Project 2025 Was the Warm Up. Now The Heritage Foundation Wants to Police Marriage, Divorce, and IVF
They hid it behind a wall of policy prose, footnotes, and moral language that reads like a sermon with a budget.
But the message from the Heritage Foundation lands with brutal clarity: America’s problems begin with women who refuse to organise their lives around marriage and motherhood, and the state should help fix that.
In a sprawling special report titled “Saving America by Saving the Family,” the think tank behind Project 2025 argues the country must “restore the family home.” Their “restoration” agenda ties prosperity, social order, and even “justice” to one narrow family model: married biological parents, one man and one woman, raising children under the same roof. Everything outside that frame becomes a social defect to correct.
Read closely, the report becomes less a plea for strong families and more a governing blueprint that pressures women back into dependency by narrowing the exits: fewer paths through education, tighter rules around divorce, a moral crackdown on birth control and IVF, and a culture campaign that frames autonomy as an injury to children.
They assumed no one would read it. They underestimated us.
The Heritage Foundation wants to sell coercion as “a right of children”
The report’s central argument arrives wrapped in a phrase designed to disarm: the “right of the children to affection and protection.”
In their telling, that right belongs specifically to “the man and woman who created them,” and the “ideal environment” for exercising it is “a loving and stable home with their married biological parents.” The report then contrasts that ideal with what it claims has become the cultural default, where “the desires of adults” outrank the needs of children and kids get asked to “sacrifice” living with both parents “for the entirety of their childhood.”
That framing does important political work: It turns private life into a public debt, recasts marriage as a child protection policy. And positions anyone who builds a different family, or leaves a harmful one, as participating in “a moral inversion.”
When the Heritage Foundation defines marriage, it draws a border around women’s rights
To enforce its ideal household, the report defines marriage as “the committed union of one man and one woman.”
It calls marriage the “cornerstone” of the family and a “seedbed of self-government.” It reaches for “virtue, responsibility and civic order,” stitching together Aristotle, religious authority, and a nationalist moral code to argue that the family sits “dependent on God” and that large families represent a civic good.
Under that vision, women’s rights become negotiable whenever they conflict with the “natural family.” Equal protection becomes conditional. Bodily autonomy becomes a threat to social stability. Sexual freedom becomes a public hazard.
The document never needs to say “women should obey” because its preferred social architecture already requires that outcome.
The Heritage Foundation calls declining marriage “a national crisis” and points the finger at women
The report describes the decline of marriage as “a national crisis,” tying it to “lower levels of education, higher poverty and instability.” Then it places birth rates inside the same alarm bell, warning that fewer births threaten institutions built on growth, including Social Security, schools, and churches. It even claims Social Security has paid out more than it receives since 2010.
From there, the report reaches for familiar villains and arranges them into a single storyline: second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution, the normalisation of casual sex, abortion, and divorce, all framed as attacks on the “natural family.” It also argues the “LGBTQ agenda” redefined marriage and “separated” it from reproduction, and it criticises “gender ideology.”
Then it widens the target again, arguing that environmental and population-control messaging “denigrated parenthood” and recasting the old fear of a “population bomb” into a “population bust.”
The throughline stays consistent: women gained choices, families weakened, society paid the price. The report’s solution follows naturally from that premise.
Project 2025 taught them the method. This report supplies the mission.
The Heritage Foundation has already shown how it thinks about governance through Project 2025, which laid out an aggressive roadmap for reshaping federal agencies, staffing priorities, and policy enforcement. The new report echoes that same mindset, only pointed at the family.
It proposes two approaches. One accepts family decline as irreversible and offers a “hospice care” response to reduce harm. The other assumes the right policies and cultural influences can reverse the decline. The report argues the country “has no other option” but restoration, because prosperity depends on rebuilding the family through renewed marriage.
This argument casts coercion as a necessity. Once leaders accept the premise, the next steps become responsible governance, even when they bulldoze personal freedom.
The Heritage Foundation rejects IVF and calls high-tech pronatalism morally corrupt
The report draws a hard line against the kind of pronatalism that treats fertility as a medical or technological project. It rejects subsidies and cultural acceptance for in vitro fertilisation, egg freezing, genetic screening, surrogacy markets, artificial wombs, and “babies created in laboratory” settings. It frames those paths as morally and spiritually wrong because they treat children like consumer goods.
Instead, the report insists on the “right” of children to be born and raised in a relationship with a mother and father “united in marriage.” It also argues policymakers should “commit to protecting life from fertilization,” warning that IVF and preimplantation genetic testing “routinely manipulate or destroy human embryos,” and calling on “pro-family champions” to fight for embryonic life “in law” across reproductive technologies and scientific research.
This is where the report stops speaking only to culture and starts demanding legal control over reproduction. For women’s rights, that shift carries immediate consequences.
