The New Pro-Life Playbook
The Political SceneUnder Trump, a new vision of conservative family policy is ascendant.By Emma GreenNovember 11, 2024Post-Dobbs, social conservatives are shifting their rhetoric away from abortion.Illustration by Keith NegleyWhen Donald Trump ran for President in 2016, the pro-life movement helped carry him to victory. He promised to appoint Justices who would overturn the constitutional right to an abortion established in Roe v. Wade. He followed through, and they delivered, with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the decision was politically toxic for Republicans. After the Party performed poorly in the 2022 midterms, Trump blamed the losses on pro-life candidates. According to Gallup, six in ten Americans describe Dobbs as a “bad thing,” and the percentage of people who say they’re pro-choice is the highest it’s been in decades. In order to win the election in 2024, Trump sidelined the pro-life movement.At the Republican National Convention, Trump’s allies all but removed abortion from the Party’s platform, stating opposition only to abortions late in pregnancy; there was also some muddled language about the Fourteenth Amendment which even conservative legal scholars had trouble parsing. A group of pro-life advocates, led by the former Vice-President Mike Pence’s policy shop, Advancing American Freedom, published a letter saying that “pro-life Americans are rightly outraged and gravely concerned.” Some pro-lifers went so far as to call on voters to withhold their support from Trump. Ultimately, though, the desire to stay in the MAGA fold won out. Other heavyweights in the movement, including Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called the platform “a set of common-sense promises.” John Shelton, the policy director of Advancing American Freedom, told me, “The pro-life groups got rolled. And then they were asked to praise this thing that they got rolled on.”Trump assured voters that he would veto a national ban. His running mate, J. D. Vance, a Catholic convert who once said that he would like to see abortion be illegal nationwide, voiced support for access to abortion pills. Down-ballot Republicans got the message: in two dozen closely contested House races, almost all the G.O.P. candidates said that abortion was an issue for the states, not the federal government. Trump’s electoral wins include states where voters also supported ballot measures to reinstate or reaffirm abortion rights.Republicans have just spent an election cycle promising that they won’t ban abortion at the federal level. Now that they’ve won, they will be tested on whether they meant it. In the Senate, it’s unlikely that pro-life lawmakers will have the votes necessary for a ban, especially with the filibuster in place. Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, who has supported federal abortion restrictions in the past, said that Trump has made it “pretty clear” what his stance is: “I don’t think the Senate is going to be in a position to work on bills that you can’t get sixty votes on, much less have a President sign.” Trump appears to see the abortion issue in purely transactional terms—and the pro-life movement has little to offer him right now. Yuval Levin, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told me, “There’s not a strategy where they can say, ‘If you do this, you’re with us, and therefore we’re with you.’ ” Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, said that a national ban “would require Trump to do something that he doesn’t want to do. It would be seen as him capitulating to the wing of the Party that he is not interested in kowtowing to.”“The thing I’m worried about is the apathy on our side,” John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, told me. “The false narrative is that red states have stopped abortion. Some Republican legislators have leaned into that, patting themselves on the back.” In 2023, there were more abortions reported in the U.S. than there had been in a decade, with many women ordering abortion pills online, or travelling to nearby states to terminate their pregnancies. For half a century, Seago told me, the pro-life movement “had a very clear target,” which was to overturn Roe. “Now the target is more nebulous. We’re kind of in the early days of what the pro-life movement was after Roe. We knew there was work to be done, but we didn’t know how to get there.”Social conservatives within Trump’s coalition have been workshopping a new playbook. They have a much broader social-policy agenda in mind for his next term: overhauling the way Republicans think and talk about family. The campaign offered a preview during Vance’s debate with the Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Vance pitched a sunny vision for families: parents should be able to choose whether to stay home with their kids, send them to day care, or make another arrangement, like getting help from their church,
When Donald Trump ran for President in 2016, the pro-life movement helped carry him to victory. He promised to appoint Justices who would overturn the constitutional right to an abortion established in Roe v. Wade. He followed through, and they delivered, with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. But the decision was politically toxic for Republicans. After the Party performed poorly in the 2022 midterms, Trump blamed the losses on pro-life candidates. According to Gallup, six in ten Americans describe Dobbs as a “bad thing,” and the percentage of people who say they’re pro-choice is the highest it’s been in decades. In order to win the election in 2024, Trump sidelined the pro-life movement.
