Alison, Liz, and Rebecca take on the far-right pronatalism movement with guest Emily Martin, NWLC’s Chief Program Officer. They explain the movement’s history of racism, sexism, and eugenics, the alarming support it has in the Trump administration, and what truly pro-family policy would look like.
Background
Heritage Foundation – Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years
New York Times – “The Heritage Foundation Wants to Send American Women Back Half a Century”
Ms. Magazine – “Trump's Pronatalist Agenda Weaponizes Motherhood to Push Women Out of Public Life”
Rebecca Markert: Welcome to We Dissent, the podcast with secular women attorneys discussing religious liberty issues in our federal and state courts and our work to keep religion and government separate. I'm Rebecca Markert with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Liz Cavell: And I'm Liz Cavell with the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Alison Gill: And I'm Alison Gill with the National Women's Law Center.
Liz Cavell: Today we are so excited to welcome Emily Martin. She is the chief program officer for National Women's Law Center and one of Alison's colleagues. Hello, Emily, and welcome to We Dissent.
Emily Martin: Hello. Thank you for having me on.
Liz Cavell: So today Emily is joining us to talk about the pronatalism movement. And if you're one of the lucky ones who does not know what that means, we're going to get all into it because it actually is quite a strong force motivating a lot of the conservative far right and the Christian nationalist movement right now. And there's a lot going on behind the scenes in the pronatalism movement in the halls of power. So we're going to talk all about what pronatalism is, where we're seeing its influence, and how it's affecting the issues that our organizations work on. Before we get into all that, Emily, can you just introduce yourself to our audience? Tell us about your background and the work that you do for NWLC and how you got led to learning about pronatalism.
Emily Martin: Sure. So as you heard, my name's Emily Martin and I'm Chief Program Officer at the National Women's Law Center. I'm an attorney, and "chief program officer" means that I oversee all of our legal and policy work at the Law Center. We work across a lot of different issue areas that are important to gender justice, from workplace justice and education to reproductive rights and health, to income security and childcare, plus some other stuff we're doing with Alison, more and more work around democracy. We do a lot of work around judicial nominations. These days, we do a lot of work trying to hold back authoritarianism and to make clear the connections between gender justice and democracy. And I've been at the Law Center for 16 years, wearing various hats over that time, but have been lucky enough to work on women's rights and gender justice issues pretty much through my whole legal career, which not many people get to say.
Liz Cavell: Very cool. So I want to talk just the most basic level of what we're even talking about when we say pronatalism down to what that word even means. And also as you're explaining that, Emily, talk about how NWLC found itself working on its report on pronatalism or how you even got involved in thinking about and speaking about this issue.
Emily Martin: Yeah. So I mean, pronatalism sort of linguistically means pro-birth. And of course the Law Center is pro-babies and children when people want to have them. But the problem is that pronatalism is a movement that has really been gaining strength in the US and internationally really seizing on fears over declining birth rates in the United States and in other wealthy countries. And so the stated purpose of pronatalism is to increase those birth rates, but it's a movement that's deeply bound up with a few different threads of the conservative movement, some threads that live together a little bit uneasily, frankly, but are united by some deeply misogynist and racist ideas that really you can see flowing through the whole pro-natalist project. So we see a lot of religious conservatives who talk about the need to have government policy more firmly, more coercively, push people and women specifically into married heterosexual families where they have a whole lot of kids and who talk about that in ways that are very bound up with conservative patriarchal ideals of what family life looks like.
And we also hear pro-natalist ideas from sort of more the tech side of the world. Elon Musk is maybe a good example of this, where there's more focus on genetic quality, and how can we use tech to create high-quality babies, but still the same focus on the notion that declining birth rates are an existential threat, the right people aren't having enough babies. And so how do we ensure that more of the right people by which folks sometimes are more explicit and sometimes are less explicit, but where it's not that hidden that the right people mean white, middle class or wealthy people, certainly not immigrants, certainly not poor women of color. How do you get the right people to have more babies? And it's true that birth rates have fallen in the US and across wealthy countries. And what I think we really see in pronatalism are attempts to leverage the conversation, which is a legitimate conversation, but what does that mean for the future?
