A new report shows the conservative minds behind Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation, are scheming to boost the failing U.S. birth rate numbers with a new campaign called “We Must Save the American Family,” The Washington Post reported.
The right-wing think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., is spearheading a “Manhattan project to restore the nuclear family” type plan for Congress to create legislation to create government-seeded savings accounts, but only for married couples. The goal of the campaign is to steer funding away from child care programs like Head Start and push it toward individual families in hopes that they would be encouraged to stay home and have babies.
In the five-page executive campaign summary, Heritage steers away from its traditional small
government and free-market conservatism and pushes a different support of government intervention, calling on President Donald Trump to issue executive orders that would require proposed regulations to “measure their positive or negative impacts on marriage and family” before taking over or ending programs that allegedly perform poorly. “For family policy to succeed, old orthodoxies must be re-examined and innovative approaches embraced, but more than that, we need to mobilize a nation to meet this moment,” the document reads.The idea comes as data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed the fertility rate in the U.S. hit an all-time low in 2024, with under 1.6 children being born per woman, according to CBS News. As more women are
waiting longer to have children or add being mothers to their busy schedules, the United States was once a country that held a birth rate that would guarantee each generation would have enough children to replace itself, with an estimated close to 2.1 kids per woman.While the Vice President JD Vance declared during his first public speech in office, “I want more babies in the United States of America,” there are a number of factors that contribute to the declining numbers. People are marrying much later in life, in addition to the growing concern over a lack of job opportunities, efficient health insurance, and the necessary resources needed to raise children. “Worry is not a good moment to have kids, and that’s why birth rates in most age groups are not improving,” Karen Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, said.
But Republican leaders like House Speaker Mike Johnson feel the rate decline is due to Americans’ attempt to “de-emphasize the family.” “The way popular culture has developed in recent decades, they de-emphasize the family. They de-emphasize the merit of marriage, strong, steady, stable marriages between one man and one woman that produce children,” Johnson said during an April 2025 Fox News interview.
“This is part of the uphill climb that we have in working against the culture, but we’ll continue to do that, and public policy should reflect it.”
The U.S. birth rate and other ways to control women’s bodies were included in the controversial
Project 2025 document, which Trump once claimed to have no ties to. The 900-plus page document listed ways to restrict and eventually eliminate access to Mifepristone, also known as the most common abortion medication.It also has its eyes set on implementing an anti–sexual and reproductive health agenda through the government, such as changing mandates of key agencies and rearranging words within policies to stigmatize sexual and reproductive concepts.
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