At the Republican National Convention, Trump’s allies all but removed abortion from the Party’s platform, stating opposition only to abortions late in pregnancy; there was also some muddled language about the Fourteenth Amendment which even conservative legal scholars had trouble parsing. A group of pro-life advocates, led by the former Vice-President Mike Pence’s policy shop, Advancing American Freedom, published a letter saying that “pro-life Americans are rightly outraged and gravely concerned.” Some pro-lifers went so far as to call on voters to withhold their support from Trump. Ultimately, though, the desire to stay in the MAGA fold won out. Other heavyweights in the movement, including Marjorie Dannenfelser, the head of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called the platform “a set of common-sense promises.” John Shelton, the policy director of Advancing American Freedom, told me, “The pro-life groups got rolled. And then they were asked to praise this thing that they got rolled on.”
Trump assured voters that he would veto a national ban. His running mate, J. D. Vance, a Catholic convert who once said that he would like to see abortion be illegal nationwide, voiced support for access to abortion pills. Down-ballot Republicans got the message: in two dozen closely contested House races, almost all the G.O.P. candidates said that abortion was an issue for the states, not the federal government. Trump’s electoral wins include states where voters also supported ballot measures to reinstate or reaffirm abortion rights.
Republicans have just spent an election cycle promising that they won’t ban abortion at the federal level. Now that they’ve won, they will be tested on whether they meant it. In the Senate, it’s unlikely that pro-life lawmakers will have the votes necessary for a ban, especially with the filibuster in place. Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, who has supported federal abortion restrictions in the past, said that Trump has made it “pretty clear” what his stance is: “I don’t think the Senate is going to be in a position to work on bills that you can’t get sixty votes on, much less have a President sign.” Trump appears to see the abortion issue in purely transactional terms—and the pro-life movement has little to offer him right now. Yuval Levin, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told me, “There’s not a strategy where they can say, ‘If you do this, you’re with us, and therefore we’re with you.’ ” Patrick T. Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, said that a national ban “would require Trump to do something that he doesn’t want to do. It would be seen as him capitulating to the wing of the Party that he is not interested in kowtowing to.”
“The thing I’m worried about is the apathy on our side,” John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, told me. “The false narrative is that red states have stopped abortion. Some Republican legislators have leaned into that, patting themselves on the back.” In 2023, there were more abortions reported in the U.S. than there had been in a decade, with many women ordering abortion pills online, or travelling to nearby states to terminate their pregnancies. For half a century, Seago told me, the pro-life movement “had a very clear target,” which was to overturn Roe. “Now the target is more nebulous. We’re kind of in the early days of what the pro-life movement was after Roe. We knew there was work to be done, but we didn’t know how to get there.”
Social conservatives within Trump’s coalition have been workshopping a new playbook. They have a much broader social-policy agenda in mind for his next term: overhauling the way Republicans think and talk about family. The campaign offered a preview during Vance’s debate with the Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Vance pitched a sunny vision for families: parents should be able to choose whether to stay home with their kids, send them to day care, or make another arrangement, like getting help from their church, all with government support. There should be paid leave for parents who work. Child-care providers—some of the country’s most underpaid workers—should have incentives to stay in the industry. “We’re going to have to spend more money,” Vance said.
