• Where Have All the Good Men Gone?: Making the personal political doesn’t lead to better politics

• ‘Much Ado About Nothing’: A new paper on private equity and child care

• Anti-Anti-Family Policy: Updates from the city that never sleeps, but not because kids are waking them up at 3 a.m.

• Black Mirror: A victory lap for pro-family voices in Meta’s new settlement

• It’s Me, Hi: National Review, First Things

• Parting Shots

Where Have All the Good Men Gone?

At the beginning of the Congressional session prior to the current one, in January 2023, Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) capitalized on the attention he had gotten for wearing his four-month-old son to the House floor for votes to establish the Congressional Dads Caucus. The initial group was made up of 27 male House Democrats and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and it was focused on the traditional progressive suite of family policy issues: “a national paid leave program, ensuring affordable and accessible child care, and supporting the expansion of the Child Tax Credit.” Gomez talked about the need to “normalize Dads” and proudly proclaimed his vote for Speaker of the House as being “on behalf of my son…and all the working families who need an expanded Child Tax Credit.”

Now, the roster is falling apart. Some lost re-election. One of the members of the Dads Caucus, former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), resigned from Congress in April of this year, after multiple women accused him of sending unwanted sexual imagery and a former staffer alleged sexual assault. Another, then-Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), is now a Senator, but has faced criticism with having consensual sex with younger staff members in other offices while he was serving in the House.

And now, the founder of the “Dads Caucus,” Rep. Gomez, is facing sexual misconduct allegations that he engaged in “inappropriate sexual contact with a House staffer.” The accusations against Rep. Gomez are credible enough to have led the House Ethics Committee to launch a probe into the “serious and disturbing” allegations. That, in turn, has led Rep. (D-Mass.), to resign his membership in the Congressional Dads Caucus.

Rep. Auchincloss deserves credit for taking a stand against sexual misconduct in the workplace, even if it costs him friends within his caucus. And if his name sounds familiar, it should — he was one of the “neo-neo-conservatives” I highlighted in a piece in The Dispatch last year (gift link). I don’t know if they would particularly embrace the label, but it’s the one I came up with to bestow upon the small but growing number of center-lefties recognizing the limits of progressives’ push for ever greater individual liberation. Rep. Auchincloss, for instance, has criticized “corporations [for] rout[ing] young men to online sports betting, pornography, and social media,” suggesting that “young men are the worse for it, both in the job market and the marriage market.” On his Substack, , he has written about the need to embrace public order, understand the frustrations felt by young men, and to prioritize home ownership for young families.

A policy agenda focused on those topics would arguably bear much more fruit in helping form strong families and engaged dads than the three priorities the Dads Caucus set for itself. Even before the sexual allegations ruined the reputations of some of its highest-profile members, there was a very obvious reason why the Congressional Dads Caucus was simply never going to work.

The weakness of the Congressional Dads Caucus is that it sought to do what other marginalized groups on the left have done — substitute identity for argument. There was little unique about the Congressional Dads Caucus beyond a dad joke energy behind the standard left-leaning wish list. They could have tackled the issues raised by the American Institute for Boys and Men’s Nathan Robbins in his policy brief. Instead, no specific focus on what it means to be an engaged father, no bipartisan efforts to seek common ground on youth sports, carseat laws, or predictable work scheduling, nothing more innovative than “as the father of a daughter”-type cases for the usual progressive agenda. Being a “dad” in favor of the progressive, Build Back Better-style approach is no more or less interesting on its own terms than any other identity marker — but it sought to steal a base by painting progressives as the real champions of engaged fathers and conservatives as standing in the way of pro-family legislation. For this, they were named one of the “Top Ten Policy Wins of 2023” by the child advocacy group ZERO TO THREE. Nice work if you can get it.

Neither party has a monopoly on masculine virtue, of course. The Republican candidate for Texas’s 23rd Congressional District, Brandon Herrera, is a firearms manufacturer-turned-self-described-“social media personality” who has a history of saying such crude things about mothers, children, and families, that I hesitate linking to them in what aspires to be a family newsletter in more ways than one.1 Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) has been allowed to keep his seat despite serious allegations of domestic violence, including the claim that he broke his two-year-old daughter’s collarbone. It does not particularly speak well of the avowedly “pro-family” party that the reality of a razor-thin House majority — to say nothing of a White House inner circle that can sometimes seem intent on making good on ’s most famous tweet — can lead leadership to place political expediency over personal integrity. As wrote for the Washington Examiner earlier this week, we are seeing the initial rise of the “anti-family” right, with various forms of misogyny and anti-natalism breaking through at an alarming rate (“I don’t know if women should be lawyers,” some young women have been told by their law school peers.)

But it’s especially galling for people who sought to create a political brand around their identity as a “dad” to exhibit such gross behavior at the workplace. Rep. Auchincloss deserves full credit for bowing out of the Caucus, and the other members should do the same, especially if Rep. Gomez remains affiliated with its efforts. For it takes a special kind of chutzpah to cheat on your wife with a junior staffer at your place of work, and then, just a few months later, use your four-month-old baby as a human prop, hoping to subtly shame your political opponents for not caring about families in the way that just so happens to align with your party’s pre-conceived vision of policy. If that’s all the Congressional Dads Caucus was good for, then it deserves a hearty good riddance.

‘Much Ado About Nothing’

In an article for Vox, explores the growing consternation over private equity firms investing in and buying out child care providers. Analysts, mostly on the political left, have been concerned that private equity ownership of child care could be driving up prices and driving down quality for families. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) even launched an investigation into the practice.

As Booth writes:

“[A] forthcoming paper reviewed by Vox from two leading national researchers focused on the economics of childcare — Jessica Brown at the University of South Carolina and Chris Herbst of Arizona State University — complicates the case that has been building against the private-equity owned centers. In the country’s first systematic, descriptive look at how far private equity has actually spread through American childcare, the scholars found no smoking guns.

“Private equity is not sweeping the childcare sector, the researchers report. Its share of the childcare workforce stopped growing around 2010 and has hovered near 10 percent ever since. It isn’t everywhere, either — three-quarters of private-equity childcare centers sit in just 5 percent of US counties, clustered around Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Atlanta, and northern Virginia. Nor do the centers look uniformly distressed. They have been operating for 18 years on average, longer than other chains — and between 2021 and 2024, while non-private-equity providers cut staff, these programs added workers.”

One of the paper’s co-authors tells Booth they were jokingly going to title their paper “Much Ado About Nothing.” The other co-author I have an irrevocable conflict of interest towards, so I will say nothing else other than to direct you to read their work and to continue to read Family Matters for a calm, sober assessment of family policy trends. For as I wrote back in March:

“The focus on the given ownership structure of a given child care facility seems to be the political cause célèbre of anti-bigness in search of a problem, rather than a focus on increasing child care affordability per se. The reason why child care costs at private equity-owned establishments have risen so much over recent years is the same reason why child care costs at private operators have also risen so much in recent years — labor costs have gone up, and inflation spares no man or woman.”

Anti-Anti-Family Policy

The two coolest (?…at least by some measures) politicians on the left right now are New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. I’ve made a couple of statements in support of Mayor Mamdani’s “Parents Night Out” initiative offering free drop-in babysitting to elementary-school age kids. At Reason, is intrigued by my support of the plan, but also expresses a wish that voluntary associations like churches could provide these services instead of the city. (In many places, they already do!)

Given that New York City already runs after-school and weekend kids’ programming, the idea that they would explicitly allow parents to drop their kids off and enjoy an evening together rather than hang around for them to finish up an activity seems laudable to me (and, indeed, laudable to Oklahoma City as well, hat tip to .) It might be a weird initiative for a smaller town with more active community organizations already offering services for parents. But in a city like NYC, with a high cost of living and a highly-active city government, it doesn’t strike me as anywhere beyond the pale — and conservatives attacking the Mayor over it have generally gotten out over their skis, driven more by their reflexive opposition to the mayor’s political leanings than the merits of the policy on its own.

Similarly, conservatives attacking Rep. Ocasio Cortez for her recent social media video about her decision to freeze her eggs have fallen into a related trap. As writes for Commonplace, the second-guessing, well-intentioned as well as not, that some conservatives offered in response failed to meet a cardinal rule of politics: be seeking converts, not heretics. Recommend reading Sargeant’s post, particularly its concluding paragraph:

“Our ideological opponents don’t just need to be pitched on a “no” to their current worldview, but a clear invitation to say “yes.” To promote the family, social conservatives need to be the right kind of weird—visibly and joyfully counter-cultural, and more focused on what we have to share than what we want our opponents to concede.”

Commonplace

Anti-Anti-Family Policy Is Not Pro-Family

“Don’t be weird about this,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) says, an injection needle poised over her belly as part of an attempt to freeze her eggs. “Even though I know all of you will be…

Read more

5 days ago · 14 likes · 2 comments · Leah Libresco Sargeant

Black Mirror

Conservatives are taking a well-deserved victory lap in the wake of a new settlement between Meta and state attorneys general. For years, we were told that pushing for greater parental controls and top-down limits on teen accounts were technologically infeasible and politically impossible. Now, Meta is proposing to implement a wide-ranging suite of tools intended to make social media more kid-friendly.

They include a limit of two hours a day on Instagram and Facebook for users under 18 (do users under 18 even use Facebook any more?), with no access between midnight and 6 a.m. Notifications won’t be sent during school hours, and like counts will be obscured. Incredibly, teens were not given the option of turning off “auto-play” for videos in their feeds before now, which is the only option that can preserve your sanity on sites like X. They’ll be able to now. The company also promises to work on meaningful age verification and restrictions on filters that lead to unhealthy and unattainable face and body image ideals.

Now, the fine print. There is an aspect of coercion in the deal. If Meta is going to “voluntarily” roll out some of these teen protections, they want to make sure their compeitors do as well. In the deal with the 47 states, Meta included a $5 billion financial incentive for the state AGs to loop other companies into the restrictions. In a regular economic marketplace, that might feel like an unfair business practice, trying to financially induce states to coerce other businesses in an industry to voluntary adopt restrictions. But given the difficulty in getting kids online safety legislation across the finish line at the federal level, and the real risk to kids and teens in continuing to allow access to tech services that seem genuinely harmful, there’s at least a case to be made that a new, quasi-voluntary industry standard for taking care of kids online could be the next-best thing, even if it is based in the cynicism of inter-corporate competition.

It’s Me, Hi

For the October 2026 issue of National Review, I reviewed ’s new spiritual memoir, Communion, and about what it says about his political trajectory.