The Heritage Foundation wants welfare policy to steer people into marriage
The report organises its recommendations around three “imperatives,” beginning with “Stop punishing family formation.” Under that umbrella, it calls for removing “marriage penalties” in welfare programs and strengthening work requirements for able-bodied adults. It also claims that cracking down on fraud, waste, and “excess benefits” could offset costs.
Behind the neutral language, the policy logic pushes in one direction: reward married households and tighten the screws on everyone else. Make marriage the safest economic choice. Make single parenthood feel financially precarious. Frame state support as a moral hazard when it allows women to survive without husbands.
The Heritage Foundation wants a “whole of government” marriage test
The second imperative, “Restore the American Dream,” broadens the scope from welfare to the entire state.
The report argues that high government spending suppresses family formation, citing government spending at over 35% of GDP across the local, state, and federal levels. It cites federal debt of more than $270,000 per household. It cites a NAHB study saying regulations account for nearly a quarter of the cost of building a new home.
Then it proposes the most radical administrative move in the document: a “whole of government” approach where every federal grant, contract, policy, regulation, research initiative, and enforcement action explicitly measures whether it helps or harms marriage and family, blocks discrimination against family formation, and prefers actions that support families.
The report even compares its desired zeal to the tactics used to dismantle DEI in Trump’s second term, arguing the same intensity should now fuel pro-family policy. The subtext is stark: the state should rank citizens based on compliance with a particular family structure, then distribute opportunity accordingly.
The Heritage Foundation wants a culture-wide “Manhattan Project,” and it names its enemies
The report repeatedly argues that policy alone cannot achieve its goals. It calls for a broader cultural renewal driven by families, communities, and religious and civic institutions. The Heritage Foundation describes the government’s role as clearing “weeds,” including cultural toxins, regulations, and perverse incentives, and calls for a “culture-wide Manhattan Project” to restore the “natural family.”
It also assigns blame, and it does so in ways that reinforce hierarchies.
The report emphasises differences by race, ethnicity, and education, stating that nearly 70% of non-Hispanic Black children and 53% of Hispanic children are born outside marriage. It claims that about two-thirds of births to women with “low” education occur outside marriage, about 53% for “moderate” education, and about 12% for “high” education.
Then it turns to religion as the stabilising force.
It argues religiosity in the U.S. has “collapsed” over the last 50 years and links that decline to marriage and fertility. They also argue weekly religious attendance has dropped from more than a third of adults in 1975 to a little over a fifth today, while “rarely/never” has risen to nearly half of adults. It offers causal explanations, including political sorting, consumer entertainment competing with worship, the repeal of Sunday laws, work pressure, and weakening local social capital.
The report also cites correlations: lower risk of divorce, improved child outcomes, higher likelihood of marriage, greater happiness during economic hardship, and higher fertility among weekly attenders. It frames women who prioritise careers as a danger, citing Pew 2023 findings that only about a quarter say marriage is extremely important for a happy life, and that 71% say enjoying work or a career is very or extremely important. It adds that a 2023 Pew parenting survey found only 21% of parents say it is very or extremely important that their children marry, while around 90% prioritise economic independence and enjoying work.
Read together, the message sharpens: modern life offers women too many alternatives. The solution, in their view, is to make those alternatives feel irresponsible.
The conclusion lays out a governing philosophy, then nods at Trump’s young male voters
The report closes by urging policymakers and civic leaders to treat restoring the family home “as a matter of justice,” grounded in two truths. It states:
“The first is that all children have a right to the affection and protection of the man and woman who created them. The second is that the ideal environment in which to exercise this right is in a loving and stable home with their married biological parents.”
It adds:
“By contrast, the default in American culture today is to put the desires of adults over the needs of children. Children are too often called to sacrifice what is due to them—namely, the presence of their mom and dad under the same roof for the entirety of their childhood.”
It labels that a “moral inversion,” then calls for restoring “order to the household” and placing provision, moral instruction, and emotional development “back where it belongs—with their parents.”
The report then sets eight “philosophical cornerstones” that function like marching orders: treat the “natural family” as pre political, discourage delayed marriage and out of wedlock births, favour “natural marriage” over same sex relationships and cohabitation, preserve sex distinctions in law against “gender identity,” protect life from fertilisation including embryos affected by IVF, expand parental rights over education, and treat culture and religion as central policy arenas.
Then, in one of the clearest political tell lines in the document, it cites a 2025 NBC News poll and offers a glint of electoral strategy:
“Young men who voted for President Trump in the last election ranked having children as their number one measure of life success, and female Trump voters ranked it sixth.”
The report frames that as an encouraging sign, suggesting this constituency needs less persuading. It reads like a map of where the authors see momentum and where they plan to apply pressure.
The Heritage Foundation wrote this report as moral philosophy. It functions as social policy. It lands as a threat to women’s rights, packaged as child protection and national renewal.
The question is not whether the vision is radical. The question is how quickly its language becomes law, and how many people realise what is happening before the doors start closing.
