Project 2026. And 2027, and 2028....

Explainer: "Saving America," the Heritage Foundation’s latest nightmare plan

Before Donald Trump was elected president for a second time, the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025—a 900-page roadmap detailing an ultra-conservative wishlist and how the administration could deliver every single item on it. At the top of that list was the dismantling of reproductive rights: the blueprint laid out how the White House could move towards a national abortion ban, restrict birth control, push women back in the home, enable anti-abortion violence, attack private health data, and more.

Just over a year into President Trump’s second term, Reproductive Freedom for All reports over half of Project 2025’s reproductive rights agenda has been completed: defunding Planned Parenthood, anti-abortion judicial appointments, the green-lighting of anti-abortion violence, attacks on emergency abortions, and more, for instance.

The Heritage Foundation has been pulling Trump’s strings for years now. In his first term, the organization boasted that the president had enacted two-thirds of their agenda within a year.

The far-right, Christian nationalist think tank’s sweeping successes have seriously emboldened them—so much so that they’ve written a plan for the next 250 years.

In January, the Heritage Foundation published “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years”—yet another chilling roadmap, this one to erase LGBTQ families, decimate the social safety net, and push women out of public life altogether. As Jessica reported on Monday, “Saving America” also hones in on young women and girls, taking the Republican Party’s festering obsession with the birth rate and forced births to the next level. Its authors include an all-star cast of far-right extremists, including Roger Severino, a Health and Human Services Department official in the first Trump administration who was deemed too controversial to serve in this one. Other writers include Emma Waters, one of the leading right-wing voices against IVF, and Jay Richards, the author of nearly a dozen Christian nationalist books. These are the Trump World figures determined to shape the next 250 years of American life according to their vision.

Heritage clearly sees the end of Roe and the election of Trump as first steps toward a broader, Christian nationalist, cultural and political revolution. They understand that extreme policy proposals alone can only take their vision so far. They need sweeping changes in cultural attitudes to compel women to accept fewer rights—or even see fewer rights as freedom. In order for their plan to work, it’s going to take the indoctrination of an entire generation.

That’s why “Saving America” mirrors what we’ve been watching unfold on social media: seemingly apolitical female lifestyle influencers priming young women and girls to accept fewer rights and instead seek “fulfillment” in marriage and homemaking.

There’s a lot to this document—and Heritage (rightly) assumes most people won’t read it. But Abortion, Every Day has, and we’re going to take you through everything you need to know. Feel free to skip ahead using the headers below, and share with your communities. The best way we can fight back is by arming each other.

The “Saving America” plan for…Ending No Fault Divorce, Encouraging Early Marriage, Pushing Women Out of Public Life, Increasing the Birth Rate (For Some), and Targeting Young People—AND how we can use their 250-year plan against them.

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Ending No-Fault Divorce

“Saving America” foremost reads as one long screed against no-fault divorce, which allows people to end a marriage without the burden of proving wrongdoing by their partner:

“The no-fault system has in effect turned into a ‘no reason needed’ system. … The interests of any children are not considered at all in whether a divorce should be granted.”

Throughout the document, the organization rails against the evil of “easy divorce,” blaming it for everything from poverty to societal decline writ large. But before no-fault divorce, spouses had to prove adultery, desertion, or abuse—an especially high bar for domestic violence victims operating in a legal system primed to disbelieve and re-traumatize them. (It’s no surprise that legalizing no fault divorce led to a 20% drop in the female suicide rate.)

Not that it matters to Heritage, which regards the end of no-fault divorce as yet another pathway to entrap women in the home. And they’re not alone. Back in 2022, Media Matters identified attacking no-fault divorce as a rising trend among popular right-wing influencers. In 2021, while campaigning for the U.S. Senate, JD Vance suggested divorce is wrong even if a marriage is abusive:

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy.’ And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.”

The right’s position against divorce is growing more explicit by the day: the Texas GOP’s 2022 platform includes a proposal “to rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws and support covenant marriage.”

Heritage advocates for “covenant marriage,” as well: unlike a standard contract marriage, covenant marriages—which are available in Arizona, Arkansas, and Louisiana—require couples to seek premarital counseling, or require proof of abuse, felony crimes, and other aggravating factors to divorce.

Covenant marriages are something couples opt into—but not all of Heritage’s plans are freely chosen. And while the group knows they can’t ban no-fault divorce overnight, they can use the same tactic they did with abortion: they can chip away at access bit by bit.

The group recommends limiting and gatekeeping alimony payments to discourage women from seeking divorce, overhauling custody laws that favor primary caretakers (ie. women), and—crucially—electing family court judges who are against divorce. In other words, they want to empower people who will prevent couples from getting the divorces they want.

But before Heritage can stop people from getting divorced, they need to get them married.

Encouraging Early Marriage

The authors of “Saving America” are bereft that more people (women) aren’t getting married—and that those who are are getting married later in life. They report that a third of young people today are projected to never marry, and bemoan that American women’s median age upon first marriage is 28.6.

