The Heritage Foundation brought you Project 2025 in order to completely transform the U.S. federal government. Now, it’s rolling out a new plan to save the American family.
To ring in 2026, the conservative think tank that provided the blueprints for the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and President Donald Trump released a new 168-page policy plan titled Saving America by Saving the Family. The Heritage Foundation’s plan claims that its goal is to encourage more “fertile” men and women to marry younger and have more children. But curiously, this plan for America’s families recommends programs like marriage boot camps and“community rest” laws, not policies that have been empirically shown to encourage family growth and stability—such as the expansion of paid parental leave and flexible work schedules.
The exclusion of these policies isn’t accidental. Heritage certainly must know about the familial benefits of expanding paid parental leave and flexible work schedules. For instance, its plan cites Hungary as a shining beacon of hope, claiming that it is one of the few Western countries that has successfully increased its birth rate. This isn’t entirely false: Hungary’s total fertility rate did increase to 1.61 in 2020 before falling again to 1.39 children per woman in 2024. But what Heritage fails to even acknowledge in its plan is that Hungary provides six months of state-funded, fully paid maternity leave, with the option for mothers to take up to three years of unpaid additional leave, as well as two years of paid child care benefits. If Hungary’s fertility rate is increasing, and if Heritage wants the same thing to happen in the U.S., why wouldn’t it highlight these pronatal policies in Hungary?
The answer: because Heritage is playing a different kind of game. D.C.’s premier conservative intellectual institution intends to preserve a very particular kind of family, hoping to fit as many families as possible into its mold. By “saving the family,” Heritage doesn’t just mean increasing fertility rates (considering its plan specifically denounces federal funding for IVF treatments). Rather, Heritage uses the language of protecting and providing for children to push through long-held conservative policy goals that target just one category of the nuclear family: women.
Instead of focusing on policies that allow both men and women to participate in the workforce while raising their children, Heritage would prefer that women remove themselves from the workforce altogether. On that front, it’s already getting its way—after all, mothers are currently leaving the workforce in droves. Roughly 1 in 4 women leave the workforce in the first year after having a baby.
“Given the wage gap, the lack of solid family policies, the lack of maternity leave, the discrimination against women in the workforce based on family reasons, and the cost of childcare, for many, leaving the home would cost more than staying, in addition to causing huge strain and stress in our daily lives,” journalist and former stay-at-home mother Darlene Cunha wrote in 2015 for Time. As Cunha points out, many factors might make a new mother find staying home with her children preferable to engaging with a system that simply isn’t built for women and their families.
Yet in the past five years, there has been promising evidence that remote and flexible work schedules encourage couples to start or expand their families while retaining employment. Journalist Stephanie Murray has covered the remote work-fertility connection since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In February, Murray analyzed a study covering 38 countries that found that total fertility was 14% higher for couples in which both partners worked from home at least one day a week. “In the American data set, they found that fertility is 18% higher among such couples,” she said.
This should be welcome news for Heritage. The authors of Saving America by Saving the Family pay lip service to the connection that Murray notes, writing that evidence does show that “flexible work conditions support family formation, especially for mothers, who must negotiate time spent on employed work versus bearing and nursing infants, as well as higher overall preferences for spending time raising young children.”
But instead of proposing policies that could help support mothers as they raise children and remain connected to the financial benefits of the workforce, Heritage’s primary recommendation is to lengthen the current twelve weeks of unpaid leave offered by the Family and Medical Leave Act to six months of still-unpaid leave, which it says should be done specifically to promote breastfeeding. Asking women to leave the workforce for six months without pay will only have the effect of continuing to force women out of their jobs entirely, which seems to be exactly what Heritage wants.
Heritage offers praise in its report for the flexibility of remote work, but functionally presents the options for working mothers as a binary: They can either return to work soon after giving birth (in one Maryland survey, 61% of mothers had returned to work by four months postpartum) or leave the workforce entirely.
In May 2025, science writer and researcher Elena Bridgers, who examines the evolutionary mismatch between motherhood and modern society, posited an entirely different approach: “What if we made it normal for all parents, male and female, to work a 25-hour-workweek while their children were under the age of 5?” she asks. “What if we made it normal for mothers to work from home for as long as they choose to breastfeed, or to have subsidized childcare on-site where they work, or to have co-working spaces with childcare that allowed for concomitant care work and economic labor?” There are myriad options to support (and, indeed, even save!) American mothers and their children.