What does that mean for the policies that we should be adopting if there are fewer working age adults for every older person, trying to leverage anxiety around that question of what does the future look like into a misogynistic and racist new, or slightly new, politics. So the Law Center started paying attention to this movement and engaging around this movement for exactly that reason, but this is sort of a new brand of old misogyny and racism being pedaled and uplifted by some really powerful people. So folks like Elon Musk, folks like JD Vance. And so it seemed like important to wrestle with this since this is part of the branding and the political theory, which a lot of efforts to really push women and LGBTQ people out of public life are currently being wrapped up in.
Alison Gill: Emily, you say that this is a new politics, but it feels to me like in several ways it's sort of warmed over preexisting politics. There was the Family First programs over under Reagan and Bush, for example, and like the whole tech bro side of this, it just feels like eugenics warmed over, right? It seems like everything old is new again here.
Emily Martin: I think that's right. I think that when you read some of the writings from pro-natalists from the religious conservative side of the world, for example, we'll talk a little bit more, I think about the report that Heritage Foundation just came out with about the need to invest in a traditional vision of the family. And reading that report is interesting because a lot of it is just sort of warmed over hostility that we have heard for decades towards single mothers, toward the notion that we have this welfare state that has led all of these women, all of these black women in particular to have children out of wedlock. And that's a huge problem. And so we need less generous welfare benefits because we are incentivizing children out of wedlock. And that's sort of a story, that welfare queen story, is decades old. And the thing that I think is new and that lives a little uncomfortably with that story is the idea that also, we need to have a lot of babies. And it's a crisis that there aren't enough babies. So not just that there are too many babies to unmarried women, too many babies in families that don't look like a traditional or patriarchal nuclear family, but also the idea that the problem is we don't have enough babies, and also the problem is the wrong people are having babies, but those ideas are being pushed together in ways that frankly don't always make a lot of sense. And I think that attempt to push the two ideas together is a little bit of a new spin in this moment.
Liz Cavell: Yeah. Well, you mentioned it, Emily, so we're going to go there. And this is the not at all self-servingly named report by the Heritage Foundation, the people who brought you Project 2025, "Saving America by Saving the Family," a foundation for the next 250 years. So this is this big, just released, I think, at the beginning of 2026 report that the Heritage Foundation has put together to basically give their prescription for the crisis of declining birth rates in America. And it's all about what you're talking about, right? Emily, it's this recommitment to the institution of marriage, which means one man, one woman, and a whole bunch of subtexts that we're talking about white Christian families. So tell our listeners a little bit about what this report reflects and how this saving America, saving the family idea kind of fits in with Project 2025 and what we've all kind of come to understand as the Project 2025 ideology.
Emily Martin: Yeah. Well, of course, the Heritage Foundation is who brought us Project 2025. So it is the same institution, the same people, basically looking at a lot of the ideas that were set out in Project 2025 and going deeper on some themes. So Project 2025 actually had a lot of this notion that the role of government is to affirm and create and incentivize these families, one married man and woman with lots of children. And this report sort of spends some time unpacking what that might mean. And I think very specifically intentionally tries to set out a policy agenda for this administration. I do think it's worth noting some of the rhetoric in the report that really, if you were under the impression that maybe we could talk about pronatalism without talking about gender, you should set that aside. But one of the things that I underlined in the report, because it's a lot of gender.
In the intro, it's talking about the importance of families is like the seat of all that's good and virtuous in the world. And one of the things that says is without families, a country cannot create meaningful work and prosperity. It lacks a storehouse of strong and brave men to protect itself from hostile aggressors at home and abroad. It lacks even the ingredients for responsible citizenship itself. But you see that the project is really about, yes, very specifically one man, one woman married with children, but also one man, one woman with a lot of very specific gender roles attached in this vision of what does the family look like. We need the brave men that are strong to protect us from hostile aggressors at home and abroad and family is the seed of that. And in terms of policy, I think one of the things which I, it's hard to be shocked, but I did find it mildly shocking, is the report is pretty explicit about naming the availability of higher education opportunities for people, but really for women as a problem because it leads people to spend too much time in school, leads women to spend too much time in school and start having babies later, and then they have fewer babies.