Although conservatives have long emphasized the importance of family, they’ve also fought aggressively against the kind of expanded government spending that Vance was suggesting. Even Walz seemed taken aback. “I don’t think Senator Vance and I are that far apart,” he said. Vance’s ideas are part of a tectonic shift that has been under way for a while in certain conservative circles—an intellectual vanguard that has variously been called the New Right, national conservatism, or the realignment. Players in this scene, such as Vance and the Missouri senator Josh Hawley, have advanced a vision for economic policy—raising tariffs, cracking down on overly powerful corporations—that puts them largely at odds with the G.O.P. establishment. Their underlying motivation, however, is deeply conservative: they believe that these policies serve the traditional family, and will make it easier for parents to afford a house, hold down a middle-class job, have lots of kids, go to church, and not get divorced. A former Trump Administration official called it “the family turn”: an attempt to reorient Republican politics around what’s good for parents and their children, even if that requires the Party to embrace some policies it once considered anathema.“My party—we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue, where they frankly just don’t trust us,” Vance said in the debate.
For two generations, members of the pro-life movement were oriented around the political and legal goal of overturning Roe. Along the way, they lost the culture. The next Trump Administration will be staffed with people who wish to change that. “In 2025, there is a far more disciplined, organized, and politically and intellectually equipped cadre of people who are attuned to the realignment moment who are going to be going in,” another former Trump official told me. As Brown, the Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow, observed, “Pro-life is out. Pro-family is in.”
The Heritage Foundation, near the Capitol, is a shrine to movement conservatism. Copies of the Washington Times, a conservative D.C. paper, sit on the marble countertop where visitors are checked in. Legendary donors have their names on the walls: Coors, of the beer fortune; Van Andel, of Amway. These are fat times at Heritage: under the organization’s president of the past three years, Kevin Roberts, contributions are up around twenty-five per cent.
Conventional wisdom holds that the Republican coalition is composed of three wings: war hawks, free marketeers, and social conservatives. Roberts hails from the third wing. He started out as a historian of slavery, and then served as the president of a small Catholic college that became the inspiration for the 2019 Off Broadway play “Heroes of the Fourth Turning.” After a stint at the Texas Public Policy Foundation—a powerhouse political organization—he took over at Heritage.
Since its founding, in 1973, Heritage has been closely associated with the Republican establishment, and with the free-market wing of the Party. Scholars at Heritage staffed the White House Administrations and Capitol Hill offices that solidified pro-business, pro-trade, anti-union, and anti-welfare policies as Republican mainstays. Roberts represents a shift: he is allied with realignment politicians who stand against market fundamentalism, crony capitalism, and foreign interventionism. The populist-nationalist right has finally taken “its hard-won place at the head of the conservative movement at this uniquely dangerous moment in history,” Roberts said last year, at a gala for the magazine The American Conservative.
Under Roberts, a new generation of young staffers has joined Heritage—“very talented people who know what time it is in America,” he told me. Many of them are pro-family conservatives who are practicing what they preach: there’s been a baby boom at the foundation, with showers seemingly every other week. Roberts increased maternity leave to fourteen weeks and instituted a six-week paternity leave. He took down the donor portraits hanging outside his office and replaced them with the kind of photos you might find if you Googled “Americans”: kids in Stetsons hanging out on a ranch, a veteran in fatigues hugging his daughter. Heritage is “the ordinary American’s outpost behind enemy lines,” Roberts said. Right now, he believes that those ordinary Americans are in danger of losing their country. One of his deepest concerns is that people aren’t having enough kids—that the country is facing economic collapse, and national decline, as its population shrinks. “We’ve got at most a generation to arrest this decline in birth rates, and therefore marriage rates, and therefore the health of the family as an institution,” he told me. “Or we will lose the Republic.”
The way to fix America’s decline, Roberts writes in a new book, is through family policy: “Our North Star must be striving to once again make a middle-class lifestyle available to every hardworking American family on a single-breadwinner income.” Everything must be oriented around this goal, he writes, including government spending. It’s not that protecting the free market and national security don’t matter, he told me. “It’s a difference of degree.”