I know NR has a pretty hard paywall, and of course I encourage everyone to pony up the teaser rate to read my piece as well as the rest of the special issue on where conservatives should go on education policy. But for those who can’t, or won’t, here are a couple of fair use paragraphs that give the gist:

“In his book, Vance grapples with the difference between rhetoric and responsibility—though a glance at his X feed suggests the process is incomplete. Communion is a moving portrait of a Millennial atheist who rediscovers the personal and civilizational value of faith and family. How that discovery might shape a potential presidency makes Communion worth interrogating…

“[Vance] has thought a lot about how careerism is bad for men and women, and why the “having it all” debates feel hollow. He wants to see more husbands sharing “the burdens of household labor with their wives” and spending more time with their children. If he does succeed in leading the right, this version of Vance might prove the most attractive…

“Still, if Vance’s evolution from “self-professed atheist and meritocrat” to champion of deeply held principles is to bear political fruit, it has one final stage to attain. He recognizes that, early in his career, he was animated by “the arrogant desire to rise above others,” and he points an accusing finger at other elite strivers for prizing “achievement over duty.” But in his eagerness to distance himself from the elite circles to which he once sought entry, he sometimes displays a similar lack of empathy. He is quick to scorn the achievement-obsessed types he met in New Haven and Silicon Valley…Whether Vance’s conversion taught him to see political adversaries differently—or mainly confirmed to him that his political instincts are right—remains an open question.”

And, for First Things, I have a review of the surprisingly subversive romantic comedy One Night Only, which offers, as I put it, “either the most red-blooded apologia for purity culture or the most subtly reactionary depiction of hookup culture since HBO’s Girls went off the air.”

“One Night Only, out in theaters nationwide…dares to ask, [if] a world in which there are no rules and restrictions around sex is, in fact, less sexy—not to mention less fulfilling—than a world that treats sex as something powerful, crazy-making, even a little bit dangerous?”

Parting Shots

• reports on why pro-lifers have become increasingly motivated to tackle the question of surrogacy (probably because the ever-growing number of uncomfortable stories drawing attention to the problems in commercial surrogacy!) (The 19th)

• Marianna Orlandi (on Substack at ) writes about why young women are feeling dissatisfied with the contemporary dating scene (Public Discourse)

• The White House has ramped up its branding efforts around pro-family initiatives, reports Naomi Lim, but some critics observe their efforts would have been easier if they had made pro-family policies a bigger priority earlier in their administration (Washington Examiner)

• At National Review, and Jim Geraghty exchange thoughts on the birth rate decline

• has another comprehensive, depressing look at global birth rates for AEI

• writes about the good intentions and the flawed implementation of the “No Surprises Act.” (Daily Caller)

• John Gerardi writes about the inability of Democratic politicians to avoid following progressive activists towards an extreme, unfettered view of abortion (National Review)

• A gimmick here, a gimmick there, and soon you’re talking about real money — The Tax Foundation estimates extending the signature “No Tax on [X]” policies in the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” would cost nearly $600 billion when they expire in 2028 (POLITICO)

• Jessica Winter interviews Alex Adams, Assistant Secretary at the Administration for Children and Families, about the Trump administration’s move to scale back regulations around the Head Start program (The New Yorker)

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

This edition of Family Matters — and all subsequent ones through the remainder of the academic year — is coming to you live from Charlottesville, Virginia. If a visit to Monticello, Trump Wineries, or John Paul Jones Arena is in your plans sometime before next June, give a shout!

This is relevant to readers of Family Matters, not just because I won’t be able to give you on-the-ground intel into the South Carolina Senate special election currently taking place,1 but also because, due to related family obligations, Family Matters will be changing its production schedule.

Effective next week, Family Matters will be leaving our long-time home of Friday mornings (or, occasionally, “morning”) and publishing every Thursday. Nothing else should change, but it does mean that the traditional “Parting Shots” segment will probably be thinner than you all have come to love, cherish, and expect.

How are you feeling about that change? Is there anything that would make your Family Matters reading experience better? Any and all feedback is always welcome (though of course I will weigh comments from paid subscribers much more heavily than from the world at large…)

Ensure your feedback is overweighted

And so, one last time, if it’s Friday, it’s Family Matters:

• Thoroughly Modern Child Care: Bipartisanship is good; good ideas are better.

• A Magic Update: Disney World is building a new ride for young kids (!)

• These United States

• Parting Shots

Thoroughly Modern Child Care

“Modern.” Such a good, clinical word, isn’t it? Fresh, crisp, efficient, up-to-date. Who wouldn’t want your piece of legislation to help “modernize” something? It’s an excellent choice for labeling a bill if you want to create some inoffensively good vibes towards something that people probably don’t have strong feelings about — particularly if it has some bipartisan statements of support behind it.

The Child Care Modernization Act (CCMA) is a bipartisan, bicameral piece of legislation that would update and reauthorize the Child Care and Development Block Grant.2 The CCDBG is the federal government’s main way of providing child care assistance to low-income families — in most cases, it gives federal dollars to states which give parents “certificates” (or vouchers) to take to the child care provider of their choice. That blend of federal spending and parental choice has made the CCDBG a safe, common ground approach for federal child care support since it was established in 1990. Progressives like that it recognizes that, particularly in a post-welfare-reform world, low-income single parents who need assistance can apply for aid, while conservatives who emphasize the importance of work have tended to appreciate that it is targeted to those most in need and doesn’t create a federal entitlement or a massive expansion of government-run child care facilities.

Progressives came so very close to replacing this structure with their own federal child care entitlement program in the Build Back Better battle of 2021, and some on the left still dream of something more sweeping. But the traditional bipartisan consensus around CCDBG has fueled the sense that the next reauthorization of the block grant should look like the pieces that are included in the CCMA. But, well, should it?

What’s Good in the CCMA

First, the positive aspects of the CCMA. It would direct states to review their health and safety requirements in the hopes of streamlining regulations and targeting their impact to ensuring health and safety. At worst, this would be inoffensive; at best, it could boost efforts some states have already made to target regulations that add little but red tape. There’s also a focus on more comprehensive data collection, which, while potentially burdensome for states, can give us a better picture of the child care market.

The bill continues the program’s traditional emphasis on parental choice by explicitly embracing “mixed delivery,” the term of art that recognizes non- and for-profit child care centers, faith-based child care, home-based child care, and relative-provided care all have a role to play in the child care ecosystem. While this is somewhat just ratifying where the program has always been, blue states and Democratic administrations have continued to push for allocating child care seats by “contracts” to specific providers, rather than “certificates” for parents to take to the provider of their choice, so the rhetorical emphasis is welcome.

I also appreciate the laudable attention paid to the need to boost supply and capacity. One set of grants would support providers with startup costs, meeting licensing requirements, or other initial expenses, while another would provide facilities with access to grants to repair, remodel, renovate, or otherwise improve their physical campus to expand the number of children they serve. These kinds of grants for providers who want to retrofit or expand their facilities are worth pursuing, especially for non-profit child care providers who might have a harder time tapping into private capital markets. Personally, I have relatively low confidence in policymakers having the kind of fine-grained knowledge to be able to pinpoint which regions are in most need of these grants (see “Just Deserts”), so I’d favor making them as widely available as possible, but otherwise the idea should be appealing.

Concept Creep

Then there are two items that, taken together, would enable a little bit of unwise concept creep. The bill would allow states to serve families whose earnings are above the current eligibility threshold of 85 percent of the state median income (SMI), so long as the state can demonstrate it is currently serving all of the currently-eligible population. That seems like a camel’s nose under the tent to expand the CCDBG program into one that serves middle-class as well as low-income families, particularly given that seventeen states had CCDBG waiting lists in 2025. I don’t think it is beyond the realm of concern that states might not focus as much on serving all eligible families under 85% of SMI if they knew there were potential political benefits from deeming demand “met” and moving on to delivering child care assistance to higher-income families too.

The bill would expand the “activity test” for being able to receive a certificate through CCDBG, to include things like self-employment and mental health treatment. While there’s nothing wrong with expanding the definition of “working” per se, it does run into a weird cul-de-sac where essentially the only low-income families categorically unable to be eligible for a CCDBG certificate are the ones with a parent at home. At that rate, you may as well add in the Trump administration’s suggestion that homeschooling activities could also count as work participation to claim CCDBG dollars — or just keep the focus of the program on enabling low-income families, which again, are predominantly single parents, to be working in the labor market so that they can benefit from subsidized child care.3

Whither ‘Abundance’?

Lastly, there are other provisions within CCMA that should make anyone the least bit concerned about “affordability” think twice before endorsing. Currently, the CCDBG reimburses providers based on a survey of providers that captures what they are currently charging parents in the open marketplace. The CCMA would require states to switch to a “cost estimation model,” a goal of professional child care advocates, which would seek to account for the “true cost of care” by tallying up all the expenses associated with producing one seat in a child care center. In essence, this would be directing the federal government to change its accounting from “what does a firm charge to provide child care” to, perhaps, something closer to “what should it cost a firm to provide child care.”

This may sound like a semantic switch, but it’s actually deliberately working to weaken the price signal within the child care market. If a child care provider is currently charging $750/month on the open market, but can get $900/month via the CCDBG cost estimation model, the unsubsidized price may well converge towards the subsidized one, raising prices for the families who aren’t lucky enough to receive a CCDBG-funded voucher. If firms know their expenses are being treated as inputs into the cost estimation model, and thus end up being reflected in higher subsidy payments, their incentive to contain costs or compete on price will be that much weaker.

By including all the ancillary staff fringe benefits and various “quality improvement” adjustments, the goal is, essentially, to establish an ever-increasing floor for child care prices. Advocates will claim this is a feature, not a bug — by “overpaying” relative to the current market-clearing price, the federal government will be incentivizing providers to increase quality, retain staff longer, and maybe even make a little more profit. But we should be clear about what their goal is — they want to put more money into the child care providers’ pockets via a centrally-set price determined by an algorithm rather than reflecting a survey of providers actually operating in the market as it exists. That fits uncomfortably in the trendy “abundance” framework that focuses on supply-side barriers to lower costs, to say nothing of traditional conservative economic principles. In a world where federal debt tops $40 trillion and the bond markets are increasingly unsettled, the luxury of overpaying for a certain sector of the economy is one that will be increasingly difficult to afford.

Given the way Congress works, and the need to eventually reauthorize the CCDBG program, it’s likely that the CCMA will end up serving as the base for whatever vehicle moves forward. (For a more optimistic gloss on how the bill might help child care workers and providers, see Brittany Walsh’s helpful write-up for the Bipartisan Policy Center.) I am grateful to see some Republican Members of Congress being engaged and interested in the topic of child care — but the bill, as it stands, candidly feels a bit more like “Republican talking points atop Democratic policy priorities” than “an approach that marries the best insights of the right and left.”

Dropping the cost estimation model from the CCMA would go a long way towards ensuring the CCDBG remains a cost-effective and parental choice-based program over the long run. Directing states to explore whether parents are aware of the possibility of using CCDBG certificates for relative-provided care, which is set in statute, and what barriers face them if they choose that option, would also be a worthwhile addition to the bill. Lawmakers could even consider a little more teeth on the current language around deregulation.

These changes could make the bill feel a little less like a lukewarm approach at “modernization” that doesn’t actually bring the CCDBG to where it needs to be for the future, and more like an approach that foregrounds authentic parental choice, expands supply, and keeps an eye on fiscal realities. That would be an authentically bipartisan approach worth marshaling Republican pro-family interest around.

A Magic Update

For the first time in forever, or at least the last 14 years, Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom will be introducing a new ride that — get this — is specifically aimed at families with young children rather than “Disney adults.” Piston Peak National Park, which will replace the part of Frontierland that was formerly Tom Sawyer Island and the Rivers of America, was unveiled at the annual D23 convention. The family-friendly attraction will star a lesser-known character from Cars 3, and is apparently based on a similar ride in Disneyland Paris.