And so it argues for basically making college less affordable as a solution to increase birth rates, getting rid of some student loans and otherwise sort of changing the subsidies that are available for higher education. It names contraception and reproductive healthcare is one of the problems that are leading to women having children later. It urges what it calls a "ring by spring" culture in colleges, saying that in religious conservative colleges, there's this notion that you basically go to college to meet your spouse and you get engaged right away. Wouldn't it be great if more colleges adopted that ring by spring ethos? It urges the elimination of no-fault divorce, which of course is a relatively recent innovation and family law that makes divorce much more accessible and affordable and is connected with women being less likely to experience intimate partner violence, seems to be connected with women being less likely to commit suicide.
We also see things like hostility toward Head Start and a desire to get rid of that, a goal of making various financial supports only available to married-couple families and not to single-parent families or not to gay families certainly. And overall, a lot of sort of seeding of hostility toward women's ambition, basically naming women's investment in education and career as part of the problem that we are confronting and a lot of hostility to LGBTQ families. It's not a new story there from the Heritage Foundation, but a lot of assertions basically that they're bad for kids, they're bad for society.
Alison Gill: Emily, what struck me about this was how it proceeds from these just manifestly incorrect assumptions to arrive at its sort of policy prescriptions. For example, that people don't want to get married and have children because it is stigmatized, because they're disincentivized by the laws because same-sex marriage is legal and reproductive care exists because family programs exist that somehow that prevents people from having children. And like those things are not obviously true in any fashion, but they lead to this sort of outcome whereby we have to solve the problem by rolling back those issues and sort of creating this culture of the family or however they're framing it, culture of pro-reproduction. When really the reason most birth rates are declining is because of economic issues, right? Isn't that the case?
Emily Martin: Yeah, I think that's right. That the notion that somehow marriage and parenthood are stigmatized in modern culture seems to be based on idea that the fact that we accept that there are various ways to create a good and fulfilling life, and it doesn't have to be marriage and parenthood, but that's being flipped into the notion that marriage and parenthood is under attack, that there's this notion of victimhood because marriage and parenthood is no longer set out as the sole path toward adulthood and responsibility. So I think that's one thing, the notion that these are stigmatized choices, I don't think as a married parent, I have not felt stigma around those choices. It has seemed to be that society is fairly accepting of that way of life, and in many ways it is much easier. I actually, to go personal, my husband and I had our daughter before we were married, and one reason that we decided to get married is because all your defaults are easier.
It's simpler. Society and government policy is set up in a way so that it is simpler when you are married. So the notion that stigmatize, I don't think they successfully prove, and they do to the Heritage Foundation's credit, spend a little time around the question of what sort of economic incentives and supports do we need to support families, though part of their argument is that basically families expect too much economic comfort, but many people have noted they make this point that in the Brady Bunch, all the kids shared one bathroom, which is an interesting way to argue about what – I cite a fictional source. Expectations appropriately are. And they do urge some more financial support to married parents with children, only to married parents specifically. And so it isn't that they completely ignore the financial aspects, but again, I think that there's, in many ways, still a deep disconnect between their ideological goals and what one might do if one wanted to encourage people to have more children.
So I mentioned that they oppose the existence of Head Start. They sort of call for the expansion of FMLA leave, but like unpaid leave just for married breastfeeding mothers for a few more weeks. So again, not the sort of investment in making it more affordable for working parents to have children and to spend time with newborns while not losing their livelihood. They don't have anything to say about paid family leave. They don't really have much to say about making childcare more affordable or other sorts of workplace reforms that might make it easier for women and men to feel like parenthood and success at work, but those can coexist. So I do think in the report, you see all of their commitments to low welfare spending and to not having mandates on business, et cetera, really show up in a failure to grapple with what do families really need to make having a family financially sustainable.
Rebecca Markert: So this report came out in the beginning of this year in January 2026, and just in March, the Heritage Foundation came out with a blog that talked about how this "Save the Family" plan actually empowers women. I don't know if you had a chance to read this. It came out in early March. It's a blog by Marguerite Bowling, and it's only a two-minute read because she can lay out all of these talking points very, very quickly. But in this piece, she talks about how this plan actually does empower women because it helps fortify marriage, which is the surest path out of poverty and government dependence. It also improves the wellbeing of adults and children overall. And then she talks a little bit about the higher education piece that you had mentioned earlier and how this idea that there are too many credentials for women and some of these jobs don't need those degrees necessarily.
