It’s the worst beach read ever.

The ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation—the architect of Project 2025—is back with a “pro-natalist” sequel.

Its 168-page report, titled “Saving America by Saving the Family,” blames social welfare programs and “second wave feminism” for America’s falling fertility rates. Its solution: Promoting marriage and motherhood, even at the expense of women’s freedom.

The report is both exhausting and terrifying. Worse still, it could also become reality, with dire consequences for women’s opportunities and wellbeing.

As Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts recently pointed out—in a flex that demonstrates the organization’s influence—more than half of Project 2025’s recommendations have been implemented by Donald Trump’s administration. Trump’s cabinet is full of Heritage-aligned pro-natalists, including Vice President JD Vance (whose wife, Usha, is expecting their fourth child), and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz (“Dr. Oz”), who recently diagnosed American women as “under-babied.”

As a rhetorical exercise, “Saving America” is a flop. While Project 2025’s muscular language readily translated into sound bites and stump speeches (and often was), “Saving America”’s moralistic tone, awkward prudishness, and overwrought prose are cringe-inducing. Take, for instance, the report’s shrill warning against Chinese “sexbots” as a threat to American marriage:

Chinese companies are investing billions of dollars on lifelike “companion robots”—better known as sexbots. These advanced robots integrate chatbots and other forms of AI with materials like silicone and thermoplastic elastomer to mimic human skin, and even realistic temperature and skeletons. …

Society can no longer treat this looming technology as a niche or distant threat. No technology can change human nature; but many technologies can easily debase humans, destroy their relationships, and degrade their legal protections. Machines designed to replace human companionship and intimate sex acts will surely multiply the many pathologies already unleashed by endemic visual porn.

Oh-KAY.

But other passages, despite their clumsy language, convey dangerous misogyny: that women’s freedom jeopardizes the social order, and that women’s “liberation” is to blame for the breakdown of marriage and family. Here, for instance, is the report’s core thesis about what’s gone wrong in America:

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. Over the course of 60 years, casual sex, abortion, childlessness by choice, and no-fault divorce became normalized, while marriage and the natural family became stigmatized.

This diagnosis, in turn, leads to a cul-de-sac of policy ideas centered on “marriage promotion”—an idea that crashed and burned during President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform efforts in the 1990s but remains an organizing theme for conservatives (including in Project 2025).

“Saving America” proposes a slew of goodies for married, heterosexual couples (what it calls a “natural family”). These ideas include a $2,500 deposit into Trump Accounts for “men and women who marry by or before the current average age of first marriage (about age 30)” and a “Home Childcare Equalization Tax Credit” of $2,000 to benefit stay-at-home moms. (The report offers nothing to subsidize the cost of child care, which it derides as “non-parental care” linked to “behavioral problems” and other issues.)

At the same time, the report advocates punitive measures for unmarried mothers, especially those on public assistance. It proposes stiffening work requirements for eligibility to federal programs such as SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid—something the Trump administration has already pursued—and ending what it calls the “stacking” of benefits—the ability of households to receive both food assistance and housing help, for instance. It fails to acknowledge, however, the likelihood of hunger and homelessness for millions of families and children if those benefits are denied.

In an especially prescriptive piece of social engineering, the report imagines faith-based “marriage ‘bootcamp[s]’ for cohabiting couples with children” that would pay couples a “‘wedding bonus’ of up to $5,000 on their wedding day.” (The report cautions, however, that such payments should be made “through foundations or private donors, not government funds”).

The report also extols Hungary as a beacon of pro-natalist policies and promotes the MAHA-adjacent practice of “Restorative Reproductive Medicine,” an allegedly “natural” alternative to fertility treatment that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has criticized as “nonmedical” and potentially harmful. Perhaps its most unworkable idea—among the many contenders for that title—is for the Department of Transportation to “prioritize communities with ‘marriage and birth rates higher than the national average’ when distributing federal transportation grants, loans, and contracts.” It’s hard to imagine a connection between highway funding and fertility.

These cartoonishly extremist ideas distract from a very real concern: Kids are expensive. And affordability is the real root cause of America’s fertility problem.

“Americans aren’t ‘underbabied,’” says Varina Winder, cofounder of the nonprofit Arch Collaborative. “They’re underinsured, underemployed, and underpaid.” According to Brigham Young University’s 2025 American Family Survey, more than 7 in 10 Americans say having children is “unaffordable.” Varina cites housing costs in particular as a burden on families, as well as general economic uncertainty. “It’s AI, it’s the climate, it’s political instability, it’s violence,” she said. “Folks are really fearing, and probably for the right reasons, that the future is not going to be better for their kids.”