Roberts is the face of Project 2025, the nine-hundred-plus-page policy wish list—compiled with the help of fifty-three conservative groups, and with two hundred and seventy-six individual contributors and thirty-four lead authors—that Heritage released ahead of the election. Heritage has been publishing something similar in advance of Presidential elections since 1980, typically with little public attention. But Project 2025 became one of the centerpieces of Vice-President Kamala Harris’s campaign against Trump. The mandate calls for things like deleting the words “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and “gender” from federal documents, and dismantling the Department of Education. It discusses reproductive issues extensively, proposing, for example, that the C.D.C. and H.H.S. promote fertility-awareness-based methods of birth control. (In February, the Alabama Supreme Court declared that frozen embryos could be considered “unborn children” for the purposes of wrongful-death suits against fertility clinics. Together with Project 2025, this sparked fears that Republicans also wanted to ban I.V.F.)
The Trump campaign disavowed Project 2025, with a warning “to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign—it will not end well for you.” And yet many of the contributors may serve in the next Trump Administration. Roberts, in particular, is closely allied with Vance, whom he described to me as “the single most important person on family policy in the history of this country.”
Although Roberts said that there is a “zero-per-cent chance” of a federal abortion ban passing under the upcoming Trump Administration, Project 2025 contains all sorts of proposals to limit access to abortion through executive orders and administrative rule-making—for example, calling on the F.D.A. to reverse its approval for abortion pills. Several of its recommendations appear to undercut the message of the pro-family right, such as a proposal to eliminate Head Start, a long-standing grant program that offers child care to low-income families, on the ground that it is “fraught with scandal and abuse.” Melissa Boteach, a vice-president at the National Women’s Law Center, told me, “Gutting that means that hundreds of thousands of children lose access to high-quality early education.”
But it’s also possible to see Project 2025 as a reframing of the conservative movement, in which every policy is considered through the lens of whether it supports traditional families. Some of the proposals are clearly related to family policy: the document calls on Congress to incentivize employers to provide on-site child care and to let their employees accumulate paid time off in lieu of overtime pay, so that they can spend time with their kids. But even the labor and trade policies seem crafted with the notion of family in mind. One lead author, Jonathan Berry, who headed the regulatory office in the Department of Labor under Trump, writes, “Our federal labor and employment agencies have an important role to play by protecting workers, setting boundaries for the healthy functioning of labor markets, and ultimately encouraging wages and conditions for jobs that can support a family.” The document also calls for a deregulated housing market that would make it easier for developers to build homes that young families can afford; trade policies that would reinvigorate America’s manufacturing base and allow workers to provide for their families; and laws requiring employers to pay time and a half on Saturdays and Sundays, creating an American work culture that’s more friendly to families who keep a Sabbath.
Whether or not its proposals will hold sway with the second Trump Administration, Project 2025 signals the rising power of a bloc of conservatives who challenge the former Republican consensus. Roberts, in his book, disses Friedrich Hayek, the economic guru of the right, calling him “some long-dead Austrian aristocrat.” He claims that “Republicans have lost the plot” on economic policy since Reagan, failing to invest in actually making things. “The recalcitrance of many wax-museum conservatives to support the American family with any policies besides aggressive tax cuts for big corporations is truly shocking and shameful,” he writes. The process of compiling Project 2025 allowed “some of that fractiousness” among conservatives “to heal,” Roberts said.
The family turn reflects the newly remade Republican Party, which is more working class and racially diverse than it has been in the past: according to early exit polls and surveys, Trump won significantly more Black and Latino voters in 2024 than he did in previous elections. These voters want to know that their politicians care about the high cost of living and housing. Rubio told me, “You can’t be the Little League coach if you’re unemployed and struggling to find work and raise your family.”
Democrats, of course, talk about these things, too, but the core goals of liberal and conservative family policy tend to diverge. For Democrats, the mission is often lifting families out of poverty, whereas conservatives want to ease the way for people who have kids, or who want them. On the campaign trail, both Vance and Harris advocated increasing the child tax credit, which gives working parents a break on their taxes. In August, Vance didn’t show up for a Senate vote on a tax bill that would have expanded the credit. Many Republicans objected to the bill over the issue of refundability—they didn’t want low-income families who don’t owe much in taxes, or who don’t file them, to get this money from the government to help with the cost of their kids. Republicans typically oppose making tax credits refundable because they’re worried about creating a new form of welfare. And yet, as Boteach, at the National Women’s Law Center, said, “Children don’t cost less when you have lower incomes.” Republican opposition to refundability, she continued, “ends up hurting families that are headed by a single mom, Black families, and Latino families.”