And the point that she makes is that it's empowering to women because if they don't have all of these higher education choices, then they're also seemingly avoiding all the student debt that comes along with going to school. It's crazy. And she also brings up the fact that married women are just happier than single women and women without children.
Liz Cavell: Yeah. Be careful not to look at the social science data on that, but just take her word for it.
Rebecca Markert: I was totally thinking of you, Liz, because you have trotted out that social science evidence oftentimes when we've talked about married women and married men versus divorced women and divorced men. But I wasn't sure if you had seen that piece yet and if you had any reactions to that.
Emily Martin: I hadn't seen that specific piece, but some of the ideas I definitely recognize from the report, and one of the things the report says, for example, in the higher education section is how now all these secretaries have college degrees. You don't really need a college degree to be a secretary. So sort of the same story of liberation that awaits us. Exactly.
Rebecca Markert: She writes in this piece, "In fact, it would give them more career choices and possibly help them avoid taking on student debt altogether. Many women feel trapped by student loan debt and are stuck in low paying jobs that don't require the degrees they earned."
Emily Martin: Yeah.
Alison Gill: If only we could do something about student loan debt.
Emily Martin: Only we could, which is why the Heritage Foundation has bravely proposed making student loans unavailable as the solution to these problems.
Alison Gill: Makes perfect sense.
Emily Martin: Yeah, for sure it is true that married women tend to have more economic stability than unmarried women, and it is a problem that marriage is one of the best paths toward financial security for women, but that suggests that ensuring that the jobs that women do pay adequate and stable wages, looking at the gender wage gap at women's overrepresentation in low-paid jobs and minimum wage jobs, that those are some of the problems that we need to solve for, looking at the policies that actually make it sustainable to take time to take care of children, whether it's paid family leave, whether it's paid sick days, whether it's stable and predictable work schedules, whether it's affordable childcare, that all of those things strike me as good responses to the idea that women who are unmarried face particular economic vulnerability, but of course the Heritage Foundation and I tend to disagree about what the ultimate goals of policy interventions are.
Alison Gill: Before we move off the Heritage Report, if I can just have a moment to indulge in a little bit of Schadenfreude. So Roger Severino was the primary author on this and he was in the previous Trump administration in a high ranking role at the Office of Civil Rights, the Department of Health and Human Services, where he basically created the section that focused on denying medical service based on religious exclusions. And so he's been prominent in this area for a while. And if you remember, when Trump came in the second time, he was trying to portray himself as not quite as anti-abortion. He tried to sort of pretend he was not against abortion. And so my understanding is that Severino tried to get in the Trump administration and he could not get a job there because of this whole situation and because he had a certain reputation based on his previous work.
And so I was wondering where he landed, and apparently he's been writing this report. It's 170 pages for the last, I don't know, year and a half. So I was just sort of, "Oh, I guess this is where he landed."
Emily Martin: And informally, this was called the Manhattan Project for Babies. So really thinking about it is on the scale of creating a nuclear weapon, which makes me feel like having a baby.
Liz Cavell: Amazing. We can move on from the Heritage Foundation report, but it's so important because it just really captures, I think, the lie at the heart of what this whole movement is purporting to be responding to, which is the crisis of declining birth rates and the real life implications that a good faith person might discuss, the economic repercussions of that, and the way that you would solve that problem if you were a good faith person actually trying to increase American birth rates. But you scratch the surface at all on this 170-page report, and it's just a bunch of, like Alison said, all of the old, warmed-over anti-woman, patriarchal ideology just sort of being jammed in a square peg in a hole as the right policy prescription for all of these things that so obviously could be addressed by actual working family supportive economic policies.