Other updates from Orlando have not been kid-focused: an “incredibly twisted” new portion of the park focusing on the villains of various Disney franchises is also set to make its debut before long (one wonders what Walt would have thought.) The park’s most recent brand-new ride, TRON Lightcycle / Run, was aimed squarely at the teens-and-adults thrill seeker demographic, amidst a shift towards pursuing consumers with more disposable income. The company’s not-so-secret pursuit of the ideal consumer willing to spend on premium upgrades and repeat trips, rather than the family making a once-every-couple-years special excursion, has been frequently criticized, but investors haven’t been complaining.

That a kid-focused ride is noteworthy, rather than standard practice, is an unfortunate commentary but we’ll take it as a welcome sign that families haven’t been totally forgotten in the long-range plans of the “Most Magical Place on Earth.”

These United States

• The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service proposed new rules that would eliminate the ability to access refundable tax credits such as the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit for certain immigrants, including asylum applicants and DACA recipients. They would still be able to claim the non-refundable portion of the credits.

• California: The school year is starting with new programs available to California school kids, including free pre-kindergarten for all four-year-olds, free school meals for every public school student, and expanded before- and after-school programs.

• New York: 500 families enrolled, while about 265 participated, in the first NYC Parents’ Night Out programming, a free drop-in babysitting for elementary school-age students initiative launched by Mayor .

• New York: Mayor Mamdani also announced the city will spend an additional $6.2 million to eliminate co-pays in the city’s child care assistance program

• South Carolina: The state legislature included $2.8 million in its budget to expand access to free school breakfast to all public school students in the state.

• Texas: The state’s Workforce Commission voted to cut about 14,000 slots, or 9.5% of the state’s total child care scholarships, due to the expiration of temporary funding and the impact of higher-than-expected inflation.

• Texas: The high-profile surrogacy case is putting a spotlight on efforts to reform surrogacy laws, with pro-life groups pushing for action ranging from a ban on commercial surrogacy to a ban on contract provisions requiring an abortion at the commissioning parents’ request.

• Vermont: Gov. Phil Scott (R) is touting his signature on a tax cut package that expanded the state’s child tax credit to families with kids up to 6 years old, up from 5, delivering a total of $3.6 million back to about 4,000 Vermont households.

Parting Shots

• In the wake of the Florida custody story discussed in last week’s Family Matters, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) promotes his SAFE KIDS Act with , which would make it illegal to enter into a surrogacy contract with citizens of adversarial nations, like China and Russia.

• offers some responses to common objections to her opposition to IVF (National Review)

• reports on why self-described conservatives have more kids than self-described liberals. There’s some selection at work, of course, but I wouldn’t underrate the impact that becoming a parent has on political ideology either — plus some of the other factors she unpacks. (The Atlantic)

• A new study finds that one in ten American men reported signs of cannabis use disorder in 2024. I’m sure that’s absolutely nothing to worry about and reason to open even more avenues to investors looking to cash in on the pot boom. (New York Times)

• A new paper in Demography finds that, on average, low-income moms experience a $2,097 reduction in annual earnings, spend six months out of the labor market, and are connected to the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program for eleven months and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for a year and a half after childbirth.

• Why does Texas build new housing, while California doesn’t? Hint: it’s not a big difference in zoning. explores the question for American Affairs.

• New Substack alert! A new organization, the Center for State Labor Innovation, has launched a new Substack headed by pro-labor voices such as , , and , which promises to share some unorthodox ideas for boosting worker pay and working conditions:

  Labor Innovation

  Exploring labor policy, worker power, and the coalitions needed to build sustainable models for the next generation.

  By CSLI

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

• Are You My Mother?: Surrogacy and the limits of reproductive autonomy

• Head Start’s Fresh Start?: The Trump administration’s new proposed rule

• Can Handyman Dads Fix the Birth Rate?: Two thoughts on Marc Novicoff’s Atlantic piece

• It’s Me, Hi: The Bulwark, Catholic Register

• These United States

• Parting Shots

Are You My Mother?

Our hot bioethics summer continues — we’ll get back to Congress’ latest child care approach next week. But while the politics of parenthood have always been fraught, the world of commercialized reproduction has opened up new fronts in ethical dilemmas that call out for better policy responses. Consider these headlines from just over the past month:

• In Florida, a surrogate who gave birth to triplets on behalf of a single Chinese man is suing for custody after she grew concerned about the babies’ welfare, as detailed in an excellent piece of reporting for New York magazine by ;

• In Ontario, Canada, a same-sex couple is suing their surrogate for “emotional distress” after she refused to undergo an abortion after an ultrasound revealed the baby she was carrying had a cleft lip and possible heart abnormality;

• And, in Texas, a court ruled that a surrogate-carried baby who had been diagnosed with a rare heart condition could be given life-saving surgery upon birth, against the wishes of the commissioning parents, who had wanted their surrogate to obtain an abortion and would have not have consented to surgery upon birth (the case is still ongoing).

All this comes on top of the flurry of investigative reports into the seamy side of the the global fertility industry, which, as the New York Times Magazine’s Sarah Topol reported last year, “has evolved by breaking procreation into different components — creating chains of reproduction, step by step, piece by piece, assembled to result in a baby…intended parents from China can import Ukrainian eggs or semen from Denmark, create embryos in Tbilisi and use Thai wombs to bear and birth babies before bringing a child home to Shanghai.”

For a long time, surrogacy was sufficiently rare for it to not garner much political attention outside religious conservative circles. But as technology advances, global travel gets cheaper, and the ethical questions raised by contract law seeking to cover the contingencies of pregnancy and parenthood become more common, we are well overdue for a policy conversation about which approaches — up to and including an outright ban on commercial surrogacy — would best protect mothers and the children they carry.

These kind of fraught legal cases — who gets to decide when a commissioned baby is no longer “wanted,” the commissioning parents or the mom who is bearing it? — are made possible when the law intentionally distinguishes between contractually-obtained and biological parenthood. For most of the 20th century, family law questions were brain teasers about purported paternity and trying to figure out who was responsible for the child a man and woman had created. Today’s family law edge cases can involve parties with no genetic relationship to the child in question. Blue states like Washington, Illinois, California, Michigan, and Hawaii, and more have changed family law definitions to allow for the establishment of legal parentage following gestational surrogacy even when neither commissioning parent bears any genetic relation to the child.

This is a different question than adoption, which asks what the best situation is for an already-born child whose parents are in no position to be able to care for it. This is about entering into a contract to bring a child into existence, which raises all sorts of questions about who should have the authority to make decisions when things go wrong (as they so often do.) The logic of treating children as consumer goods to be designed according to our desires and procured with the right to destroy a defective product leads us into the kind of legal regime that allows commissioning parents to direct their surrogate to undergo an abortion if they catch her on social media drinking a glass of wine during pregnancy, as happened in 2024.

Old-school feminists like Gena Corea and Janice Raymond used to criticize the practice of commercial surrogacy for, like prostitution, commodifying women’s bodies. You cannot treat the issue with any amount of seriousness without recognize there inherent power imbalance at play between wealthy commissioning parent and low- or middle-income surrogate moms — and that’s before you layer on the complication that one-third of surrogacy contracts are commissioned by foreign nationals (with China being the most common source.)1 Some of today’s leading feminist intellectuals, like , realize the need the practice be “very very very tightly regulated.”

Part of the reason why these regulations don’t exist is because activist groups aimed at “family building” don’t want them to exist. In our system of government, a motivated minority can achieve policy wins so long as opposition to the issue is not activated, and surrogacy has been insufficiently common to have not garnered widespread opposition — so far. But another part of the reason is that those on the center-left have tended to distrust those on the right, who would prefer much wider restrictions on the practice (and the distrust tends to go both ways.) To pass legislation regulating the current wild west that is our system of commercial surrogacy would likely require an alliance of social conservatives willing to not get everything they wish for and feminists willing to work with partners on whom they disagree vehemently on other issues.

Part of the problem with commercial surrogacy, in particular, is that it is most heavily utilized by wealthy, politically engaged individuals and couples who swim in elite circles — some have genuinely tragic circumstances that prevent them from conceiving naturally, and others have biological realities that prevent traditional conception. In order to regulate the excesses of the industry, policymakers would have to grant that there is a justification for limiting surrogacy because of the unavoidable imbalance between wealthy commissioning parents and surrogate, and the inherent risk for abuse in something as fraught as a contract for the delivery of a child. Any kind of regulation with teeth would place limits on the full range of autonomy to those who engage in commercial surrogacy, and thus signal their choice is something other than praiseworthy. That’s a normative stance too few on the left are willing to openly take.

On the contrary, progressives are much more comfortable with a framework of maximal reproductive autonomy — for the latest example, see Massachusetts, where Gov. just delivered on activist-led push to erase an upper gestational limit on abortions. Physicians will now be able to “terminate” a “pregnancy” beyond the 24 week limit that had previously been in place (though, as points out, even that limit had a number of wide exceptions, including “mental health.”)

The same 25-week-old fetus that would be born and treated with state-of-the-art NICU technology, if needed, in Nashua, N.H., would, a mere half-hour down Route 3 in Lowell, Mass., be subject to having its heart stopped by a lethal injection before being dismembered — with the legal limit being little more than the “professional judgment of the physician.” We are told that such a scenario is vanishingly rare (though the Lozier Institute estimates the number of abortions after 15 weeks gestation may total between 60,000 and 70,000 per year, something like 170 a day,) and that they are all due to the worst kind of fetal abnormalities and complications — “these babies were wanted,” as the refrain goes; right up until the moment they weren’t wanted anymore.

But the logic of maximal reproductive autonomy has nothing to say against an abortion at 33 weeks, just as it has nothing but affirmation for the choice of the single Chinese businessman to buy triplets from a woman he’ll never meet in Florida, or the right of the couple forcing their surrogate to undergo an abortion because they’re concerned about raising a child with a cleft lip. To some, it feels as if to admit that any of these cases are wrong or an unhappy outcome would raise too many questions about the underlying practice, and so affirmation is the only choice. If both sides have freely agreed to enter into a contract, isn’t that “reproductive autonomy”? That, in its own way, leads to a reproductive rights-inflected version of the “tyranny of the edge case” thinking that characterizes so much of the progressive left that explored in a fantastic essay for :

The Argument

Sometimes you have to hurt people

Phoebe Bridgers recently announced that her upcoming tour would feature “no phones” at all shows. Fans would be required to leave phones at home or lock them in Yondr pouches for the duration of the show…

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3 months ago · 477 likes · 66 comments · Jeremiah Johnson

“We can’t regulate against the worst abuses of the commercial surrogacy industry because it might imply judgment against those who have used commercial surrogacy” is this kind of thinking on steroids. (So, too, is “we can’t restrict abortion once a fetus is viable outside the womb because that would imply some abortions aren’t valid choices.”) Such cases may not make up a large share of commercial surrogacy arrangements, but they illustrate the weakness of our current autonomy-driven approach — whose autonomy should trump whose? Progressives unwilling to tackle the seamier stories of surrogacy gone wrong for fear of undermining their side’s ideological commitment to full reproductive autonomy ensure that more of these stories will continue to make headlines.