Yet the authors of the Heritage Foundation report seem to limit their imaginations about why some Americans are not having children. “Today’s adults may favor autonomy and personal development over raising children more than earlier generations did,” the report states, arguing that “opportunity cost” is the reason American adults are having fewer children rather than solely financial cost. Rather than pointing primarily to the well-documented American affordability crisis, Heritage identifies, of all things, the demands of higher education as one of the main drivers behind declining marriage and fertility rates. “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,” the authors claim.
By “almost everyone,” the authors of this report primarily mean “young women.” They point out that over the past 35 years, the median age of women at the birth of their first child has increased from 27 to 30, which they blame on college enrollment and degree completion. Consequently, Heritage proposes “dramatically scaled back” student loan programs and teaching middle and high–school students that “getting married and having children — in that order — is a near-guarantee of life success.” There is currently legislation on the table in at least seven GOP-led states mandating that public school students be taught this “success sequence.”
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In an apparent contradiction to this proposal, earlier in the report, Heritage notes that higher education is closely connected to the kind of quality time parents, and especially mothers, can spend with their children. “Highly educated parents tend to spend significantly more time engaged with their kids than do less-educated parents — college-educated mothers spend about 4.5 more hours per week on childcare than mothers with only a high school degree spend,” the authors blithely admit before going on to propose curtailing higher education for women. On the one hand, Heritage openly states that highly educated parents can benefit their children; on the other hand, Heritage seeks to advance policy proposals that would limit higher education for women. Therefore, it becomes increasingly difficult to take Heritage’s claim to care about what is best for families seriously when it seems to ignore the demonstrable, tangible good that educated mothers can provide for their children.
After removing women from the workforce and from the halls of higher education, Heritage has one final plank in its plan for American women. The authors of this report insist that “the only way for America to thrive in future generations is to rebuild the family, and that can happen only with a societal commitment to revive the institution of marriage.” To that end, Heritage wants to ensure marriages last by eliminating no-fault divorce and instituting covenant marriages.
Covenant marriages are designed to make divorce difficult. In order to obtain a divorce, a spouse within a covenant marriage must attend counseling, separate for one to two years, and prove that the other spouse has committed adultery or a felony, engaged in substance abuse, or has physically or sexually abused the spouse or a child. In addition to encouraging the mainstreaming of these arrangements, the authors of this report propose making 50-50 custody the default for divorcing spouses who have children. They cite a law passed in Kentucky in 2018 that did just that; soon after, the state’s divorce rate fell by 25%. Of course, Kentucky also has the second-highest rate of domestic violence in the U.S., with nearly half of women and a third of men experiencing intimate partner violence, but Heritage doesn’t take this fact into consideration.
Another suggestion proposed by Heritage is placing hard caps on the duration of alimony. “Each of these changes in existing laws would reduce the financial incentive to leave a marriage where major breaches of a couple’s vows (such as infidelity, abuse, or abandonment) are not present,” the authors state. But the reality is that these changes will make it far more difficult for women in abusive relationships to leave their marriages. They will force women who have been systematically denied an education and the ability to financially provide for themselves to stay in unsafe situations lest they risk losing custody of their children. Marriage and birth rates may increase, but women will pay the price.
In Saving America by Saving the Family, Heritage assumes that a certain kind of family is normative and traditional. Yet according to clinical psychologist Darby Saxbe, who studies the effect that the transition to parenthood has on mothers and fathers, this is remarkably shortsighted. “As concerns about family formation and falling birth rates enter our discourse, there have been many calls for a return to traditional, ‘natural’ gender roles, in which women forego higher education and the paid workforce in order to devote themselves to motherhood, while men fill the breadwinner role outside the home,” she wrote in March. “But a strict divide between the home front and the workplace reflects only a brief window in our human history, when the industrial revolution divided the spheres of work and family.”
The Heritage Foundation wants families to return to its idea of tradition. It explicitly aims to remove women from the workforce and decrease their educational opportunities, regardless of how that might hurt their children.
The Heritage Foundation wants families to return to its idea of tradition. It explicitly aims to remove women from the workforce and decrease their educational opportunities, regardless of how that might hurt their children. In its attempt to supposedly save the American family, Heritage couches long-standing conservative policy goals in the language of caring for families and children. But the reality of Saving America by Saving the Family is far darker.
Elena Trueba writes about American evangelicalism and Christian fundamentalism, their interwoven connection to right-wing politics, and the stories of everyone who falls in between. Subscribe to her weekly Substack newsletter, Unholy Alliances.
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