The Heritage Foundation asserts that these declining marriage rates and delays in marriage are to blame for, well, everything—from “weaker educational attainment among children” and “higher poverty,” to “neighborhoods hollowed out by instability.”

Incidentally, the rest of the plan rails against welfare and the social safety net, suggesting that without access to these resources, women would have fewer options but to marry and have children. Welfare, the authors write, “encouraged women to rethink their relationship to men, marriage, children, and family.”

The organization suggests that the scant resources our country provides to single parents somehow punish or disincentivize marriage. They call for the government to address this by “increasing federal marital benefits,” and craft all policies based on how they would boost marriage and build families:

“The President should issue a series of executive orders requiring every grant, contract, policy, regulation, research project, and enforcement action involving the federal government to do the following: Explicitly measure how it helps or harms marriage and family, block actions that discriminate against family formation, and give preference to actions that support American families.”

The policy proposals read almost 1:1 like a page from fascist Italy’s “Battle for the Births” campaign in the 1920s.

And that’s the thing—when it comes to exposing the right’s extremism, sometimes, all you have to do is let them speak for themselves:

“If women view marriage and children as disrupting their careers or straining their finances, they may forgo or delay marriage and choose not to have children or to have fewer than they would otherwise. This greater female workforce participation has put downward pressure on fertility, while on the flip side of the coin, lower fertility can be said to have put upward pressure on workforce participation.”

The organization knows that if they want young Americans to get married earlier, they’re going to have to attack women’s ability to obtain an education or enter the workforce at all. Which leads us to the next theme of “Saving America”…

Pushing Women Out of Public Life

Throughout the document, Heritage admonishes young people for prioritizing higher education and pursuing careers, quite literally disparaging the idea that young people should chase their passions and should instead procreate right-fucking-now. And while they often use gender-neutral language, the intent is clear. Especially when the authors share lines like this:

“The opportunity cost—that is, the number and perceived quality of activities or opportunities foregone if one has a family—has skyrocketed, especially for women. As the value of one’s alternatives—including career success, income potential, or leisure—rises, the more one must forgo to bear and raise children.”

And this, referring to young women, specifically:

“Since 1990, the median age of women at the time of the birth of their first child has increased by three years, from 27 to 30. This delay could be explained in part by increases in female college enrollment.”

While, at different turns, the Heritage Foundation seems to blame school, work, and ambition more broadly for supposedly declining fertility and marriage rates, they also cite research that suggests employment and “each additional hour of weekly labor per working-age adult” correlate with more births. In the same breath, the Heritage Foundation criticizes universal childcare and advocates for the government to support flexibility for working parents, but not through childcare programs. Instead, they want government grants for “home child care,” and more support for work-from-home options.

Taken together, their solution is to gut welfare programs, compelling more hours of work, and ‘encouraging’ women to stay home with their kids—driving young women out of schools, careers, and public life.

Especially telling? Heritage is critical of “over-credentialing”—that is, the growing demand for advanced degrees and professionalization to push ahead in one’s career. Instead, the group supports investments in apprenticeships and trade schools.

This isn’t a new refrain: In 2025, when Trump rolled out his disastrous tariffs, he claimed this would restore the ‘American Dream’ of good factory jobs for young people. Right-wing media personalities immediately got behind him. But Trump and the Heritage Foundation don’t want their kids on assembly lines or unclogging toilets. They want a gender-segregated world where young men and women marry and have kids as early as possible, men go to work, and women stay home with the babies they’re forced to birth.

Increasing the Birth Rate (For Some)

Speaking of those babies, let’s talk about pro-natalism and where Heritage stands on IVF and same-sex parents. (It’s exactly where you’d expect.)

Despite the organization’s obsession with the birth rate, their plan emphatically claims they aren’t “pro-natalist” but “pro-family.” Why? Because their position is aggressively anti-IVF and anti-LGBTQ families:

“Pro-family policy, by contrast [to pro-natalism], should reflect the value of all human beings as endowed by the Creator with inherent dignity from conception—and in particular, it should uphold the link between marriage and biological reality.”

The organization cites a bevy of decontextualized statistics that claim the U.S. is on the verge of civilizational collapse because people are having fewer kids—with language parallel to the white supremacist Great Replacement Theory, claiming that “fertility rates in the United States dropped below replacement level in the early 1970s and have remained below that threshold nearly every year since.”

For those who are opting against having children, their reasons are fairly obvious—like, say, abortion bans. Pregnancy is more dangerous than it’s ever been in recent history, and prenatal and reproductive care is sparse as OBGYNs flee anti-abortion states.

Their proposed solution? More cuts to the social safety net! Heritage rails against welfare for supposedly making low-income women less likely to marry. The plan all but spells out that the only way to compel more women to pursue marriage and childbearing as early as possible is to take away all their other options.

