They're Coming for Our Daughters
The conservative plan to shrink girls’ futures
My daughter has had a difficult few months in school. By some administrative fluke, she ended up in a class where she was the only girl—it was just Layla, surrounded by a dozen or so 15-year-old boys. She could have found it tolerable, I think, if not for the rape jokes.
That’s right, in the year 2026—in a progressive Brooklyn high school—my daughter had to listen to her classmates ‘joking’ about rape. These are boys she thought were her peers and friends, some of whom she’s known since pre-school. And though the school ended up handling it well, I watched Layla’s light dim a little every time she came home from that class. For her, it was a regular reminder that the world sees her as less human, less worthy of dignity. Just less.
It’s a feeling I remember well, and one I couldn’t stop thinking about this weekend as I considered conservatives’ plan for the next generation of girls and young women. Because what they have in store for our daughters isn’t just about policy and politics, but dimming their collective lights.
A few weeks ago, the Heritage Foundation—the powerhouse organization behind Project 2025—released a 250-year roadmap to “save America.” Written by authors with close ties to the Trump administration, the document is a how-to guide for subjugating girls and young women: a detailed plan to push them out of college, funnel them into early marriage and motherhood, and then trap them there.
The document is part of a broad, well-funded campaign to reassert misogynist control by targeting women while they’re young and pliable—and chip away at one of Democrats’ most supportive demographics in the process.
According to Heritage, the future of the country relies on more straight married couples having more children. To make that happen, the group says, the government has to address multiple factors that “conspire” to drive down birth rates:
“These include the proliferation of birth control, more prospects for women to receive higher education and work outside the home…”
In other words, pretty much every major advancement for women’s rights and freedom is a problem. And whether it’s eradicating “cheap and ubiquitous” access to contraception or appointing family court judges hostile to divorce, Heritage has the answer.
Like the conservative movement more broadly, the organization wants young women to believe this is all being done for their benefit: that work is soulless and unfulfilling, that feminism has made women miserable, and that the real path to happiness is being a stay-at-home mom. The latest right-wing mantra for women? “Less burnout, more babies.”
This isn’t some fringe effort. From the tradwife explosion to MAHA disinformation about birth control, conservatives are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into convincing the next generation that the rapid erosion of their rights isn’t a political and moral crisis—but a lifestyle upgrade.
Why bother with the horror of the professional and public world, young women are told, when you can just opt out? That message isn’t limited to Turning Point USA conferences, either: over the last year, outlets from CBS News to NPR have hosted earnest ‘debates’ on whether feminism “failed women.”
Even the Vice President of the United States is advising women to give up work for motherhood. At the March for Life last month, JD Vance said, “you’re never going to find great meaning in a cubicle or in front of a computer screen—but you will find great meaning if you dedicate yourself to the creation and sustenance of human life.” (He said something near-identical in a 2022 tweet.)
But there’s only so much choice conservatives plan to give young women in the matter—and other powerful misogynists are done bothering with pretense. This week, billionaire pro-natalist Elon Musk—who bemoans birth control and built an AI tool that lets men “undress” women’s images—co-signed this chilling X post:
When I say they’re coming for our daughters, I’m not exaggerating. The powerful people obsessed with the (white) birth rate and enforcing ‘traditional’ values and norms know they need young women to do it—whether those young women like it or not.
What do you think provocateur Jordan Peterson meant when he talked about “enforced monogamy” as a solution to men’s violence in 2018? Or why, nearly a decade later, one of the country’s most popular podcasts would seriously debate whether young men’s inability to find sexual partners and have children is a “mass extinction event” akin to “genocide”?
“Does society have a responsibility to intervene in some way, to course correct this?,” Diary of a CEO host Steven Bartlett asked.
If this were just about men’s overwhelming desire to advance their genetic lines, we’d hear podcasts and pundits talking about IVF or how to incentivize surrogacy. And if conservatives were simply concerned about the birth rate, they’d propose policy solutions that actually help families—like paid parental leave, affordable child care, and laws that don’t kill pregnant women.