Perhaps the biggest question dividing pro-family Democrats and Republicans is what kinds of families they want to promote. The consensus on the left is that it’s not the government’s job to encourage people to have kids or to be married. “I think the tax code should be as neutral as possible on those questions,” Boteach said. Conservatives believe the opposite: that it’s affirmatively good—for society, and for the economy—for people to get married, stay married, and have kids. They believe that religion is healthy for families, and that the government should give as much runway as possible to religious communities. What remains an open question is how their new family-policy agenda would account for the many families in the United States who don’t fit that mold.
Realignment conservatives often argue that federal spending is biased toward getting both parents to work and to put their kids in day care. Scholars at Heritage have batted around the possibility of a “family flexible savings account,” which would allow families to take money they would pay in income taxes and put it toward education, child care, health care, and housing, with bonuses for the third baby and beyond. “I’m enamored with that idea,” Roberts told me. Some of the policies that pro-family conservatives have pushed—such as banning hormones and surgeries for transgender kids—are wildly controversial. Others, such as regulating and placing age limits on social-media sites, have cross-partisan appeal. “We live in a moment when the conservative movement, especially when we think about President Trump’s politics and campaign, is really diverse,” Roberts said. “We probably need to be talking about things we agree on.” By focussing on family policy, he wants to have a conversation that “at least temporarily sidesteps the very clear differences that Americans have on abortion.”
And yet there are fundamental differences that will never be resolved. Most progressives see the right to an abortion as an essential feature of family policy. “I don’t think any amount of social spending is going to make up for the loss of bodily autonomy,” Boteach said. “It is a miscalculation to think that you can whitewash anti-choice policies, stripping away people’s bodily autonomy and trying to dangle something in front of them to make them forget that.”
A major testing ground for family policy is the place where the current abortion landscape took shape: Mississippi, the state spotlighted in Dobbs. The woman behind that case, and behind efforts to expand family policy in Mississippi, is the state’s attorney general, Lynn Fitch. “It is our charge today, in this new Dobbs era, to channel that same determination and hope and prayer that has led you to these streets for fifty years,” Fitch told activists at the March for Life in 2023. “Use it to make more affordable, quality child care, and make it more accessible. Use it to promote workplace flexibility.” During the past two years, Fitch has helped secure state child-care tax credits for low- and middle-income families, expanded tax credits for parents who adopt kids, and made it possible for women to seek missing child-support payments even after their kids turn eighteen. Over what her staff described as vigorous pushback from some Republicans in the state legislature, Fitch helped enact a Medicaid expansion, allowing poor women to be covered for up to a year postpartum. Fitch and her staff also tout the half-dozen baby boxes in the state, where one can safely give up a newborn without fear of legal repercussions. So far, no babies have appeared.
Other initiatives have proved harder to advance. Since the Affordable Care Act was passed, in 2010, states have had the option to expand eligibility for Medicaid for everyone who qualifies, not just pregnant women, allowing more people to get health-care coverage; fourteen years later, Mississippi is one of ten states that still hasn’t done so. Fitch favors the expansion, which would benefit poor women and families, but “there are pretty strong feelings within the Republican side” resisting it, Michelle Williams, Fitch’s chief of staff, told me. Mississippi doesn’t have paid parental leave for state employees, something Fitch has advocated for. She has proposed a streamlined process for getting nonviolent misdemeanors expunged from criminal records, on the ground that the laborious process takes parents away from their kids and keeps people from getting jobs, but there’s also opposition to that effort.