In this week’s Monthly podcast, out on Wednesday, Varina walks through more of the shortcomings of the Heritage Foundation’s plan and its failure to address women’s needs. I hope you’ll take a look.

Don’t miss at the Monthly…

A fresh betrayal of rural America. Under the Biden administration, Congress created a landmark $42 billion grant program to close the “digital divide” in rural America. But the biggest beneficiary of this program could be Elon Musk’s Starlink. Editor Kainoa Lowman reports that new rules announced by the Trump administration heavily favor Starlink’s satellites over higher-quality providers of fiber-optic networks. The result, Kainoa writes, will be “slower, less reliable, and likely costlier broadband” for rural Americans. Get the details here.

The culture war’s founding father. “Long before Donald Trump crawled out of his palatial sewer and Fox News beamed into the brains of middle America,” writes David Masciotra, one North Carolina senator recognized the political power of hatred: the late North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. David reviewed Isaac Butler’s new book, The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars, which credits Helms as “an ideological and tactical founder of the contemporary Republican Party.” Helms, like Trump, was able to cow his opponents into submission. These early capitulations, David argues, set the stage for the culture wars battles of today. Read here.

Rescuing Americans from dead-end jobs. Millions of Americans are stranded in dead-end jobs that don’t lead to higher pay or career advancement. What’s worse, they have no path out. It’s a national crisis that demands a national strategy, writes PPI’s Bruno Manno. “A job isn’t enough if it leads nowhere,” he argues. Bruno calls for new mechanisms and measures to help all workers leverage their skills to find a better path upward. Read here.

The truth about American college students. Right-wing critics of higher education like to paint American college students as pampered, uber-lefty elitists. But a new poll by Third Way shows that U.S. college students are pretty moderate politically, uninterested in campus protests, have positive attitudes about their institution, and like many Americans today, are struggling to get by. In this exclusive look at Third Way’s data, Michael Nietzel paints a portrait of the typical student at the nation’s regional public universities, which educate the vast majority of American college students. These are the students most hurt by the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education. Read here.

Plus…

Keith Humphries argues that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s resignation is symptomatic of a bigger, systemic problem in British politics: a distrustful electorate reluctant to deliver electoral mandates.
Politics Editor Bill Scher writes that there are no shortcuts to peace in the Middle East.
George Thomas reviews Jesse Wegman’s The Lost Founder, a new book appreciating the achievements of James Wilson—one of only six men who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Merrill Goozner explains why the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are going broke (hint: tax cuts for rich people).
On the 150th anniversary of Custer’s Last Stand, author Deanne Stillman reflects on why this battle still matters.
Rob Shapiro traces Trump’s perversion of executive prerogative.

Coda (presidential baby names edition)…

At the same event where he described American women as “under-babied,” Dr. Oz predicted a wave of “Trump babies” resulting from the administration’s policies.

If those “Trump babies” do indeed materialize, they’re unlikely to bear his name. NOTUS reported this week that in 2025, the baby name “Donald” “hit its lowest point of popularity in U.S. history.” Fewer than 400 proud parents named their sons “Donald,” making it the 690th most popular name in America last year. (For the record, “Liam” was number one, according to the Social Security Administration.)

This naturally leads to broader questions about the popularity of presidential baby naming. According to two articles I found addressing that question, “Woodrow,” “Warren,” “Dwight,” and “Franklin” all peaked as baby names in the years that Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Dwight Eisenhower, and Franklin Roosevelt were elected president. “Hillary” was popular in 1992, the year that Bill Clinton was elected president, and spiked again in 2008, when Hillary Clinton ran for president herself. (“William,” on the other hand, declined in popularity after Bill took office.)

According to NOTUS, peak “Donald” was in 1934, when about 30,400 babies were christened as such. Despite Trump’s efforts to stick his name on every surface possible in Washington, D.C., his name might yet be headed for extinction.

“Anne,” btw, ranked 619th among baby names for girls in 2025 (still ahead of “Donald”!) “Kim,” on the other hand, didn’t crack the top 1,000. (Yes, I’m aware “Kim” is not my first name; you’d be surprised how many people think otherwise.)

You can check out the popularity of your own name, according to the Social Security Administration, here.

Have a great week!

Anne Kim, Senior Editor