We can start to improve the way law treats commercial surrogacy — and the uncomfortable questions it raises about parentage — when we recognize that the bond between mother and child is something no contract is able to fully efface, and that treating women as incubators under contract to deliver a product rather than the figure whose heartbeat, voice, and body sustained the child in question for nine months is subjecting the most fundamental human relations to the logic of the market. This isn’t a wild, reactionary stance — many other countries, such as Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden already explicitly or implicitly prohibit commercial surrogacy.2

To rein in the worst excesses of commercial surrogacy run amok, conservatives may have to make peace with the fact that a new regulatory approach might not be their ideal. Laws that more carefully limited commercial surrogacy, with stronger safeguards for surrogates’ bodily autonomy and a presumption that she is acting in her child’s best interest, would likely be dissatisfying to those, like myself, who would like to see the practice ultimately banned. (Similarly, altruistic surrogacy, or the practice of bearing a child for someone else out of good will rather than as a paid service, has much more public support, probably because its rate of legal messiness is much lower). The nexus between commercial surrogacy and international birth tourism will continue to be the lowest-hanging fruit, politically, with more conservatives increasingly concerned about practices that make it possible for foreign nationals to procure a child who comes a with U.S. passport.

But progressives will need to acknowledge that a “reproductive autonomy” framework that continues to be pushed to its extreme, that says essentially no choice around procuring or avoiding a child can ever be subject to public scrutiny or regulatory interference, will continue to produce more of these complicated, horrific legal fights when the interests of the commissioning parents and the surrogate parents collide — and the interests of the child in question are, too often, ignored.

Head Start’s Fresh Start?

As mentioned in last week’s Family Matters, the Department of Health and Human Services recently announced sweeping changes to how the Head Start program is regulated and administered. It’s been greeted with cheers from some conservatives, for whom the program has been a long-time target,3 and lamentations from some progressives, who see Head Start as a sterling example of Great Society paternalism aimed at improving outcomes for low-income children.

To start with — the current Head Start regulations manual runs a cool 130 pages. I challenge anyone in Washington or any state capital to argue that a leaner, more focused set of regulations wouldn’t make the lives of Head Start officials or service providers easier, and a renewed emphasis on parental involvement shouldn’t strike anyone as beyond the pale. The question, from my point of view, should be closer to “did they get the balance of cutting regulation and ensuring proper support for low-income families correct?”, rather than “why is the Trump administration trying to ‘quietly dismantle’ Head Start?” And to answer that first question, we also need to ask “Is Head Start just child care, or should we treat it as more than that?”

At , argues that the problem with Head Start is that it “has never worked,” which I think gets ahead of the evidence. We have plenty of papers finding the apparent bump in test scores due to Head Start fade out (though perhaps not over the long run), and some of the canonical papers looking at sibling effects have their critics. My general read on Head Start is that it did have a measurable impact for the first generations of kids in the program. The kids who benefitted from the programs intensive, wrap-around supports in the 1960s and 1970s did so because the quality of the alternative care arrangement — often, at home with a low-income single mom unable to find steady work or cared for under a neighbor’s less-than-watchful eye — was often low.

But we’ve grown richer, fertility has fallen, and more child care and preschools offer more focus on enrichment than their predecessors in the 1970s and 1980s. As such, the relevant counterfactual for today’s Head Start participant may look very different from the one facing a poor child in the 1960s, and I don’t think we necessarily need to treat Head Start as sacrosanct. Despite the hue and cry from the advocates and interest groups that rely on Head Start funding, we probably don’t need quite so prescriptive an approach today as when the alternatives were fewer and further between, and the field of early childhood education less developed. But neither do we want to needlessly tinker with the program without being sure that the alternative won’t be worse.

My first impression of the Trump administration’s revision of the Head Start guidance is that they went about as far as they could go in stripping the program down to its bare bones; maybe, truth be told, just a touch too far. There’s nothing wrong with reducing some adult:child ratios and cleaning out administrative overhead. But their decision to essentially remove all of the federal government’s role in shaping local curriculum — such as the existing requirements to teach lessons in math and literacy and perform general health screenings — seems like a case of potentially throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and they may end up wanting to add back some streamlined version of the program’s top-down guidance and restore a limited version of its focus on whole-child well-being. Interestingly enough, they did acknowledge the value of having a federal role for guidance in their inclusion of MAHA-aligned physical education and nutrition priorities and requiring English-only classroom instruction.

Streamlining federal regulations does not need to mean eliminating them. Instinctively, I agree federalism is the right approach, but some federal guardrails feel necessary to keep some of its traditional and statutory emphasis on child development, anti-poverty interventions, and school readiness. Or, if the Trump administration would prefer to treat Head Start as something closer to any other child care program and get rid of its wrap-around service model altogether, there’s at least a case to be made there — but they’d have to make it to Congress.

Can Handyman Dads Fix the Birth Rate?

For The Atlantic, complicates the narrative around men’s household contributions and birth rates in a useful way. has been the loudest voice critiquing the over-reliance on cross-sectional comparisons in Claudia Goldin’s more recent work on declining fertility, and Novicoff’s piece will help readers think a little harder about the “if only men did more chores” school of fertility decline analysis. Two thoughts:

1. Novicoff’s empirical work is helpful but not, I think, the full story. For instance, it’s true that Novicoff’s chart below pretty clearly shows that places where male partners do more household work have just as many (or as few) babies as places where there is more of a gender imbalance. For instance, we do have evidence from Spain that longer paternity leave may actually be correlated with lower birth rates, possibly because dads realize how much work babies are and ratchet down their willingness to have another.

   

   But this is, by definition, selecting on the variable of men who are already in a relationship. We are now in a world in which women are — as I will continue to argue — selecting more on interpersonal characteristics than ever before, and marrying for personal and romantic compatibility over simply what Mr. Right may bring to the table economically. For example, cultures marked by machismo or traditional Confucian gender norms, where women are expected pull off a double-shift at home and at work, may be ones in which women are increasingly less interested in coupling off in the first place, and we have indeed seen some of the sharpest recent fall-offs in fertility in Latin America and East Asia. If our global fertility decline is most parsimoniously explained by people failing to couple off — and it is — looking at how housework is split by a given couple is less interesting than how much housework a woman expects a man to perform in order to be considered relationship material, knowing that she will likely end up bearing an asymmetric part of keeping the household running. And that expectation, I suspect — though am open to proof the other way! — continues to rise.

2. I’ve enjoyed ’s Substack, , and appreciate the work she has done to help her audience (broadly, from what I can tell, sensible progressives) talk about the contributions that dads make in a helpful way. If Marc, Darby, Lyman, and I were locked in a room for a day, I bet we could come up with some really great policies for helping families and celebrating parents. But in tracking down the numbers behind her Slate piece on dads’ contributions at home, Novicoff discovers that Saxbe’s numbers weren’t able to be replicated because she had relied on data compiled by AI that turns out to have been hallucinated. For a profession that relies on credibility, this kind of error needs to be recognized for the disappointment that it is. Part of the reason why this newsletter remains painstakingly artisanally-crafted, typos and all, is precisely because of my fear of this kind of scenario. Without The Atlantic giving Novicoff support to track down and double-check the numbers, we all — Slate readers, Saxbe herself, probably me — would have been operating under a false conception about what the data actually say. For those of us in the line of work of trying to better understand and explain the world, that should be one of the biggest pitfalls to try to avoid. Of course Saxbe won’t be the first, or last, to be misled by AI, but if we don’t all take this vignette as further evidence to be cautious, and always verify what our algorithmically powered research assistants may be serving up, we might not be as lucky as to have The Atlantic uncover where we’ve been led astray.

It’s Me, Hi

For , looks at the “Project 2029” child care plan that includes an at-home payment option for families that do not use formal child care. He has quotes from , Julie Kashen, and me expressing various levels of intrigue and curiosity into a plan that breaks from the traditional Democratic mold:

“It’s fascinating to see Democrats responding to what was always the conservative critique of universal child care programs—namely, that they don’t do anything to support parents who don’t want or need child care…If a presidential candidate picks this idea up, it could be a sign that the party really is starting to recognize some of its policy blind spots.”

The Bulwark

How to Break the Fifty-Year Stalemate on Childcare Policy

MILLIONS OF WORKING PARENTS struggle every day to find decent childcare they can afford. And it might not be happening if only Richard Nixon had signed legislation to create a comprehensive childcare system back in 1971…

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23 days ago · 453 likes · 92 comments · Jonathan Cohn

In her column for the Catholic Register in Canada, cites me and Lyman Stone as being among those who “certainly believe government can and should do something to encourage higher fertility.” Guilty as charged!

These United States

• The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced it will end any federal Medicaid and CHIP funding from going towards sex-rejecting procedures for children and youth.

• According to the Department of Education, 22 states have received waivers to use federal education dollars more flexibly, including six that have allowed waivers entitled “Returning Education to the States” which will allow them to experiment with new pilot approaches. (Stateline)

• A new report commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services, to which my EPPC colleagues and Rachel Morrison contributed, highlights the degree to which over 225 hospitals and health systems were able to profit from the expansion of sex-rejecting procedures, such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and plastic surgery, performed on children and young adults.

• Idaho: The campaign around the state’s upcoming vote on whether to eliminate restrictions on abortion has included some back-and-forth over whether the number of OB-GYNs has fallen in the state. There isn’t good data on the question. (Idaho Capital Sun)

• Michigan: Voters in Kalamazoo County approved a property tax increase by about $50 to $100 per homeowner to go towards a county fund aimed at increasing access to child care. (WOOD-TV)

• New York: Mayor has launched what his office is calling the “Emergency Microgrant Fund” for licensed home-based child care providers, allowing them to tap microgrants of up to $10,000 to address immediate needs.

Parting Shots

• My EPPC colleague has an essay arguing, perhaps counterintuitively, that “social conservatism is in a markedly stronger intellectual and cultural position than at any point in the last twenty or so years.” (Public Discourse)

• and join the chorus of conservative commentators, like , , and myself, criticizing the Trump-era GOP for its embrace of the industry of “vice” and what it will do to the fortunes of young men. (COMPACT)

• The Independent Women’s Forum has released a new report summarizing areas of family policy that deserve to be taken seriously, including sections by on paid leave, Heather Madden on child care, on education, on workplace flexibility, and more.

• Ian Frisch reports on parents who have run afoul of child protective services, or even arrested, for letting their children play or run errands independently. (New York Times)

• Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard has written a report on why the Quebec child care model continues to suffer from long waits and variable quality (Cardus)

• A new Zillow analysis finds approximately one-third of families with children under the age of 18 today are renting, and more than half of them are “rent burdened,” highlighting the “structural” affordability hurdle facing families.

• Joseph Davis, Michael Toscano, and Ken Burchfiel have published another installment of their series of reports on young men (Institute for Family Studies)

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

• Can Republicans Ditch Tariffs?: Evaluating the political and economic case for tariffs

• Qui Custodiet?: The culture of “optimization” comes for the nursery

• This Budd’s For You: Standing up to the pot industry and its backers

• It’s Me, Hi: Letter to Senate Commerce

• Parting Shots

Can Republicans Ditch Tariffs?

