In 2023, the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation released “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”—otherwise known as Project 2025.
Already, more than half of the recommendations included in this blueprint have been implemented by the Trump administration, with profound and destructive impacts on public health, governmental capacity, civil liberties, and Americans’ safety.
The organization has since published a sequel, “Saving America by Saving the Family,” which lays out an equally troubling “pro-natalist” agenda. The report blames social welfare programs and “second wave feminism” for America’s falling fertility rates. It calls for promoting marriage and motherhood—at the expense of women’s freedom. For instance, the report heavily criticizes no-fault divorce and champions “covenant marriages” that are difficult to dissolve except in limited circumstances.
“This goes beyond just incentivizing marriage to get to a higher birth rate,” says Varina Winder, who served as the Senior Advisor and Chief of Staff in the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues at the U.S. Department of State. “They have policy solutions around restricting women’s educational and career opportunities, and they have policy interventions around restricting women’s access to health care and particularly reproductive health care.” (Additional critique of the report is here.)
Winder is currently the co-founder of the nonprofit Arch Collaborative, a strategic initiative focused on protecting women’s rights and advancing gender equality. She cautions that the Heritage Foundation’s next wave of policy ideas, if allowed to be enacted, could be devastating for women’s well-being.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes.
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Anne Kim: There really isn’t any dispute that the U.S. birthrate has fallen, and that’s true of all industrialized countries around the world. What’s troubling about the Heritage Report are the questionable explanations for why this is happening. Can you explain?
Varina Winder: Exactly. Let’s start first with what they use as their crisis framing language.
The two reasons they say we’re in crisis are social welfare programs and feminism. And Dr. Oz, the TV personality who is now also part of the Trump administration, has talked about women being “under-babied.”
So the Heritage Foundation has taken this “under-babied” [problem] as a call to action. They’re insisting via government intervention as well as cultural intervention that women get married and have the “right” number of babies. [They’re also proposing] to go at it using a couple of different mechanisms, including by eliminating certain social welfare programs.
Anne Kim: So let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. What are they arguing is the link between social welfare programs and falling fertility? I’m not sure I understand their logic.
Varina Winder: I don’t know if I can give them the benefit of the doubt. They talk about how the government has been the “de facto husband” for too many women and how that has to end.
So they recommend ending social welfare programs or tightening social welfare programs as we know it, things like TANF—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, SNAP (food stamps), and Head Start, which provides a floor through which America’s children who are ages birth to five don’t fall through. They recommend tightening work requirements.
They recommend making these social welfare programs either completely different or much, much smaller. They’re also actively designing and recommending new social welfare programs for what they call a “natural family”—which they define as one man, one woman, and their biological children.
Anne Kim: And there’s a racialized component to this too, right? When you look back to welfare reform, they were attacking welfare programs—the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program—as encouraging too much fertility among the “wrong” kinds of people. So there’s just enormous hypocrisy.
Varina Winder: That hasn’t changed. I religiously follow Tressie McMillan Cottom, the New York Times columnist, and she has this clip where she says, “You know, as a Black woman in America, I have never once been told that I need to have more children.” So this is really a plan, even though they’re never explicit about it, for white people.
Anne Kim: So what does feminism have to do with Americans being “under-babied,” from the Heritage Foundation’s point of view?
Varina Winder: The report starts with sort of a lamentation that over the past 60 years, abortion and casual sex and being childless by choice and no-fault divorce have all become “normalized,” and that the government should and can act to—and this is a direct quote—“clear the weeds to help the poison from entering the ground.”
I read that in the opening pages of the report and got chills down my spine because I’m the granddaughter of Polish Jews. I’m also the granddaughter of Germans. I don’t think there’s any way to read that and not know implicitly what they’re suggesting. This is a plan not just to control women’s reproductive health and lives, but to control a lot of other aspects—if not all other aspects—of folks’ lives.
Anne Kim: I did find that quote while we were talking here: “Second wave feminism and the sexual revolution promoted an individualistic, child free, marriage free, sexual ‘liberation’ that promised to lead to an unparalleled era of consent based human happiness and fulfillment.” They think that’s really bad!
Varina Winder: I think that’s really interesting that you picked up on that quote because of the reference to consent. That was the novel idea in the founding of the American government. Consent by the governed is a founding principle, and yet I don’t see a lot in this report that elevates consent.
Anne Kim: You started to allude to some of the solutions that Heritage puts forward that are pretty troubling, so let’s start talking about those. Given what the Heritage Foundation says are the root causes of the U.S. fertility crisis, what are some of the key “solutions”—big scare quotes here—that they are offering to solve this problem?
Varina Winder: They have three pillars for their policy solutions, and when you read them, you understand that this goes beyond just incentivizing marriage to get to a higher birth rate. They have policy solutions around restricting women’s educational and career opportunities. They have policy interventions around restricting women’s access to health care and particularly reproductive health care.
That will not come as a surprise. That’s been a long-term goal that’s been very successfully implemented. And they have incentives and interventions around the promotion of marriage and restrictions around divorce. They of course use very different language, but when you read the policy, the aim is restricting women’s ability to make choices.
Anne Kim: Now some of the solutions they have may seem appealing on a very surface level, right? Just to play devil’s advocate, they have this idea for what they call NEST accounts, which is to give newlyweds a nest egg to start their lives together. And if you hear a candidate, for instance, talking about the bumper sticker version of this, it sounds fine. Why not give newlyweds a nest egg to get started on their lives?
And then they have this other idea about giving middle class women what they call a “Home Childcare Equalization” tax credit. There are middle class women who drop out of the workforce because childcare costs are high, and I have friends who said the cost of childcare is more than their salaries, so it’s not worth it to work. That too has kind of a surface appeal to it. What is the rejoinder to that?