And so as usual, what's missing almost entirely from this report are actual policies that would actually support working families. So it's not just the affirmative policies that are absurd, like, let's do away with student loans and let's do away with women's jobs. Let's make it so that women don't go to college and then we'll have more babies instead of like, let's respond to what, not just women, but women and men are telling us about the obstacles to family formation that they face. And they do nod to this at the end where they talk about, I think, delusionally actually the number one measure of life success for Trump-voting men is having a family and in Trump-voting women, it's sixth. I mean, you look at that and you know the gap amongst just men and women, Gen Z in general is even bigger than that, but that was their supportive statistic that the distance between the most conservative men and women that they value or they think a measure of life success is having a family.
Trump-voting women rate that sixth, sixth. I have three kids. I can't think of five other things more fulfilling. And of course, as we know, men, especially conservative men, rate that as the most important thing to life success. And there's no real, it's just so naive. There's no real attempt at grappling with what is really going on. And it is a crisis. It's an economic crisis. But what is really going on that's making having a family just anathema to everyone that's trying to survive in our economy over the past 40 years. It's just silly.
Emily Martin: Including failure to really think about, well, why are conservative men apparently more interested in getting married and having lots of children than even conservative women? Maybe that's worth interrogating a little bit. Are there things that conservative women are looking for in a partner that they're not confident that conservative men are bringing to the table? What are the shifts that we might make in how manhood looks in this country that could be pro-natalist? And the Heritage Foundation Report doesn't do this other than the language about strong protection from aggressors at home and abroad and other little linguistic tweets. There are certainly people who are loud and proud pernatalists who say the problem is that men have become too feminized, and that's why we're not having enough children these days because of all these feminized men, and that maybe is why their sperm counts are so low.
And so what we need is a real embrace of dominance masculinity as a solution to this problem, but that is not what those stats about the difference between conservative women and conservative men as they look at their future. That's not what it suggests to me, that what conservative women want is men who are as hypermasculine as possible. I think it's worth taking the gap seriously and thinking about what are people seeing in their lives.
Liz Cavell: No kidding. It's shocking. That's just tucked into The end as a pep talk about how much conservative people value having a family as a measure of life success. I can't believe it didn't strike anyone as extremely far apart, one-in-six in terms of-
Alison Gill: Well, it's because they value what conservative men think.
Liz Cavell: Right, right. And women only rate that six, six. The question is about what makes a successful life, not like what are some things you might be interested in doing? What's your measure of a successful life? Five things are more important to conservative women than having kids. I think there's some work to do there perhaps, but no, that's cited as look at how much everyone wants to have kids, but they just can't. First and sixth, those are both really high, high on the list. I mean, I just think that's wild. Just shows the naivety of just the whole concept of what low birth rates are pointing to. The story this report is trying to tell about how we got here is such a fantasy.
Alison Gill: I think this leads us really well into, as you were saying, what would a good faith person sort of do to address this economic crisis? And the National Women's Law Center also produced a report on pronatalism that sort of addresses these things, I think, more fairly. And maybe that's a good place to go next, Emily.
Emily Martin: Yes. The National Law Center does a lot of reports. And I think this one is notable in that we really tried not to use our hyper-legal wonky voice because we thought it was really important to communicate as broadly as possible this is the thing worth paying attention to. This is really a play for changing the culture as well as changing laws in ways that have a lot of implications for all of our futures, but for the future of people who can be pregnant and have children especially. And so in our report, we tried to tell clearly and simply who's behind this movement, the ways in which it is bound up with misogyny and also with racism. One of the things we haven't talked about a lot yet is how if you were thinking about good faith solutions to the problem of low birth rates and the fact that the working age population is decreasing relative to the elderly population, one of the things you might think about is immigration.
That's a way to expand the working age population. And in fact, when you look at roles that we especially need for an aging population, like healthcare workers and home health aides, the caregivers, those are jobs that are really disproportionately held by immigrant women. And yet the loudest pro-natalist voices are also very anti-immigrant and not coincidentally so. Many folks who are making the claims why it is absolutely necessary or civilization will collapse if there aren't more babies are doing so with the sort of great replacement theory as part of the case that they are making. But otherwise, Elon Musk, I think is probably the most prominent example of this, without lots of white people having babies, the white culture is going to be decimated by all the immigrant boards. So we tried to tell that story in our report and how we see the hostility to women in public life, the hostility toward women of color as parents, how we see that showing up in the policies championed by the administration and its allies.