If you look at the trend of President Trump’s polling average, as compiled by , you can see a couple distinct moments in his second term where the elevator dropped a few floors. The initial highs of the second inauguration were almost immediately undermined by DOGE’s antics, though that coincided with an expected reversion to the mean following the post-election honeymoon. Then, in April, a sharp dip from “Liberation Day,” followed by a recovery as the most dramatic of the tariffs were rescinded. In late 2025, ICE’s aggressive enforcement tactics and the fatal shootings in Minneapolis led to another drop, as the opening of hostilities against Iran in the spring.1

The Trump administration seemed to have pulled the reins back on the shock-and-awe immigration approach following the blowback they received over the winter. The on-again, off-again attempts at a ceasefire in the Persian Gulf suggest they know that there, too, public opinion is not convinced by the argument that “we have always been at war with Iran.”

Then there’s the tariff regime, which, by all accounts, the President comes by his affection for honestly. In his 2011 book teasing a potential Presidential campaign, “Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again!,” Donald Trump proposed a version of his across-the-board tariffs that would come to characterize the initial Liberation Day attempts: “So here’s the deal: any foreign country shipping goods into the United States pays a 20 percent tax. If they want a piece of the American market, they’re going to pay for it. No more free admission into the biggest show in town—and that especially includes China.” For a politician who has proven deft at weaving between his various political commitments and stances, his belief in tariffs is earnest and long-standing.

The problem for the President is that having gotten a taste of what heavy tariffs do to the economy over the short-run, the American people have decided they find it unappetizing. As and talked about in their Silver Bulletin update earlier this month, “People really do not like tariffs. Liberation Day was the first big drop we had in the average, very early on, and tariffs are also now popping back up…I think if you asked the White House, they’d say, ‘Well, sure, people aren’t happy about the economy, it’s not fantastic, but we can kind of win them back with cultural grievance type issues.’ And it’s kind of almost the reverse, if anything.”

Politically, Republicans aspiring for Congress in competitive states or districts could probably make some headway by creating daylight on the tariff issue. “President Trump has been tirelessly trying new approaches to create good-paying jobs, which I fully support, but given the rising cost of everything, we have to pull out all the stops to bring down the cost of living and get rid of some of these tariffs.”

Some of the more true believers will still try to make the long-term case for the tariffs, arguing that due to the Supreme Court’s decisions or other exigencies the tariffs need to be given more time to take effect and truly usher in the Golden Age which has oft been promised. The steel-man case for a rethinking of free trade remains something like accepting the trade-off between lower consumer prices and the need to make supply chains more resilient, boost industries critical for national defense, or even just to shake up a sometimes sclerotic global status quo.

But a little over a year since “Liberation Day” and its aftermath, it’s worth spending a little time thinking about the costs and benefits of our new semi-tariffed kind of life. A symposium in the latest issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives analyzes the impact of the Trump II Tariff Regime from a number of different angles — and what they suggest is less “a worthwhile idea implemented haphazardly” than “a trade-off whose costs outweigh the benefits.”

One paper, by Harvard’s Gita Gopinath and U-Chicago’s , finds an exceptionally high pass-through rate of 92 percent for the 2025 tariffs — that is, for every dollar of tariff imposed, the price paid by U.S. importers rose by 92 cents, which subsequently gets passed through supply chains onto downstream firms and consumers.2 (“When a 10 percent tariff is imposed on an imported good, US importers appear to pay 8–10 percent more, including the tariff, for that good.”) They are careful to note that statutory rates often overstate the actual average tariff rate, and do their best to account for that in their paper. Once they make those adjustments, they find that foreign exporters are eating a very small share of the post-tariff price, with most of the increased cost passed on to American firms and consumers.

What did this do to household pocketbooks? The Tax Foundation’s and look at the distributional impact and find that “tariffs are regressive: the tax burden as a share of (­pre-tariff) after-tax income is higher for low- to middle-income households than for ­high-income households.” This isn’t surprising if you imagine a family on the lower half of the income spectrum as buying a higher share of trade-exposed and imported goods than higher-income families who purchase relatively more services and non-tradable goods (think a family who shops at Walmart vs. the upscale boutique).

Of course, the intellectually honest defense of the tariffs is to acknowledge that yes, consumer prices will go up, at least until domestic producers shift their practices, but it’s worth paying that cost because of the benefits to workers. We need an economy, we hear, that is optimized for higher wages for workers in American manufacturing and less around cheap consumer goods and services. Rafael Dix-Carneiro and Brian K. Kovak review the evidence for that claim in a more theoretical paper and suggest there’s no guarantee that tariffs will lead to better labor market outcomes: “protecting industries may benefit firm owners without necessarily benefiting workers.”

They point to a 2024 paper from the authors behind the initial “China Shock” work, which found that while domestic industries that benefited from tariffs did see an increase in sales, that did not translate to a statistically-significant increase in employment. It’s not that a tariff regime couldn’t theoretically boost the blue-collar labor market, in other words — it’s just that we should only expect any benefits to accrue to workers over the long-run, after firms and industries adjust to the new terms of competition. And the most recent job numbers suggest a weaker labor market is not in the position to bear such experimentation for long.

All that is cold comfort for all those tweeting about $20 burritos, and their sense that an administration elected to bring down the rising cost of living has instead pursued actions that are making the affordability crisis (or, “crisis”?) worse. Like the Iran war, our new tariff regime has relied on and been undermined by an extremely high degree of executive fiat and accompanying unpredictability, and characterized from the outset by a lack of clear communication around the trade-offs necessary to reach a particular goal.

The President will continue to make his case — with two years left in office and decades’ worth of commitment to the idea, he’s not going to be talked out of it now. In some respects, his flat 20% universal tariff idea from 2011 would at least be more predictable and consistent than the current ping-pong ball approach.

But Republicans running for office this fall need not tie themselves to the mast of a policy that is creating economic headwinds and failing to produce any political benefits. Creating strategic space from the mishandling of the tariffs — just as with the Iran war and the overzealous immigration enforcement — can help Republicans tack to the center and focus on what voters are most worried about. Far better to come up with ideas that take on the sense the cost of living is skyrocketing by expanding the economy’s productive capacity and removing supply-side constraints on key goods like housing and health care — and better yet, to mean it.

Quis Custodiet?

The team over at the American Compass Substack, , recently published a roundtable on the dynamics of parenting, pegged to Sapna Maheshwari’s New York Times piece on high-tech parenting, under the absolutely fantastic title “But Who Monitors the Baby Monitors?”:

Commonplace

But Who Monitors the Baby Monitors?

Perhaps the oddest thing about Sunday’s New York Times feature on the “Nanit” baby monitoring system was that all of its arguments in favor of the trend toward hypervigilant technology for babies kinda seemed more like arguments against. “I’ve gotten a little unnerved by how easy it’s become to outsource daily parenting decisions to technology,” writes…

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a month ago · 15 likes · 13 comments · Oren Cass

In the discussion, the new parents on the Compass team (mazel tov!) talk about their ambivalence, or outright unease, at the new trend of “hypervigilant” baby monitors — the $300 socks offering pulse oximetry tracking, the $359 baby monitor that promises “A.I. scheduled lullabies,” the $120 app membership that purports to offer “optimized nap predictions,”3 and the rest. It’s an industry perfectly calibrated to capitalize on the natural sense of “I don’t know what I’m doing” that every new parent experiences with the tech-empowered neuroticism of a generation habituated to obsessively track their Apple Watch sleep score.

As , Compass’ executive director, points out:

“It’s a glide path. You have to choose intentionally to seek out a different option like a low-tech baby monitor and be able to answer the question implicit in the marketing: why don’t you want the best for your baby?”

This question is at the heart of so many modern parenting trends, whether it be the $40 billion youth sports industry or the growing push for embryo optimization coming from Silicon Valley startups. “Why don’t you want what’s best for your future baby? Your toddler? Your 11-year-old shortstop? Don’t you know other parents are going to pay to ensure their children are going to have the highest IQ, the most high-enrichment early learning environment, the private tutor?” Whether it’s cause or effect of a low-fertility future (I suspect it’s a little bit of both — if parenting requires that level of intentionality and investment it’s hard to justify more than one or two), that mentality, and the tech that enables it, are embracing a view of human nature that sees it as something to be optimized, hacked, and improved upon. Yet what’s sold as peace of mind ends up creating neuroses of its own. (For more on a related theme, see ’s recent New York Times opinion piece on the “pathologizing” of ordinary life.)

There’s less a legal or political prescription one here than a cultural one — opt out of the culture of optimization and pursue a soft boycott of these types of goods until such time as our politics is ready for a hard one. If you find yourself contemplating whether you need an app to tell you whether you need to read your kid more books at bedtime, give yourself the gift of opting out and pick up “Goodnight Moon” instead.

This Budd’s For You

Lastly this week, Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) deserves a public shout-out for his work to uphold Congress’ intent in passing a law to ban hemp-derived cannabis last year, despite White House-led efforts to delay the date the restriction is scheduled to take effect.

As I wrote for COMPACT magazine at the time of the original ban, “While hemp is generally less potent than marijuana, it contains the same intoxicating chemical—tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. By using hemp to extract and create synthetic THC, companies [can] create products that contain even more highly concentrated substances than even natural marijuana could produce.” Last year, Congress voted to restrict the practice, recognizing that the loophole had, in effect, created an ersatz national legalization of some marijuana derivatives, often in packaging meant to appeal to kids and teens. The pot industry has been pulling out the stops to delay and ultimately repeal the legal limitation, and got President Trump to successfully petition Senate negotiators to include a delay in the government funding package being debated.

As the New York Times reported, “Complicating matters further is that the delay stands to benefit the son-in-law of Susie Wiles, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff. The animosity flared on Wednesday during a closed-door luncheon of G.O.P. senators, where James Braid, Mr. Trump’s legislative affairs chief, made the case for the provision and promised opponents that the White House would not seek any further postponements.”

It takes courage to stand against one’s political opponents on behalf of what’s right; it takes even more to stand against one’s political allies. By the time you read this item, it’s possible the Senate will have voted down Sen. Budd’s amendment — or, if saner minds prevail, passed it. Whatever the outcome, it’s a welcome sign that some Members of Congress remain focused on the well-being of their constituents in ways that go beyond the dollars investors stand to make. Sen. Budd and others on the Hill who are focused on protecting kids and young adults from addiction and other negative health outcomes are owed our thanks.

It’s Me, Hi

I was happy to co-sign a letter to the Senate Commerce Committee ahead of its vote on a package of bills on kids and tech, along with other conservative writers, advocates, and leaders. The letter read, in part:

“Parents, not government, are the primary stewards of children’s wellbeing. Our past advocacy demonstrates clear commitment to this principle. However, let us state it clearly and without equivocation here: The voices who tell you this principle means emerging technology should get free rein with our children do not speak for us!…

“Any measure advanced by the committee should build on state efforts to protect children, and any demand to grant preemptive immunity for emerging technology (especially generative AI) in exchange for ratifications of protections on other technologies should be emphatically rejected. States are standing with parents and children. Your committee must build on that work, not tear it down.”

