Rishi Chava/ The Cougar
The Heritage Foundation is the dark dragon looming in the shadows behind some of Trump’s most dangerous policies. A far-right Christian nationalist group, which also created Project 2025, laid the plans for mass deportation, attacks on reproductive care and gutting of the bureaucracy that we are living through today.
Now, Heritage has come out with a new plan, “Saving America by Saving the Family,” where women are once again the sacrificial lambs.
The proposal’s purpose is “to remove the many obstacles blocking the formation of healthy families.” According to them, a healthy family, is between a fertile man and woman, no LGBTQ+ space allowed.
What are these obstacles? Seemingly everything: welfare programs prioritizing single moms, birth control, the legalization of gay marriage, no-fault divorces and higher education. Young Americans are apparently wasting their time pursuing pointless credentials.
Higher education
College is painted as a kindergarten playground where young adults can prolong being kids for as long as possible, as if learning isn’t an adult pursuit.
Heritage frames their argument as a battle against degrees required for jobs that don’t need them. However, it completely ignores the benefits of college that aren’t related to book smarts.
Learning about the world, meeting people of various backgrounds and opinions, discovering new hobbies and networking are just as crucial.
Their ‘success sequence’ involves people getting married right after high school, going to work and immediately having kids. Curricula should focus on “practical knowledge that prepares young people for a successful family,” because who needs doctors and sociologists when you have relationship management?
Womens sacrifice
Their “opportunity cost” of having children; in short, admit that modern women lose valuable opportunities for income and leisure when they have kids. More and more women are weighing their options and deciding to put themselves first.
The goal seems to remove the many obstacles blocking the formation of healthy families.
Econimist and social philosopher Catherine Pakaluk states in the document that from her research, women are valued having children over anything else.
“The relevant obstacle to choosing a child, they said, was the cost of missing out. They talked about sleepless nights and giving up comforts, plans, hobbies, status, income, a clean house. Giving up alone time. Giving up freedom,” said Pakaluk, “These costs were big and consequential, they conceded. But they had a reason to pay the price. This isn’t a story about it being easy to have kids—it’s a story about having a reason to do ‘the most hard thing you’ve ever done’ more than once.”
The foundation calls the family “an institution worthy of sacrifice,” whose sacrifice? Their rhetoric around childbearing is not one of choice, but of obligation, of civic duty. Giving birth is the new tax American women will have to pay.
The proper family
Heritage claims it is protecting children’s rights. They say there is a crisis in America’s falling marriage and fertility rates. This robs children of their right to a “natural family with married parents,” referring to their biological mother and father.
Aside from nothing being natural about the nuclear family, marriage is a man-made institution that’s only been around a limited time in human history, and historically, children were raised in large communities. This creates a strict definition of what constitutes a proper family and who is fit to raise children.
Queer or transgender couples, cohabiting people, asexuals and aromantics, infertile people and spouses who simply don’t want children are breaking this supposed “biological function” of marriage.
It was never about children, or The Heritage Foundation wouldn’t support giving birth young, which statistically breeds child abuse. It was about the dwindling Social Security fund and the “meaningful work and prosperity” that large populations provide.
Labor, taxes and soldiers are what children mean to these people. Starting a family is a wonderful goal, but it should be done on your terms, not the government’s. The best way to change the government is by going to school.
They’ve already dismantled the Department of Education. Don’t let them take your education, too.
opinion@thedailycougar.com
Great Job Maria Krylova & the Team @ The Cougar for sharing this story.
