s biggest cultural moments was when Taylor Swift, a Kamala Harris voter, and Travis Kelce, a professional football player, got engaged.
I have interviewed men and women of different political backgrounds about their family goals. Many are delaying or having fewer kids because they are worried about paying for college, about paying for their retirement and about job stability. They also worry about paying for birth in the best of circumstances, because even for women with employer-provided insurance, the average out-of-pocket payment for a hospital birth is nearly $3,000, more than what is in Trump’s newborn accounts. They worry about their kids dying in school shootings. Women worry about dying in states with anti-abortion laws that prevent pregnant women from getting adequate medical care.
These are problems of the present and future, and they will need new and inventive solutions. Even a majority of G.O.P. primary voters in a 2025 Bipartisan Policy Center/Cygnal poll said the government has a role to play in helping parents get access to safe and reliable child care.
Instead of figuring out a real way to make life easier for families, all the Heritage Foundation does is propose razing what little government support exists while scolding young people for their decadence because they want fewer children and more bathrooms.
End Notes
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In New York magazine, Simon van Zuylen-Wood spent a lot of time with college Republicans and members of Charlie Kirk’s organization, Turning Point U.S.A., to write the fascinating feature “Inside the Conservative Campus Revolution.” Van Zuylen-Wood notes that there are a lot of young women in the movement and points out the inherent tension in their increasing political power. He focuses on Lesley Lachman, who is the president of the group’s chapter at the University of Mississippi:
Lachman’s T.P.U.S.A. presidency is an update on an archetype that has informed modern conservatism since Phyllis Schlafly: the anti-feminist female powerhouse. Kirk’s notion of a woman’s path to fulfillment — to get married and have children — raises interesting questions for a dynamic leader like Lachman. And not just her. At their chapter’s weekly general-body meeting, I counted 56 women and 17 men in the section I was sitting in. Across the country, many chapter presidents and executive board members are women too.
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The Lancet just published a systematic review of studies concerning Tylenol (a.k.a. paracetamol and acetaminophen) use during pregnancy and neurodevelopmental outcomes in babies. They found that Tylenol exposure was not associated with risk of autism spectrum disorder, A.D.H.D. or intellectual disability.
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The post The Conservative Conspiracy Against Women’s Progress Is Real appeared first on New York Times.