It was co-signed by the president of the Family Policy Alliance and heads of the family policy institutes of Louisiana, Indiana, Arkansas, Montana, Alabama, Tennessee, South Dakota, Idaho, Virginia, Arizona, California, and other organizations, as well as Michael Toscano of the Institute for Family Studies, Tina Descovich of Moms for Liberty, and Corinne Brown (no relation) of the Child First Policy Center.

These United States

• Maryland: Parents in Baltimore County are leading a grassroots pushback against school-issued laptops (Baltimore Banner)

• Michigan: House Speaker Matt Hall continues to advocate against the Rx Kids initiative, accusing the program’s backers of pursuing a guaranteed-income agenda. “They give you this free cash and there are no strings attached by definition…This is a progressive left-wing experiment toward basically a universal income.” (Fox News)

• New Hampshire: HHS officials have told the state that their proposal to use $15 million in TANF dollars to pay for child care employees’ wages and benefits is not an allowable use of the federal funds (New Hampshire Bulletin)

• New York: The Center for New York City Affairs’ new report on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposed child care program would cost about $9 billion annually, with an average cost per child of around $27,000, higher than the estimates being touted by City Hall.

• New York: My EPPC colleagues Eric Kniffin and Rachel N. Morrison filed a public comment challenging aspects of the state’s new assisted suicide law, including how it conflicts with federal civil rights law and directs physicians to omit the actual cause of death on death certificates

• Pennsylvania: Some midwives now say they are worried they have no legal standing to work and deliver home births after lawmakers repealed the state’s 1929 midwifery law, and are suing over the changes (Philadelphia Inquirer)

• Texas: Unlike other prior statewide Democratic campaigns, James Talarico’s campaign has not yet run an ad focusing exclusively on abortion this year, and his campaign website downplays “social issues” for economic ones. (Washington Post)

Parting Shots

• The Department of Health and Human Services has announced sweeping changes to how the Head Start program is regulated and administered.

• The Department of the Treasury announced new guidance around tax credits for employers who provide paid family and medical leave, including expanded eligibility and coverage, such as allowing employers to claim the credit for premiums paid for paid leave insurance and for some part-time employees

• President Trump signed a pair of executive orders taking narrower aim at birthright citizenship and birth tourism than the actions struck down by the Supreme Court earlier this year, including a provision that seeks to increase restrictions on foreign nationals seeking to obtain visas for the purpose of giving birth in the United States.

• What happens when surrogacy contracts go wrong? A Florida case might bring more attention to the messy world of international surrogacy and the need for reform (Wall Street Journal)

• The Senate Commerce Committee unanimously advanced the Kids Online Safety Act, setting up a potential clash with the House over a “duty of care,” and voted 15-13, along party lines, to advance Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) Act, which would enact age verification requirements on websites hosting explicit content, but the bill failed to advance because the committee lacked a quorum

• My EPPC colleague weighs in on the “common good” debates that swept the right over the past week: “In my view, man is not made for autonomy alone, and a politics that pretends to be neutral about the human good is not neutral; it is merely smuggling in an account of the common good and disguising which good it is serving. As always, the question is not whether, but which common good will dominate.” (Daily Wire)

• writes on some tax code changes that could expand the supply of single-family homes on the market, such as expanding the capital gains exclusion and loosening some inheritance issues. The challenge, of course, is that these changes would largely benefit older and wealthier incumbent homeowners; but, conversely, that could make them easier to pass. (Niskanen Center)

• The advocacy group “Care Can’t Wait” will launch digital ads against Republicans in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona, reports Semafor’s . I do wonder if they are likely to prove decisive in a general election or more effective at polarizing Republicans against “care” spending.

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

• On Assisted Reproduction, Full Speed Ahead is the Wrong Speed and the Wrong Direction: A review of Leonard Lopoo’s “Wanting Children”

• Housing as a Moral Issue: Catholics should get a little more YIMBY-pilled

• It’s Me, Hi: Politico, National Catholic Register, Relevant Radio, EWTN Radio

• Parting Shots

On Assisted Reproduction, Full Speed Ahead is the Wrong Speed and the Wrong Direction

The entire caucus of Senate Democrats recognized “World IVF Day” by re-introducing their co-sponsored Right to IVF Act, a bill that would “promote the right and ability of an individual residing in any State to choose to receive ART or IUI provided by a health care provider who chooses to provide such services.” The bill would prohibit states from regulating the fertility industry beyond the current “Wild West” levels of federal regulation, require public and private insurers to include ART and IVF coverage in their benefits packages, and take other steps to remove limits on and expand access to assisted reproductive technologies.

The push may or may not be a smart move politically — while IVF access tends to have high levels of support on paper, it appears to move very few voters on the margin. But beyond the potential political payoff, it’s striking to see progressives blowing past the ethical questions around the future of human reproduction in the name of a maximalist, “reproductive autonomy” view of fertility. Recent high-profile foul-ups within the fertility industry indicate a field that could benefit from closer regulatory scrutiny, not the equivalent of a federal shield law protecting them from any state efforts to rein in bad actors.

But beyond the way the business of fertility is practiced now, we are entering brave new territory in bioethics. The next wave of assisted reproduction technologies have the potential to fundamentally change what it means to be a parent, or to procure a child, indelibly — something that deserves prudence rather than “full speed ahead.” Technologists tell us we are on the cusp of polygenic screening for intelligence, health, and cosmetic appearance; in vitro gametogenesis, or the process of making eggs out of skin cells; and AI-enabled embryo screening or even genetic enhancement. Yet the whole policy conversation around “protecting IVF” feels like legislation written for 2007 rather than 2027. Shouldn’t now, more than ever, be a time to favor prudence and humility in how policy treats the pursuit of parenthood, rather than Congress ham-handedly seeking to codify individual rights in ways that could pre-empt any future attempts at guardrails?

The same blind spot can be seen in a new book by Leonard Lopoo, an associate dean at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. “Wanting Children: Family-Planning Policies and the Engineering of America’s Population” picks up on some threads that pro-life conservatives have long critiqued. The federal focus on population policies, which flowered in the early 1970s with the establishment of Title X and other family planning approaches, were largely grounded in the assumption that the problem facing America would be low-income women having too many children. Lopoo is right to question how the conventional wisdom of yesteryear ended up looking stale with the benefit of hindsight.

Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg accurately, albeit infamously, characterized the decision in Roe v. Wade as reflecting “concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” Lopoo quotes President Richard Nixon, recorded on the White House tapes, telling advisors in 1972 that “The people who don’t control their families are people that — the people that shouldn’t have kids.” In its report released the same year, the U.S. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, led by John D. Rockefeller III, encouraged the American people to “challenge the tradition that population growth is desirable.” They looked at higher fertility among minority women and prescribed a simple diet of more closely following middle-class norms: “Those who have not been able to climb onto the socioeconomic escalator have also not adopted the pattern of smaller family size...Those minority people who have ‘made it’ into the system have adopted the small-family pattern. The problem is that so few of them have made it.”

Lopoo is quick to use these examples to argue for the “original eugenic intent of these programs” — that the idea that racial minorities and low-income Americans needed to curb their fertility in the pursuit of national prosperity was, in large part, misguided Malthusianism. He’s not wrong to note that some of our more coercive efforts to more strictly limit welfare spending to single moms — at times, directly, through “family caps” which froze benefit increases to low-income mothers who had additional children while on welfare — was grounded in this mindset. Today, he argues, “our choices have created a de facto fertility policy that only supports low-income women if they want to limit their fertility.”

Unfortunately, Lopoo overcorrects the other direction, captive to the conventional wisdom of today’s academic class. The second part of “Wanting Children” is a full-fledged endorsement of a universal commitment to public provision of artificial reproductive technologies (ARTs):

“Universal coverage of infertility supports within this family-planning structure would not only lead to greater social welfare; it would also move the United States closer to a society in which all Americans, regardless of social class, have the freedom to time, space, and have the number of children they desire, which includes the decision to have none. Viewed from another side, this same policy approach would bring the United States closer to a place in which more children are wanted. Research has shown that this end is justified by almost any means.”

“By almost any means”! That kind of sentiment should always be approached with extreme caution.

Conservatives, particularly those concerned with low birth rates, sometimes have an awkward tight rope to walk between wanting to support families (and lower abortion rates) and recognizing that kids do best when they are not being born into poverty or single parent homes. A concern with second-order effects (would more generous welfare benefits increase single parent families? would expanding subsidies for ARTs ultimately lower birth rates by inducing more women to wait until later, when odds of conception are lower? would stressing responsible parenthood raise abortion rates?) has long been a hallmark of family policy on the right.

Lopoo and the Right to IVF Act’s many sponsors would blow past those notes of caution. “Wanting Children” is a serious but incurious book — it treats long-standing political objections to single parenthood, and traditional conservative critiques of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) lightly, when it deigns to acknowledge them at all.

First off, while some of the energy behind welfare policy’s anti-natal turn may have been authentically eugenicist, surely no small energy came from the genuine belief — misguided or not — that poor kids would do better, overall, with fewer siblings, and that part of policymakers’ attention should be paid towards helping single parents enter into stable marriages. Secondly, making IVF and other ARTs an “individual” right, rather than a service that couples benefit from jointly, would absolutely increase the number of kids born to and raised by single parents, particularly if it was made available with no cost-sharing, as Lopoo suggests.

And, most damningly, the book unthinkingly adopts a professional-class mindset to family planning, in which every child should be “planned” and “wanted,” even if some are “mistimed.” Lopoo grounds much of his case for proactive fertility policy in “wantedness,” assuming that the biggest problem is that too many children are “unwanted” — roughly 13 percent, by his calculations. That motivating principle may have been the case when Title X was passed in the 70s; that seems less true today.

For one thing, women today appear more deliberate about conception; in the 2010s the rate of unintended pregnancies in the U.S. fell from 42.1 to 35.7 per 1,000 women over the span of less than a decade, as more women opted for more effective methods of contraception and the overall level of sexual intercourse fell. For another, an “unwanted” child is rarely an “unloved” one; if Lopoo has never met a family that had a wholly unplanned pregnancy turn into an unexpected bundle of joy, he should get out more. A system that is designed to only welcome children when they are comprehensively and deliberately “planned” will be one with fewer children than people want and one less accommodating of life’s happy accidents.

To counterbalance the traditional focus on fertility-reducing policies, and enable all families to enjoy the sense of control — illusory or not — that ARTs offer to the wealthy, Lopoo advocates for universal coverage of ARTs, on equity grounds. Currently, he notes, only New York allows Medicaid recipients to use their benefits for ovulation-stimulating drugs, and no state covers IVF. He would like to see something like the Right to IVF Act, including state-of-the-art genetic testing available for all recipients. After all, he suggests, wealthy parents are going to continue to adopt these technologies — he cites a study finding the share of IVF patients using preimplantation genetic testing rose from 5 percent of patients in 2015 to 43 percent in 2019. In so doing, he acknowledges, we would be “trading a [currently] health-inequitable system for one that is individually eugenic.” Eugenics, so long as it is freely chosen, is the price he is willing to pay when the only other alternative is a top-down eugenics softly imposed by government policies.