We looked at Project 2025 and its many proposals to push women out of the workforce, out of independence, out of public life, and interdependence on a male wage earner and talked about how the sort of pronatalism vision underlies a lot of that. And we tried to set out what a real pro-family agenda would include. So things like access to affordable quality childcare for everybody and healthcare that is available across the reproductive lifespan and that is comprehensive that includes abortion. If getting pregnant means you might die because you can't get abortion care if you need it, you might be less likely to get pregnant. It means increasing access to basic needs for families, basic needs support, like food assistance, like housing, ensuring that everyone's able to meet their basic needs. It means ensuring that pregnant people aren't criminalized when they have miscarriages or when they seek abortions or when they need emergency care, and that they aren't fired when they need accommodations at work or when they need time off.
It includes, again, looking at access to healthcare across the reproductive lifespan, including pregnancy-related care like birth control and IVF and infertility coverage. It means protecting pregnant people from discrimination at school and at work. As a little aside, the Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Education under the Trump administration has basically spent all its time targeting trans kids and also threatening institutions that are undertaking any sort of racial equity work. They haven't done anything about pregnancy discrimination against students, not a single thing in their year plus in office. It also means, yes, paid family and medical leave, paid sick days, stable and predictable work schedules. Those are all part of what you need to be able to have quality jobs that allow you to support yourself and your family. Safe and inclusive and high quality public schools are part of what you need when you're thinking about whether you're going to have kids, how many kids you're going to have.
I think it's really clear that this administration is in fact incredibly hostile to public education, is literally trying to dismantle the Department of Education. Public education doesn't really come up in the Heritage Foundation's report, but that is a critical part of how do you support families. And more broadly, we afford all this when we make billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share in taxes. That's how we can create the policies and the family supports that allow people to really make their own decisions, to have children if they want to have children, to have as many children as they want to have. And I think a little bit more broadly, part of deciding to have a family is feeling, yes, economically secure and also fundamentally just feeling safe in your community, in your country. So that includes feeling like you're not going to be persecuted for your sexual orientation or your gender identity.
It means taking gender-based violence seriously, feeling like that if it turns out that the person you are with is a person who is dangerous to you, that there are ways to get out of that relationship without sacrificing everything in your life. So all of those things are things that I think are really important to invest in and that could well increase birth rates. I think it makes it more likely that you'll have a child if you have this sort of array of policies that really support families at every stage. But whether or not it increases birthrates, I think that it increases autonomy. It increases people's ability to choose the life that they want and to ensure that they can have thriving day-to-day existence and thriving families. And it's worth doing for that reason, whether or not it moves the needle on having more babies.
Alison Gill: If nothing else, I'm just struck by how much it costs to sort of have a single baby, right? It can cost upwards of 20K in some areas, depending. And I don't understand how you can advocate for these sort of, oh, people are going to not go to college and be able to afford and have more children. If you don't grapple with that … If nothing else, you put everything else aside, grapple with that simple fact. If you're not providing healthcare, expect people to do that. And that's just one aspect.
Emily Martin: Yeah. Healthcare and childcare. I mean, again
Alison Gill: Yeah.
Emily Martin: There's a lot of threads you can pull, but starting just really basically about, can you get affordable prenatal care? Can you have affordable birth? And then is there anyone who can take care of your child so that you can support yourself? Those are all basic questions where it's not just the administration hasn't seen that interested. They've been actively hostile. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, HR1, store cuts to Medicaid, which is leading to all sorts of gaps in healthcare coverage as states scramble to figure out how to fill those holes. Huge cuts in SNAP, in food assistance, which again, that is money that enables families to stay afloat. So not just the failure to take seriously the sorts of policies that a good faith person would say, "Oh, that makes a difference for families." But active hostility toward those policies who say nothing of reproductive rights.
Where again, if pregnancy is dangerous to you, you are probably less likely to become pregnant. And
Alison Gill: That's an important issue, especially when it comes to black maternal health. It's pretty bound up in these issues. It's already was high. It sort of has skyrocketed under the Trump administration. And of course, that's not something that they are actively addressing in part of what you were saying earlier, the right sort of people having babies. So that's sort of …
Emily Martin: No, post-Dobbs we are seeing in states that have banned abortion, increases in maternal mortality, the loss of OBGYNs who are scared to practice there because they're risking criminalization if they provide the medical care that their patients need. These are not the ingredients toward creating a culture that is supportive of people's decisions to have babies.