Following the 2024 election, there will be twelve states, including Mississippi, that fully ban abortion with limited exceptions, such as in cases of rape or danger to the mother’s life. Seven states will have gestational limits in place, ranging from around six weeks to eighteen weeks. According to a report from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, all of those states have passed laws to aid families in the wake of Dobbs. Tennessee offers free diapers for children under two to poor families; Ohio lets breast-feeding mothers get off jury duty.
These efforts can seem paltry given the level of need among families. “I take everything that Lynn Fitch is saying with a grain of salt,” Oleta Garrett Fitzgerald, the Southern regional director for the Children’s Defense Fund, told me. “Mississippi’s racism, which has bled into ideology and public policy, has for the most part focussed on making it as difficult as possible for families in need to access resources.” Garrett Fitzgerald pointed out that Fitch has referred to her endeavor as giving “a hand up and not a handout,” a framing that Garrett Fitzgerald considers degrading. “People in this state paint poverty as if it’s all Black, and that it’s Black people not wanting to work,” Garrett Fitzgerald said. In fact, direct government welfare for the poor is extremely limited in Mississippi. “One of the leading causes of family breakdown is poverty,” Garrett Fitzgerald said. “We have to address the level of poverty in the state.”
In general, Mississippi has done much more to legislate against abortion than to promote life. The heavily Republican state government has been unwilling to take major steps to protect the health of pregnant women. In the past few years, the state’s maternal-mortality rate, which was already higher than the national average, has been rising. A review published by the state’s Department of Health in 2023 cited a full Medicaid expansion and paid family leave as basic measures that the government could take to make women safer. Michelle Owens, an ob-gyn specializing in maternal-fetal medicine in Mississippi, who led the review, told me, “It is sometimes frustrating to feel like you’re saying things over and over again, and the story is not changing.”
As Republicans prepare to retake power in Washington, there will be significant jostling as different parts of the coalition vie for influence. Tim Carney, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, described talking about family policy at a recent conference. “One of the questions I got was ‘How does subsidizing family fit in with conservatism, which basically says that it should be an individual responsibility to raise a family, not a government responsibility?’ ” he said. According to Carney, that attitude is shifting: “The younger crowd of conservatives doesn’t have the instinctual libertarianism that Reagan-era and Bush-era conservatives do on these questions.” One example is Oren Cass, the founder of American Compass, a think tank that wants to end the free-market fundamentalism of the G.O.P. “The decision to form a family and raise children . . . is the basic obligation of life and citizenship,” he wrote last year. A capitalism that is neutral about that “has no future, and does not deserve one.” Compass is something of a revolving door for Senate staffers and potential future White House aides who are interested in family policy. Staffers in the offices of Vance and Rubio spent time with the organization. Jonathan Berry, the former Trump official who worked on Project 2025, is a Compass adviser. He is committed to the notion that the government can, and should, try to shape people’s decisions around marriage and kids—and that it can do so creatively. “If you care about life issues, you ought to care about the supply of marriageable men,” he told me. That is “affected very heavily by education policy and trade policy and all kinds of other public policies that you don’t think of, conventionally, as social policy.”
Berry has come to see the decline of marriage and birth rates in the U.S. largely as a function of the warped concentration of money, influence, and power among the educated élite. This has piqued the interest of some on the left, who share his belief that the economy needs an overhaul, albeit for different reasons. “I’m starting to build relationships with the hipster antitrust scene, although we disagree on plenty,” Berry said. The godfather of that scene is Matt Stoller, a former Democratic Senate staffer who writes an influential newsletter on monopolies and antitrust issues. “If you look at what is the fresh, interesting thinking, it’s all realignment right,” Stoller told me. But, in his view, people in that circle have also made mistakes that alienated potential allies, such as scapegoating immigrants, promoting conservative judges who are hostile to regulatory action, and indulging the January 6th insurrection.“It’s a different experience, when you’re actually implementing ideas and dealing with politics and fighting institutions and dealing with Congress,” he said. On family policy, “I don’t think they’ve gotten there yet.”