But…surely there is another option or two on the table? He rules out cutting funding for federal family planning programs, straightforwardly asserting that it would “violate the role of government, which most social scientists believe is the maximization of collective well-being.” Talk about assuming away a lot of good-faith disagreement about the means and ends of government! But, for the sake of argument, put aside the constitutional questions about the proper role of the state and assume Lopoo is right to be concerned about anti-natal pressures in the federal government’s current provision of contraceptive and family planning resources. Why wouldn’t we start by expanding the suite of benefits — fertility awareness, better evaluation of and treatment for endometriosis, more conversations about careers that are amenable to family life — before assuming an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” approach to controversial technologies like preimplantation genetic testing and designer embryos? After all, the ethical questions raised by new technologies do not go away by making them universally accessible.

In fact, Lopoo and progressives concerned about inequities in health access could start by taking a page out of the Trump administration’s book — as covered by for last week — and seeking opportunities to revise sexual education, Title X, and other family planning dollars to make it easier for women to both avoid and achieve their fertility goals.

The Free Press

What if the Right Is Right About Sex Ed?

“Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die” is an iconic line from Mean Girls. It is also a devastatingly accurate portrayal of American high school sex education in the decade or so leading up to its 2004 release—a moment when society was still reeling from the twin epidemics of AIDS and teen pregnancy, and a plurality of people still held to the now-quaint opinion that sex outside of marriage was the purview of sinners and sluts…

Read more

a month ago · 154 likes · 222 comments · Kat Rosenfield

America tends to be a deeply practical nation, not a philosophical one. But choosing not to ask these deeper questions is as much of a way of answering them as coming down with a carefully considered legal regime. No legal guardrail about human cloning or gene editing will be completely impermeable, but the genie is not so far out of the bottle that we can’t design better approaches to hacking reproduction than the current light-touch approach. Some of the champions of the “Right to IVF Act” doubtless see human nature and the limits of biology as constraints to be overcome. Others — perhaps the majority — are more likely to think about sympathetic cases of couples experiencing infertility, and think the legislation will help them without a thought to the long-term consequences. They owe it to themselves to take a second look.

Treating the issues raised by new technologies — including the increasingly popular integration of AI into questions of reproduction — could look something like a new commission proposed by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and (D-Ga.). Their proposed Human Dignity and Emerging Technologies Act (bill text) would establish the United States Commission on Human Dignity within the legislative branch to advise Congress on the ethical and policy implications of emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI). At National Review, Wesley Smith pays tribute to the idea of a commission that might take up the bioethical issues that the White House’s current Tech Right-guided race to AI supremacy seems to be too often neglecting. I’m confident the Commission wouldn’t necessarily get to the right answers — but it would at least be a more serious approach to these questions than pretending they don’t exist, or brushing past them in the service of “pro-natalist” or “health equity” concerns.

Housing as a Moral Issue

This article by the National Catholic Register’s Jonah McKeown does quote me, but it’s too good to tuck into the “It’s Me, Hi” section below. The article looks at the increasing pressures on housing affordability as a moral issue, talking to theologians and policy analysts (yr. obdt. svt.) about what happens when a lack of housing growth leads to more young adults feeling unable to get their life on track:

“Housing is directly tied to family formation and in that sense tied to what it means to be able to call people to mature, grow up, and become contributing members of a community,” said Patrick Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who has written extensively on the social impact of housing unaffordability…[F]inancial pressure created by housing is almost certainly causing people of all ages to “put their lives on hold,” including delaying or forgoing parenthood and staying in their parents’ homes well into adulthood, Brown said. (National Catholic Register)

I was happy to talk about the thesis behind the piece and some of my own work on the topic with on his radio program, The Drew Mariani Show on the Relevant Radio Network, for a lengthy discussion about housing and family policy.

I also spoke with Teresa Tomeo for her radio program, Cultural Connections, on the EWTN Radio Network:

It’s Me, Hi

Politico’s Alice Ollstein talked to me about whether a new study looking at whether chemical compounds related to the abortion pill might be found in the water supply might change the politics of abortion:

“One study isn’t going to make or break the case, but it can change the conversation,” said Patrick Brown, a fellow with the anti-abortion think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center. He pointed to scientific advancements around fetal development in the 1980s as ultrasounds became more common as a catalyst for the movement’s success banning a commonly used surgical method for abortions later in pregnancy. (POLITICO)

These United States

• Indiana: Curt Smith, chairman of the Indiana Family Institute, praises his home state senators, Todd Young and Jim Banks, for advancing legislation to materially support families (Northwest Indiana Business Magazine)

• Kentucky: Following Covid, Gov. Andy Beshear relaxed restrictions on Medicaid coverage of substance abuse programs. A new report finds Kentucky now has more per capita long-term treatment slots than any other state — coupled with a troubling pattern of fraud and skyrocketing state spending (ProPublica/Lexington Herald-Leader)

• Maryland: This fall, Baltimore residents will be asked whether to establish a $15 million fund aimed at enhancing the economic wellbeing of families with newborn children - though the details are intentionally left open-ended (Baltimore Sun)

• Massachusetts: The House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow abortions after the 24th week of pregnancy. The Catholic bishops of the state say they are praying for “a renewal of reverence for every human life,” and advocating against the bill in the state Senate (Boston Pilot)

• Tennessee: Deputy House Speaker Jason Zachary writes against “radical pro-life abolitionists,” calling them a “threat to the very movement they claim to want to advance,” and stresses the pro-life gains made in the state and the need to materially support pregnant moms. (Chattanooga Times Free Press)

Parting Shots

• My EPPC colleague argues that New York City’s progressive politics around gender means that Mayor Mamdani’s latest parents-night-out initiative should be looked at with extreme skepticism — I disagree! (The Federalist)

• My EPPC colleague shared her personal journey with EWTN’s The Coming Home Network:

• Senators (D-Ariz.) and (R-Ky.) introduced the “state of Men’s Health Act,” which would direct the Department of Health and Human Services to establish an Office of Men’s Health (bill text)

• Few writers are as convincingly dyspeptic about the future of AI and human achievement than . His latest, for COMPACT, is no exception.

• Every night, at midnight, the sisters of the Bethlehem Priory of St. Joseph near Tehachapi, Calif., rise to pray for those in need. “Just as the mother rises in the middle of the night, so we rise.” A beautiful piece of reporting by Lauren Jackson (New York Times)

• Jessica H. Brown, an assistant professor of economics at the University of South Carolina, speaks to New America’s about her work debunking common measures of child care availability and developing more accurate measurement techniques: “I find that child care desert status does not predict whether providers have open slots…if our measure of child care access is not accurate, [public] funds may not go to areas most in need.”

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

• Saving Women’s Sports: Conservatives have gained real ground by defending Title IX, making this an odd time to propose undermining it

• EPPC Comment on Fertility Benefits: Weighing in on the technicalities

• Hot Town, Summer in the City: New Urban Institute on the end of “creative class” development strategies

• It’s Me, Hi: MADE WITH CARE, The Family Frontier

• Parting Shots

Saving Women’s Sports

One of conservatism’s most popular and high-visibility political victories over the past decade has been protecting women’s sports from those who would redefine it for political ends. That makes this an exceptionally odd time for some conservatives to start attacking the very law that protects women’s sports in the first place.

There’s little question the right is winning on the women’s sports issue. Sophie Cunningham of the WNBA’s Indiana Fever went viral earlier this year for an instantly-memeable clip of her pointing at her opponent for a full 22 seconds during a game. More recently, Cunningham went viral for another reason, telling an ESPN reporter that “I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

Even three or four years ago, Cunningham may have had her roster slot or livelihood threatened. But the vibe, as they say, has shifted. Progressives have found themselves on the wrong side of public opinion on athletes who identify as transgender females participating in women’s sports, with examples from the swimming pools of the University of Pennsylvania to high school tracks in California to Olympic boxing rings to wrestling mats in Washington state causing national debates over how far the playing field should be tilted in the name of “inclusivity.” The International Olympic Committee has already revised its framework of eligibility around women’s sports to respond to the shifts in public opinion. It’s not just Bob Costas who calls the kind of policies that limit participation to biological females “common sense;” even ESPN loudmouth Stephen A. Smith also backed up Cunningham’s recent remarks.

“When it comes to just protecting young girls in sport and women in sport, I feel very strongly about that,” Cunningham said in a follow-up interview. “That’s why you have Title IX. That’s why you have some of the greats in women’s sports. If Title IX and women’s sports weren’t protected, then you wouldn’t hear about any type of women in sport.”

While the national sports media, which tends to skew left, will doubtless continue to harangue Cunningham, Democratic politicians who have to chase the median voter are showing signs they recognize the kind of maximalist position on trans athletes favored by many gender activists is unpopular. As reports in his recommended Americana newsletter for Semafor, Iowa Democratic candidate for governor Rob Sand has called the state’s restrictions on biological males playing in women’s sports “settled law.” In Ohio, gubernatorial aspirant Amy Acton has taken fire from some LGBTQ activists unhappy she told a local newspaper she “doesn’t support boys playing in girls’ sports.”

Conservatives can give themselves a well-deserved pat on the back. A fundamental conservative tenet is that biology matters, that sex differences matter, and that an ideology that allows self-identification to trump the physiological differences between men and women is one that allows sports to become a field for ideological contests rather than purely athletic ones. On this, we are winning. Indeed, a claim could be made that the battle to protect women’s sports is one of the most popular right-of-center causes in recent years.

Just last month, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the influential religious liberty public interest organization, celebrated one of its many significant wins at the Supreme Court in an important case around youth sports laws. “Today’s decision affirms what common sense and the law have long made clear: States have the right to designate sports teams based on biological sex, not gender identity. Without that delineation, Title IX is turned on its head, and decades of hard-fought progress to advance female athletes is erased.”

They were entirely correct to celebrate the outcome in State of West Virginia v. B.P.J., in which the Court ruled 9-0 that Title IX allows states to protect female athletes through sex-specific sports. That even the most liberal justices in the court joined in the conventional conservative reading is worth noting; and also makes this an exceptionally odd time for a new report from a major conservative think tank to seek to kick the legs out from under Title IX, the law that, more than anything else, kickstarted the growth in women’s sports.

In a lengthy report for the Heritage Foundation, senior research fellow Scott Yenor argues that Title IX’s promise of athletic equality between men’s and women’s sports should be seen as “a powerful engine of feminist social engineering.” He critiques the 1972 law, signed by President Richard Nixon, as having artificially limited scholarship opportunities for male athletes. The framework, he suggests, hoped that by “cultivating daring, risk-taking, physical dominance, and a desire for victory, athletics would prepare women for careers, leadership, and independence rather than homemaking and motherhood.” Yenor positively cites Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, who worried that female bodies were not “‘cut out to sustain certain shocks,’ and their poor performance would diminish the spectacle of sport.”