Rebecca Markert: So one thing that I wanted to talk about when we decided to have this as an idea for an episode, we kind of talked about this at the beginning of the show, but this seems to be one of the issues that sort of flies under the radar with all of the other things that are coming out of the Trump administration, all of the attacks that we're seeing, we're sort of under this deluge of horrible policies and the impact towards vulnerable populations is so great. And oftentimes when you talk about things like women's rights and the gains that we've seen over the years since the '70s, it really sort of gets lost that those are of recent vintage. We've seen so many gains in my lifetime that my mother didn't necessarily have. And certainly after Dobbs, we've sort of rolled back a lot of the rights and the progress that women have made, but it still seems as if it is easily dismissed when you're talking about it.
I remember talking about my fears after Trump was elected in November of 2024 and feeling like this is what could potentially happen to me as a working single mom of four. These are the things that I'm concerned about and feeling like that is a very real thing that could happen, that they could take away my rights to own my own house and have the life that I have. But I do feel that oftentimes it is sort of poo-pooed because people think, "Well, we've made all of this progress. They're not going to undo it and we really are being just sort of hysterical about it and just have your focus on something else." But I really wanted to talk about how very real these policies are with the Trump administration and even if they're not making daily headlines, they're definitely there in very insidious ways.
And one example that I had that actually did make headlines is when this pastor, Doug Wilson, came and spoke to the Department of Defense. You may recall that the Department of Defense recently started having monthly prayer services, their worship services for all of the Pentagon employees. And in February of 2026, Doug Wilson, who is a conservative, reformed evangelical preacher, he has a church in Idaho called Christ Church, he was the featured speaker at the February church service at the Pentagon, and he has said some pretty horrific things about women. And I would imagine that you would consider him to be a pro-natalist. He went viral last summer because he was interviewed by CNN and he was quoted as saying that women are the kind of people that people come out of and really sort of just dismissed how difficult it is to become pregnant, stay pregnant and have babies, but he is just one of the people that is seemingly having a significant influence over people in the highest offices in our country.
And I was just curious if there are other people like him or other types of influencers that we're seeing that have the ear of the president and of the secretaries of these major agencies and other advisors that might be driving some of these policies that we're seeing out of the Trump administration.
Emily Martin: Yeah. I think one of the many things which is so dark about this moment is the normalization of really extreme misogyny and racism, including with folks who have the ear of the administration or are in the administration. So yes, Doug Wilson, who I believe also has indicated that the 19th Amendment was a mistake, that women shouldn't have the right to vote, but sadly he is not alone. I mean, I frankly don't think Hegsuth has really put a lot of distance between himself and Doug Wilson and the things that Hecseth is willing to say out loud, just expressing real contempt for women in the military and a belief that they don't belong there, sort of backed up by lots of shifts in policy, like how do you address sexual assault in the military or whether you can even recognize the achievements and contributions of women and people of color in the service academies.
So I sometimes find it hard, frankly, to talk about this topic precisely because it's hard not to sound a little wild eyed given, again, the normalization of really grotesque misogyny these days, but you see it in the priorities of the administration. So for example, the attacks on what they call illegal DEI, which is really being used to take apart sort of basic civil rights enforcement in this country and to weaponize our civil rights laws so that they are very explicitly primarily in service of white men. That that is the vision of what civil rights laws are for, which connects up really neatly with some of the most extreme statements in the pro-natalist movement. So for example, this guy named Charles Haywood, who is a wealthy guy who has led a far-right men's network that is really fantasizing about leading networks of warlords overturning central government.