The people in family-policy circles who have scored the most concrete wins are the culture warriors. The American Principles Project, a PAC and foundation that describes itself as “America’s top defender of the family,” channelled money into competitive races this election cycle with ads about keeping “men the hell out of women’s sports” and “taxpayer-funded sex-change procedures for minors.” “We’ve done women’s sports. We’ve done sex changes for kids. We’ve done D.E.I. and indoctrination in schools,” Jon Schweppe, the organization’s policy director, told me. Like many Republicans, Terry Schilling, A.P.P.’s president, thinks it should be illegal for doctors to assist minors with gender transitions; this, too, is family policy, in his view. “How can you have families if your children are sterilized?” he asked.
Other segments of the Trump coalition dismiss family policy, especially in the overwhelmingly secular Barstool Sports contingent of the MAGAverse. Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool, recently tweeted a video of Vance proposing an increased child tax credit. “This is fucking idiotic. You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people’s kids?” Portnoy wrote. “If you can’t afford a big family, don’t have a ton of kids.” Elon Musk, meanwhile, may be into pronatalism, but he doesn’t seem to care much about marriage, which those in the heavily socially conservative scene in Washington see as essential for the pro-family cause.
Yuval Levin, the A.E.I. scholar, told me, “I’ve been trying to make family-policy moments happen for the past twenty years. There’s always a sense that we’re in one, and then not much gets done, and it turned out we weren’t.” For all the enthusiasm about the realignment, Levin thinks that social conservatives are weaker now than they were in 2016—in part because of overreach. “The I.V.F. debate has been really terrifying to a lot of Republican politicians, and could easily cause them to be afraid of touching the stove on family policy,” he said.
And yet Levin sees family policy as the almost inevitable conclusion of the pro-life movement’s time in the political wilderness. Pro-life groups are realizing that they need to help people imagine a world without abortion. “In that sense, it’s not simply electoral—it’s much more cultural,” he said. “They have to show that, in saying they want a world where children are welcome and parents are valued, they have to mean it.”
The young people who came to Washington to work in Republican politics used to be overwhelmingly libertarian. “Today, they’re much more likely to be traditionally minded Catholics and Protestants,” Levin said. Schweppe told me, “What do realignment conservatives want? They want to get married young, have kids, and have economic success.” In conservative circles, the advice is to go start a family—“it’s where ‘Go start your own business and be a job creator’ was fifteen years ago,” Schweppe said.
Some young staffers are also choosing to live in Maryland, rather than in the expensive Virginia suburbs. If you were to draw an informal map of where young conservative politicos go to have their families, there would be a little crucifix over the Catholic hot spot of Hyattsville, a Maryland suburb that was featured in Rod Dreher’s 2017 book, “The Benedict Option,” about Christians in retreat from secular life. The Protestant territory might be marked in Cheverly, a neighboring area outside D.C.
I recently rode the Orange Line out to Cheverly to meet Rachel Wagley, the chief of staff for Blake Moore, a congressman from Utah who serves as the vice-chair of the House Republican Conference. Wagley, who wore a straw headband and tortoiseshell glasses with little makeup, drove up in a white Honda Odyssey with three car seats jammed into the row behind the driver’s seat. After I got in, she spotted a neighbor, a Republican Senate staffer. “Get in!” she shouted out the window. He climbed into the way back, next to the booster seat where her oldest, who is six, normally rides.
We drove through quiet, hilly streets and rows of densely packed houses to a playground that residents call Cheese Park, in honor of its yellow holey climbing walls. Parents, including Wagley’s husband, Ted McCann, stood around chatting as their children played soccer. The scene was a casual Who’s Who of Republican politics: Wesley Coopersmith, Kevin Roberts’s chief of staff, greeted Wagley and McCann, who worked for the former House Speaker Paul Ryan and is now a lobbyist. A former staffer for Kevin McCarthy lived in a house not far from the park. The Republican star power, Wagley insisted, was incidental to the neighborhood. “Work is D.C.,” she said. “Life is Cheverly.”
