The Heritage Foundation’s latest document, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” was published in January, and its purported goal is to reverse the country’s declining birthrate.
See, if you can’t physically force women to have more babies, which is what abortion restrictions aim to do, you design government policies that pressure women into having more babies.
You cut off opportunities outside the home, you make the public sphere hostile to women’s independence and you create a system where the only viable path left for a woman is dependence on a man for survival. In other words, you drag the country back to a time when women had fewer choices.
I remember reading a comment on a similar article about why people don’t have more kids anymore. It summed it up pretty well:
Make the world prohibitively terrible, where we all feel like trapped animals in a system we can’t escape, and we’ll focus on survival.
In the conservative vision, want isn’t necessary… unfortunately.