The trad wives feeling buyer's remorse
Jessica Grose on the Heritage Foundation's latest effort to turn back the clock -- and some trad wives with regrets
Jessica Grose is an opinion writer for The New York Times and the author of “Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood.” We recently caught up with her for her analysis of a secretive right-wing project to dispatch women back to another century.
What alerted you to the existence of the Heritage Foundation’s “Saving America by Saving the Family” initiative, and why did it set off alarm bells and prompt you to write your initial piece about it?
I had been following the Heritage Foundation’s commentary on women and families for many years. I learned about this particular report after reading a conservative newsletter writer’s commentary on it. I wasn’t surprised at a lot of what was in it, because I had read a previous report from Heritage two years ago, where they suggested many people should get less education so that they might start having babies earlier. The recommendations in the new report alarm me mostly because of the organization’s coziness with the Trump Administration via Project 2025.
And there’s also the speed and effectiveness with which the Trump Administration has activated those Project 2025 recommendations, namely, to dismantle the administrative state; defend our “sovereignty” at the borders and against “global threats;” as well as gutting DEI and using the Comstock Act to further limit abortion rights. But also embedded in Project 2025 was a mission to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life.” This latest report doubles down on that effort, right?
In my column about the report, I say that “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.” There is at least one contradiction espcially that stood out to me at the heart of Heritage’s argument: They want to provide as little government support to families as possible, but they also want women to stay home to raise their families. Given the cost of living in the United States — and Trump’s opposition to government funding for daycare — even if families preferred this arrangement, most would be unable to afford for a parent to stay home for any length of time. They also want to use policy to nudge people to get married and have children, but only if they are in heterosexual relationships. Heritage is a conservative think tank, so they’re always putting out policy papers like this, but I think people, including our vice president, are very worked up about the falling birth rate in the United States, so my guess is that is why they decided to focus on this topic right now.
The report sees the decline in U.S. fertility rates–which were at a record low of 1.59 births per woman in 2024–as an existential threat. They blame this on “childlessness by choice,” “careerism,” and the “normalized use” of birth control pills.
Yes, and the authors of the Heritage report believe that abortion becoming legal in the 1970s alongside feminism and the widespread availability of contraception have been a disaster for the American family. The entire conservative policy and legal movement has been working in concert to overturn Roe for 50 years.
I guess overturning Roe wasn’t good enough for them, though. What is their ultimate goal?