“Fertility rates tend to be higher in less-developed countries, but as nations industrialize, several factors conspire to reduce birth rates. These include the proliferation of birth control, more prospects for women to receive higher education and work outside the home, the delayed financial independence of young adults, and the government’s role in old-age Social Security.”

The short of it? They want to drag us backward.

But the implicit and, at times, explicit disclaimer to their demand for more babies? They only want this from some of us. Not from single mothers or women on welfare, who are implicitly coded as women of color. And not from LGBTQ couples, or couples or individuals who are struggling with infertility, as IVF and other fertility technology “denies a right due to every child conceived—to be born and grow in relationship with his or her mother and father bound in marriage.”

Heritage even appears to shade the likes of Elon Musk, criticizing “…mass subsidies for IVF, egg freezing, and genetic screening combined with a market for babies where people (usually men of means) contractually create many children across many partners or surrogates.”

Instead of supporting IVF, Heritage boosts so-called Restorative Reproductive Medicine (RRM) to “diagnose and treat the root causes of infertility.” (RRM is more or less the latest MAHA trend: the idea that women don’t really need IVF, but to fix their nutrition and hormone imbalances.) The group calls for insurance coverage of RRM and additional state-funded research.

While we’re all for everyone having as many options available to them as possible to control their reproductive lives, the only reason the anti-abortion movement has embraced RRM is to hide their attacks on IVF—and their efforts to codify fetal personhood.

Targeting Young People

Large swaths of Heritage’s 250-year plan are dedicated to analyzing the ambitions and behaviors of young people—including their dating lives, online dating culture, social media, porn consumption, and the ‘sexual revolution.’

It’s hard to keep a straight face as the same ghouls who want the government to track our periods lecture us about romance and relationships. The group even disparages the idea of ‘soulmates’ or waiting to marry or have kids with someone you love—instead egging us on to couple up immediately out of a sense of “duty and virtue.”

It’s extremely pointed that the Heritage Foundation’s 250-year plan focuses this much on young people—at the same time that conservative or conservative-adjacent influencers are thriving in digital spaces right now. And it’s hard not to find these efforts disturbing: The right wants young people—no matter how young, apparently—to marry and have kids immediately.

The GOP has long targeted state funding for teen pregnancy prevention programs, fearmongered about declining fertility and even sperm motility (ew) rates in young people… all at the same time our GOP president ties to a prolific child sex trafficker are continuously further exposed.

Since the 2024 election, we’ve all been forced to learn about the “manosphere”—the universe of bro-y, overtly misogynistic influencers like Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate, and Adin Ross, who have spent years reeling in young men with seemingly apolitical content about weightlifting and dating. But there’s also the pink pill pipeline, which Jessica has written about extensively, and the womanosphere: Young women are also being radicalized in digital spaces, lured by seemingly apolitical content—about celebrity gossip, “natural” birth control, “clean girl” aesthetics, and dating.

Other popular influencers—catering to both young men and young women—rail against porn for a variety of reasons. Misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate, for instance, tell young men that porn makes them weak and easily controlled by lust. Their talking points closely reflect those laid out by the Heritage Foundation.

This content has become a chilling pipeline to persuade young women that our rights to abortion, contraception—even to vote or own bank accounts—were all a mistake. Billionaire-backed, anti-feminist women’s media outlets and viral female lifestyle influencers are increasingly shaping young women’s politics, too: just look at Peter Thiel’s Evie Magazine, which routinely churns out articles about celebrity gossip that in turn glorify traditional gender roles and demonize feminism.

The timing of this seemingly organic digital cultural shift against female birth control, against sexual freedom, against feminism broadly, is no coincidence. We’re being primed to accept a slate of violent, dehumanizing legislative attacks on our bodily autonomy.

Conservatives are simultaneously trying to create a policy landscape where women rely on marriage and homemaking because nothing else is available to us—and a culture where we embrace this.

Using their 250-year plan against them

Like Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 250-year plan is a map: It spells out not just policy positions and recommendations, but sweeping explanations about their motivations, strategies, and approach to propagandizing and conditioning us to accept fascism. It’s terrifying—but like Project 205, in a way, it’s also a tool in our toolbox. When we know what they’re fighting for, and how they’re fighting for it, we’re better equipped to prepare and fight back.

The anti-abortion and broader conservative movement knows their cause is unpopular. The only tools in their arsenal are deceit: lying about the safety of abortion, misrepresenting their abortion bans or passing backdoor bans, undermining elections, scapegoating trans people, sowing fear and bigotry, claiming to care about the safety of women and children while enabling a president accused of egregious sex crimes.

Heritage has planted their flag and laid out in excruciating, hideous detail exactly how far backward they want to take us, our daughters, and our granddaughters. That means you’ll start to see these demands and messages percolating across not just conservative spaces, but probably other online and cultural spaces you aren’t expecting.

They don’t want us to know who they are or their plans for us. That’s why exposing them has never been more important.