Later, Wagley took me on a driving tour, pointing out the house known for collecting garden gnomes and the ones that are most competitive in the annual Christmas-decoration arms race. It became clear that Wagley would be well qualified to work as a Cheverly real-estate agent; she could rattle off the number of kids living in almost every home we passed, occasionally offering skeptical commentary about how this or that family planned to fit in a house with this or that square footage. We drove past the Cheverly pool, which has a five-year waiting list. (Wagley said that Moore approved her participation in this piece on the condition that she relay all the “Cheverly pool drama” of Hill staffers jockeying for entry.)
Wagley described herself as “theologically Lutheran, recreationally Anglican, married to a Catholic, and working for a Mormon.” She recently had her fourth baby, which she says she could do only because of her “uniquely awesome boss.” (“Congrats, you’ve met your Mormon minimum,” Wagley recalled Moore telling her, after she had her third.) Wagley, like other young political staffers, originally moved to Cheverly because the houses were affordable. Over the years, however, an intensely communal scene has emerged. A group of older women have started a stoop story time, where they read to kids in their front yards. “Every barbecue is more people than my wedding, but fortunately everyone’s under the age of seven,” Wagley said. “We’re, like, ‘All right, we need to buy ninety hot dogs.’ ”
A notable feature of the scene is the exceptional level of female professional achievement. This tracks with the rest of the family-policy world: Vance’s wife, Usha, is a high-profile litigator. Katie Britt, an Alabama senator who recently introduced bipartisan legislation to make child care more affordable and available, sent her kids to day care so that she could go to law school. Hawley, who has been a strong proponent of family policy in the Senate, is married to Erin, a woman he met when they were both Supreme Court clerks, and who was instrumental in overturning Roe v. Wade.
The women of Cheverly aren’t particularly invested in the trad-wife aesthetic, except maybe for one woman, who lives across the street from Wagley and makes all her own bread. (“She’s German,” another woman offered, by way of explanation.) But they do reject the reigning paradigms of American parenting—especially the norms of intensive parenting among the highly educated professional classes. Wagley described the path of the “customized child” in D.C. and its suburbs: dual-income families who move to northern Virginia and have one or two kids, whom they groom to go to an Ivy. (Wagley herself went to Harvard.) In a place like Cheverly, there might not be tons of money floating around, since the sort of women who are drawn there might go in and out of the workforce, or want to work part time. They might be professionally successful, and they might also value their community and family more highly than their job. During our chat, a neighbor texted a group of Cheverly women, including Wagley, that she was stepping out and asked them to watch her sleeping baby via a digital monitor while she was gone. “That’s what’s countercultural about Cheverly,” Wagley said. “We’re having kids in a different way.”
This is the life that pro-family conservatives seemingly want everybody in the country to have access to. And yet, even in what appears to be a time of momentum for pro-family politics, the Cheverly life may seem unrealistic for most people. Even Wagley acknowledged this. “The policies we’re fighting about are so funny,” she said. A thousand dollars from a tax credit here, a couple of months of maternity leave there—“that’s eight weeks. We’re talking eighteen years!” Often, she said, these kinds of policies are “pushed by people who have such a small idea of what parenthood is.”
When people talk about the right to an abortion, they’re often talking about the right to choose the shape of their lives: to escape a bad relationship, to get on their feet financially, to pursue their dreams without an unplanned detour. This world in Cheverly, and the conservative turn toward family, is also about choosing a vision of life: one in which people are bound by community, children are welcomed into a world that is built for them, and parents aren’t alone in raising kids. “I am bullishly pro-life,” Wagley told me. But “when we talk about pro-life policy, we have to talk about it hand in hand with supporting low-income women who are faced with an incredibly difficult choice. Pregnancy and the first year of having a child, for me, were extremely difficult. I was horribly depressed, and I had every privilege in the world. Republicans don’t often acknowledge the depth of what they’re asking these women to do.”
She continued, “We’re asking something huge of women by saying abortion is off the table. So we have to come in huge with options and opportunities for these women to thrive. We have done a horrific job in envisioning and painting for women a life that’s achievable with children.” ♦