Varina Winder: I think that folks could rally around interventions to make life more affordable. The devil is of course in the details.
For the NEST accounts, which are already in play as “Trump Accounts,” this would be a new infusion of money that a married heterosexual couple would receive when they have a biological child. It’s $2,000. And that child then has this money sitting in an account that would grow until between the ages of 18 and 30, when they can withdraw it tax free.
It’s a great idea. But to what end and for whom, right? You’re narrowing the class of folks who are able to access something like that.
As for the Home Childcare Equalization Credit, I’m a mother of two, and an extra $2,000 in the early months of my motherhood would have been just great. But again, this is money that you get if you’re married and in a certain age bracket and if you stay home. So $2,000 would not have covered my salary. It would not have covered paid leave. It certainly doesn’t cover the cost of childcare. The average household in America spends about $13,000 on childcare—that’s about 10 percent to 35 percent of the average household income. The government itself defines “affordable” childcare as costing less than 7 percent of your household income. In Washington, DC, where we both live, that average is about $24,000.
So $2,000 sounds really great. It could definitely be a bonus. You could put that in your diaper bank or buy a new car seat and strollers and take care of some basic necessities, but that doesn’t cover a salary. It doesn’t cover paid leave.
Anne Kim: Now so as far as the overall critique, what does the Heritage Foundation get wrong about what women and families actually need?
Varina Winder: Americans aren’t “under-babied.” They’re underinsured, underemployed, and underpaid. And I would add that Americans are under no illusions right now that their government is stepping up to support them in any way, shape, or form.
What the data say is super consistent: The number one concern is affordability.
In the most recent American Life survey, which is conducted by Brigham Young University, 71 percent of Americans say that it’s unaffordable to have kids. And 43 percent answered that they personally, as survey respondents, had limited the number of children that they had based on their own personal finances.
The second thing that comes up, which is related to affordability, is housing. Housing costs are rising in the US much, much faster than incomes. And a third big reason why folks aren’t having kids is just uncertainty and fear of the future. It’s AI. It’s the climate. It’s political instability. It’s violence. Folks are for the first time really fearing that the future is not going to be better for their kids, and they’re making personal choices according to that.
If Heritage wanted to address those issues, they may have more luck in terms of the fertility rate. They’d certainly have more luck in terms of Americans’ feelings of being cared for by their government and by their communities.
Anne Kim: You’ve argued that if you look beyond the specific policy ideas and all the various little goodies and treats they’ve embedded in this report, there is a larger, darker agenda that is very hostile to women. Can you explain what you think are the goals of the Heritage Foundation and its right-wing allies in terms of the role that they see women playing in society and the economy? What’s the cultural shift that they seem to be trying to accomplish?
Varina Winder: Unfortunately, you can just open your phone and see what the cultural shift may look like that they’re aiming for. They are aligning themselves with some really extreme, very misogynistic characters. The goal is nothing less than a world, a society, where women cannot leave their husbands and cannot get an education or afford to get an education; where they cannot choose when or whether or how many children to have; where they cannot afford their children or even potentially their lives.
I think it’s really nothing short of the elimination of real choice and autonomy and that sense of individual freedom that I certainly grew up with.
Anne Kim: What recommendations do you have for women who might be listening to this and have become alarmed about what might be in store for them?
Varina Winder: I’m grappling with that too. So if folks have ideas, I’d love to hear them. But I think step one in any kind of advocacy is awareness. I know personally I’ve been talking a lot about this. I’ve basically been taking this on a virtual roadshow with folks who are interested.
I think because of Dr. Oz’s comments about being “under-babied,” even folks who are not sort of steeped in the pronatalism movement are hearing that and thinking, “That’s really icky.”
Once you’re aware, you have to go on defense. Many of these policy recommendations are going to run through state legislatures. The federal government right now is not passing a whole bunch of legislation. President Trump is issuing executive orders, but a lot of these changes around, for example, no-fault divorce or eliminating access to contraception are starting to happen at the state level.
There’s a fetal personhood bill in South Carolina. There are attempts to restrict no-fault divorce in seven states. That’s where you can get involved and be a powerful, active constituent. You can obviously vote. I would never turn away the opportunity to encourage folks to vote and to vote with folks who are aligned with the ideas of individual choice and individual freedom.
And then third, I think we have to go on offense. What would a pro-freedom agenda look like? What would a pro-family agenda look like? We can’t be afraid to reclaim that mantle. And I think if we look at what women and men say that they want, it’s affordability. How can we ensure that our incomes cover the costs of our lives, especially and including housing and healthcare costs? How do we maximize opportunities?
That’s not just job and career and education, but whom do you want to get married to? How do you want to live your life? These are things that we have to protect and cherish. And again, I just keep screaming this out, we have to have autonomy. That of course includes the right to make the decisions about your own body, but it also means freedom.
One aspect of the report that we didn’t talk about and where we could potentially even find alignment is around pornography and technology. In one section they even call out Silicon Valley “tech bros” and say they may have diabolical aims.
That’s an area where we’re seeing populist backlash to AI. Folks are scared. They are scared about this from a jobs perspective. They are scared about this from a community relationship perspective. Women especially are scared about all the violence popping up online.
There are areas of common ground, but there’s no effort in this report to say, “Okay, here’s what freedom from tech control or tech interventions in your life might look like.” [Instead,] their recommendation in the technology section is around restricting fertility treatments.
But affordability, opportunity, autonomy, and individual choice—that’s the rallying cry around a true pro-family agenda.