One of his pitches at big pro-natalist conference a couple years ago was that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he called it the most destructive set of laws in American history. And he said, "We need women out of the workplace. We need to stigmatize women working." Now, that's not the language that Andrea Lucas, the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission uses under Trump, but she's making videos saying their priority is discrimination claims on behalf of white men who feel that they are not being treated fairly at work. That is the business that she is in right now. And so whether you're looking at that, whether you're looking at hostility to reproductive rights and abortion and the ways in which it shows up in so many places in the administration, whether you're looking at the ways in which the administration is making it harder just to recognize women's history at a basic level, there are anti-DEI policies that have led to, for example, the University of Alabama shutting down a magazine that was aimed at female students because that's DEI.
There is a new kind of boldness in the anti-woman stances and statements and principles that I think is part of the embrace of pronatalism by folks like JD Vance and Elon Musk and that we can see as a common thread running through so many of this administration's policies.
Liz Cavell: All right. One more question to reflect on, Emily, before we wrap up. We've covered so much and this is such a great conversation. Every report and blog and thing that we referenced will be linked in the show notes for anyone who's interested, but we have a lot of listeners who just kind of like to end on an action. And so for anyone who is horrified by this ideology, wants to pay attention and kind of follow where its influences and follow what your organization is covering. And also just wondering if there's anything they can do to agitate against any of these policies, what would be your advice?
Emily Martin: Well, for sure. They should come to our website and sign up for our alerts, www.nwlc.org, because part of what we are in the business of doing is raising the alarm and giving opportunities to weigh in at the moments when decisions are being made by the administration, by Congress, by state leaders, as well as giving information. We have more reports and fact sheets and data on our website than you would ever want to read, but there are a lot of resources to sort of arm yourself with as an advocate, as a spokesperson on these issues. So I think I'm biased, but I think it's a great place to start. And Alison, actually, maybe I'll throw it to you because one of the things that is at stake right now is women's right to vote.
Alison Gill: Absolutely. Yeah
Emily Martin: Those are places where people can weigh in with their senators right now on a live fight around the SAVE Act and what it means for women's voices in this country, as well as the voices of trans people. Alison, do you want to give a pitch?
Alison Gill: Absolutely. We're talking about policies that benefit women and families in many ways. And really, the first ever social family policies were actually implemented shortly after the passage of the 19th Amendment. So it just goes to show that women's political power is critical to sort of push for the sorts of policies that allows people options and the ability to self-determine what their lives look like for themselves and their families are bound up together. And right now, our voting rights are very much under attack. The SAVE Act is a major priority of President Trump. Sometimes it's called the Save America Act. There's a few different variants. And what it would do is make it much, much more difficult to register to vote and then to vote in person. It has already passed the House of Representatives and it's currently before the Senate. I believe wholeheartedly this can be defeated, but it requires everyone to reach out to their senators and ask them to say no to the SAVE Act.
Everyone deserves the right to vote. President and his allies keep lying about the bill. They call it a voter ID bill. It is not. It is much worse than that. It's a voter suppression bill. It very much limits people's ability to vote. And so if you can take action, we have an action on our website that allows you to reach out to your senators directly and ask them not to support this measure.
Liz Cavell: That's great. Thank you so much. I have a feeling this will not be the last time that we talk about pro-natalist ideology or cover some of these policies that are animating the pro-natalist movement, but this was such a good start to the conversation. It's horrifying. It's extremely naive and upsetting, but it has outsized influence in the halls of power right now. And so it's really important to understand what's going on in the minds of our elected officials and the people in power. So thank you so much, Emily, for breaking this down with us and sharing all these resources with us and going deep on the Heritage Foundation's prescription for the next 250 years. We really appreciate it.
Emily Martin: Thank you so much for including me in this conversation. I'm really glad to be here.
Rebecca Markert: And that is it for today's episode. I'm Rebecca Markert.
Alison Gill: I'm Alison Gill.
Liz Cavell: And I'm Liz Cavell. If you haven't already, please follow us on our socials. We're on Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, and X. Please also remember to let us know how you're liking the show by leaving us a review. This helps new listeners find our show, so please give us a five-star review in your podcast app. You can also find us at we-dissent.org. Thanks for listening.
Rebecca Markert: We Dissent is a joint production of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the National Women's Law Center, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It is hosted by attorneys, Liz Cavell, Alison Gill, and me, Rebecca Markert. Other production support comes from Greta Martens. Audio engineering is provided by audio for the arts based in Madison, Wisconsin. Thanks for listening.