Pretending this is some noble pursuit to save civilization is just a way to launder rape apologia and misogyny. The actual goal is good old-fashioned control and a world where women—young women, especially—have no choices.
And let’s be blunt: abortion bans and forced pregnancy were just the beginning.
Key to conservatives’ plan is getting girls and young women married and pregnant as early as possible. How early? Well, Heritage cites women in their early twenties as “more fertile” (yuck), but the authors also scold Democrats for “stigmatizing teen mothers.” One of those authors, Emma Waters, is working with the White House on a campaign to “persuade” women to have more babies—an effort that includes scrapping sex education in favor of “menstrual cycle classes” designed to teach the optimal time to conceive.
At the same time, the Trump administration has blocked funding for teen pregnancy prevention programs, blasting them as “radical indoctrination,” while Heritage has quietly dropped its hand-wringing about teen pregnancy in favor of a new term: the “non-marital teen birth rate.”
In other words, the problem is no longer that girls are getting pregnant before adulthood—it’s that they’re not married first. Pair that with the fact that most teen pregnancies are fathered by adult men, and with Republicans’ ongoing resistance to child marriage bans, and you start to see exactly what kind of future they’re fighting for.
Consider what all of this means for girls across the country, especially those in conservative-led states. Sex education is being eliminated or replaced with propaganda like ‘Baby Olivia’ videos, lessons telling girls that sex makes them ‘dirty’, and Trump’s menstrual classes. Planned Parenthood and other reproductive healthcare clinics are being shuttered in favor of crisis pregnancy centers, which doesn’t just make it harder for young people to access abortion—but contraception, too.
In fact, it’s only a matter of time before Republicans argue teens shouldn’t have birth control at all. They’ve already laid the groundwork by banning gender affirming care for minors, arguing that hormones harm young bodies.
Girls who would normally turn somewhere for help will also be out of luck. Conservatives aren’t just systematically stripping away support systems for teens, they’re eradicating basic information. Attorneys general in several states are fighting to ban ads for pro-choice groups that share information about abortion, while legislators across the country are introducing bills to make those sites illegal in the first place.
Lawmakers are also working to quash pro-choice speech in high schools and colleges—like banning campus health centers from even mentioning abortion, including in states where it’s legal. And under so-called ‘abortion trafficking’ laws, grandmothers and older sisters could face felony charges for helping a teen end their pregnancy. There are even attempts to criminalize lending a young person gas money to leave the state, or sending them a text message with a URL to an abortion clinic.
They want our daughters and granddaughters to have zero information about their bodies and sex, no ability to protect themselves from pregnancy, limited choices for an intellectual and professional life, and—once our girls have been corralled into early marriages—few opportunities to leave.
Push them into the home, force them to get pregnant, rinse and repeat.
And while it’s certainly easier for the Heritage Foundation and their allies if American girls fall in line, conservatives in power are just as happy to force them onto that narrow path. As with all coercive men, the fact that young women don’t want this is part of the appeal.
The truth is that the next generation is as ambitious as ever. The futures they want for themselves are broad and bright. Sometimes that includes husbands and children, sometimes it doesn’t. The most recent studies show that young men are actually far more likely to name children as their top marker of personal success. (Women cite financial independence and their careers.) It’s young men who are having a hard time finding partners, and it’s young men who are lonely.
In other words, despite years of cultural messages to the contrary—it’s men, actually, who are desperate for marriage and babies.
I suppose that’s what Heritage’s roadmap and the conservative agenda is really about: building the world that men want, and forcing women to live inside it.
I’m far more interested in the big, bright life my daughter wants, and ensuring it stays her own.
Read more Abortion, Every Day:
The funny part is a lot more people would be willing to have babies if conservatives weren’t working so determinedly to create a world no one wants to bring children into.
I agree. This is why I support you financially with my (frighteningly) limited retirement budget. I worry about my daughter and granddaughter.
Keep up the good work!