The New Pro-Life Playbook
Although Roberts said that there is a “zero-per-cent chance” of a federal abortion ban passing under the upcoming Trump Administration, Project 2025 contains all sorts of proposals to limit access to abortion through executive orders and administrative rule-making—for example, calling on the F.D.A. to reverse its approval for abortion pills. Several of its recommendations appear to undercut the message of the pro-family right, such as a proposal to eliminate Head Start, a long-standing grant program that offers child care to low-income families, on the ground that it is “fraught with scandal and abuse.” Melissa Boteach, a vice-president at the National Women’s Law Center, told me, “Gutting that means that hundreds of thousands of children lose access to high-quality early education.”
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Democrats, of course, talk about these things, too, but the core goals of liberal and conservative family policy tend to diverge. For Democrats, the mission is often lifting families out of poverty, whereas conservatives want to ease the way for people who have kids, or who want them. On the campaign trail, both Vance and Harris advocated increasing the child tax credit, which gives working parents a break on their taxes. In August, Vance didn’t show up for a Senate vote on a tax bill that would have expanded the credit. Many Republicans objected to the bill over the issue of refundability—they didn’t want low-income families who don’t owe much in taxes, or who don’t file them, to get this money from the government to help with the cost of their kids. Republicans typically oppose making tax credits refundable because they’re worried about creating a new form of welfare. And yet, as Boteach, at the National Women’s Law Center, said, “Children don’t cost less when you have lower incomes.” Republican opposition to refundability, she continued, “ends up hurting families that are headed by a single mom, Black families, and Latino families.”
Perhaps the biggest question dividing pro-family Democrats and Republicans is what kinds of families they want to promote. The consensus on the left is that it’s not the government’s job to encourage people to have kids or to be married. “I think the tax code should be as neutral as possible on those questions,” Boteach said. Conservatives believe the opposite: that it’s affirmatively good—for society, and for the economy—for people to get married, stay married, and have kids. They believe that religion is healthy for families, and that the government should give as much runway as possible to religious communities. What remains an open question is how their new family-policy agenda would account for the many families in the United States who don’t fit that mold.
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And yet there are fundamental differences that will never be resolved. Most progressives see the right to an abortion as an essential feature of family policy. “I don’t think any amount of social spending is going to make up for the loss of bodily autonomy,” Boteach said. “It is a miscalculation to think that you can whitewash anti-choice policies, stripping away people’s bodily autonomy and trying to dangle something in front of them to make them forget that.”