To address the feminist attitude towards high-intensity sports he worries creates “a less deferential, more confrontational female character,” Yenor proposes allowing universities to move away from elite-level female competition and instead to count opportunities in “group fitness classes, dance, yoga, recreational intramurals, hiking clubs, and the like” as Title IX-eligible activities. In a follow-up op-ed for COMPACT magazine, Yenor blamed Title IX for the U.S. Men’s National Team’s disappointing loss to Belgium, claiming the federal government’s requirement of equal athletic scholarships for men and women led to fewer elite-level soccer players wearing the stars and stripes in the World Cup.

Now, listen, we all wish the U.S. had gone further in the tournament, but that last argument simply rests on faulty analysis; the best soccer players are identified by soccer academies and elite travel programs by the time they’re in high school, and an American national soccer program newly reliant on men’s college soccer to fill out its ranks would be one that performed worse, not better, at the World Cup.1 But more importantly, his argument rests heavily on the idea that women do not want to seek elite-level athletic competition, but are being incentivized to do so by the unholy matrimony of feminist scholarship and federal rulemaking.

I do not think that is true. We can celebrate and affirm the differences between men and women without seeming to suggest that the girls and women seeking opportunities to play amateur and professional sports are suffering from a bureaucratically-imposed false consciousness. Progressives are the ones who have paid obsequious lip service to women’s sports as a political gesture while undermining that commitment by shrugging their shoulders when a natal male wins contests or races that should have been limited to women. Conservatives who suggest women aren’t actually interested in playing high-level sports could be accused of a similar lack of respect.

Moreover, I certainly do not think a pivot from “Title IX is protecting women’s sports” to “Title IX needs to be drastically overhauled” makes a ton of sense for the conservative movement, particularly now, given the political — and substantive — success of championing the institution of high-level women’s sports as something worth defending.

Right-wing antipathy towards Title IX and women’s sports is certainly nothing new. But in an era where the right has taken on the mantle of ensuring women can play at the highest level, the calls to “protect women’s sports” will ring truer, and be less open to claims of political cynicism, if conservatives evince real interest in collegiate and professional women’s sports.2 Or, if that’s too much to ask, conservatives could, at a bare minimum, avoid undermining them. (For instance, Yenor proposes allowing universities to exempt revenue-generating male sports from its calculation of Title IX compliance figures, a move that would almost certainly hollow out most Olympic sports — both men’s and women’s — virtually overnight.)

By my lights, there’s nothing wrong with observing that women’s basketball is, in many respects, a different game than the men’s — often more reliant on passing and offensive schemes than individual playmaking. It’s fine to prefer the high velocity pitching and towering home run balls of Major League Baseball to the newly launched Athletes Unlimited Softball League. Most people are going to prefer flipping on an NFL game on a Sunday afternoon rather than a collegiate soccer game (either women’s or men’s). And there’s no rule that says you have to like the NCAA women’s basketball tournament more than the male version (but you should at least give the final few rounds a try.) There may even be some room for thoughtful Title IX reforms that ensure women have plenty of athletic opportunities without incentivizing colleges to overstuff crew and rowing rosters simply to achieve parity on paper.

All this can be true and still conservatives can cheer for letting the girls play. Instead, every time a conservative cracks wise on Twitter about only watching beach volleyball for the skimpy uniforms, a podcaster yawns at coverage of the women’s World Cup tournament, a Barstool Sports writer guffaws about sex toys being thrown onto a WNBA court,3 or, yes, a think tank scholar proposes drastically undercutting Title IX, it undermines the right’s credibility as a movement interested in protecting women’s sports as opposed to simply using it as a convenient political cudgel.

Conservatives are winning meaningful victories for common sense, and attracting converts, by successfully pushing back against those who would instrumentally utilize women’s and girl’s sports to advance a particular ideology about gender roles and womanhood. They should absolutely avoid making the same mistake in the opposite direction.

EPPC Comment on Fertility Benefits

My EPPC colleagues , Rachel Morrison, , , and Jamie Bryan Hall submitted a public comment to the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Treasury in response to a Proposed Rule that would establish certain fertility benefits as a new category of “limited excepted benefits.” I endorse their contributions whole-heartedly.

Last year, the Trump administration announced it would be creating a way for insurers to offer stand-alone fertility benefit package. As my colleagues point out, it’s unclear whether this provision is actually, as is often proposed, “similar to” vision or dental insurance, because the treatment in question has to involve addressing an underlying medical problem, not just anything related to the eyes or teeth.

Because fertility benefits are often treated as expansive, going beyond just addressing the root causes of infertility but seeking to address so-called “social infertility” (i.e., using surrogacy or donor gametes to conceive via a third-party), it is important for the federal government to delineate between these approaches to fertility care. To do so, my colleagues suggest that the three agencies:

• define the relevant “diagnosed medical problem,” infertility, and define it by pathology, not by outcome,

• adopt concrete mechanisms to enforce the diagnostic requirement, and

• confirm that plan sponsors may adopt ethical guardrails on assisted reproductive technology.

Undergirding this comment — and, indeed, much of the ongoing debate about fertility benefits — is the question of whether the purpose of these medical interventions is addressing improper functioning of reproductive organs and processes to allow for healthy conception, or using technology to circumvent biology and remake our social conception of parenthood along lines favored by progressive activists. Anyone interested in these questions — particularly anyone working on them within the Trump administration — should start by reading my colleagues’ contribution.

Hot Town, Summer in the City

A new report by the Urban Institute’s Lydia Lo highlights a trend that , , and I have all been gesturing at over the past decade or so — the “creative class” strategy of urban development, that assumed a steady stream of 20-somethings streaming into hip enclaves, might be reaching an end, and cities that want to get serious about population growth and affordability need to be thinking about attracting and keeping young families.

As Lo writes, “Core cities that flourished over the past twenty years have leaned heavily on highly educated, prime working-age adults without children for economic growth.” Now, the piper must be paid. Millennials have entered their years of prime family formation and are moving to the suburbs for more space and better schools; future cohorts will be smaller (possibly forever.) International migration, another driver of urban population dynamism, has dried up. And the rise of remote work and the legacy costs associated with older city infrastructure means that urban neighborhoods may be less attractive on a dollars-and-cents level.

Lo suggests the “right investments” can help “retain families (especially high-income families)”, suggesting that households with children have a higher local economic multiplier in their purchase of services like child care, education, and health care than childless ones do (they also cost cities more, however!) Her emphasis on affordable, family-size housing and family-friendly amenities is spot-on, as is her identification of schooling and public safety as a major factor in families’ location decisions. “[C]ore cities’ ability to retain families depends on the attractiveness of their economic opportunities and local amenities (i.e., housing affordability and size, environmental quality and green space, education quality, neighborhood safety, and child care offerings) relative to the attractiveness of the amenities in surrounding suburbs.”

Certain urban environments will always be able to charge a relative premium — but Lo’s argument that many cities that had been coasting on a kind of demographic dividend are now facing an inflection point seems indisputable. “Absent deliberate action, many core cities risk slipping into a self-reinforcing cycle of population loss and economic stagnation that will be far harder and costlier to reverse than to prevent.” Cities may feel like they can’t afford the kind of experiments and innovations Lo summarizes in her paper. But perhaps the better question is whether over the long run they’ll be able to afford not to.

It’s Me, Hi

summarizes the recent Zoom panel she hosted with me, , , and on her Substack Made With Care. My thoughts:

“No one who does this work does it out of some abstract commitment to humans in the vacuum, or the idea of care. It’s because we all have benefited from, and tried in our own imperfect way to hand on, the gift that we’ve received—of generous, attentive, well-meaning, not always perfect, but doing-their-best parents and family members. When we’re born, those are the relationships you cannot choose. In our liberal, individualistic society, we have such a high premium on everything being chosen—opting into this, finding my identity there—and family is a radical obligation that, except in cases of awful, extreme abuse or neglect, you’re stuck with.”

MADE WITH CARE

ROUND-UP: There is Some Surprising Bipartisan Consensus on Family Policy

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a month ago · 15 likes · 5 comments · Elissa Strauss

And Haspel cites our recent co-authored brief at his own Substack, The Family Frontier, in his conversation about the right-wing freakout over New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for free babysitting programs for parents of elementary-age kids.

These United States

• California: Public school teachers will now have up to 14 weeks of paid parental leave after Gov. Gavin Newsom changed his stance on the provision.

• Colorado: Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has announced a task force aimed at delivering universal childcare within the city.

• Connecticut: A new report from the Bipartisan Policy Center applauds the Nutmeg State’s “fiscally responsible, sustainable investments in family-focused policy,” including paid leave and a baby bonds program. Note carefully that half of paid leave claimants are for personal sick time off work, whereas pregnancy/childbirth makes up less than one in six of the total number of claims.

• Washington: State lawmakers reduced spending on a state-funded preschool program; but a different assistance program focused on low-income families will grow by as many as 10,000 slots over the next decade due to philanthropic support from the Balmer Group.

Parting Shots

• The Senate HELP committee approved a slew of family-oriented health care bills, including the Rural Obstetrics Readiness Act, which seeks to improve maternal health care in rural parts of the country by providing training, equipment, grants, and telehealth support for obstetric emergencies.

• As some Republicans celebrate numbers that show a decline in SNAP participation, Jason DeParle profiles some of the 440,000 Arizonans (nearly half of the original total) who have seen their SNAP benefits dropped since the signing of the One, Big, Beautiful Bill (New York Times)

• A handful of states refuse to participate in the CDC’s Abortion Surveillance System. In response to a question from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), CDC director nominee Erica Schwartz said in her confirmation hearing that “Abortion surveillance is absolutely a critical component of what the CDC is currently doing.” (Jezebel)

• France has become the first country in the E.U. to pass a law banning social media for children under the age of 15 (CBS News)

• My EPPC colleague speaks to the National Catholic Register about her upcoming book, “No Contact: How a Seductive Ideology Broke Families and Friendships and How We Can Repair Them.”

• “Democratic voters are not thinking about abortion,” reports NOTUS’ , with the number of abortion-related campaign ads falling as the Dobbs decision recedes and the cost of living takes political precedence.

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

• The Family-Friendly Skies (Congress’ Version): Making airplane travel more parent- and kid-friendly

• Dipping into the SIPP: New data on diverging American childhoods

• By Your Leave: Boozman and Gillibrand team up

• It’s Me, Hi: Reason

• Parting Shots

The Family-Friendly Skies (Congress’ Version)

Family Matters has previously cheered the roll-out of “Families on the Fly,” a TSA initiative to pilot family-friendly security screenings at a small batch of airports that tend to serve a large number of flyers with kids. The initial reviews have been positive: by giving families traveling with kids 12 and under their own designated lane, families get more help with folding up the stroller and dealing with the recalcitrant three-year-old who doesn’t want to walk through the magnetometer (what, just mine?) while other less-encumbered travelers can look forward to a more streamlined security experience. Assuming there is infrastructure and staff present to ensure both standard and family lanes are processed efficiently, it’s a pro-family win-win. Under Secretary Sean Duffy’s leadership, the Department of Transportation has stepped up as well, launching a $1 billion campaign last year to expand amenities like airport play areas and nursing rooms for moms.

Now, Congress is getting into the act. This week, the House of Representatives passed the “Improving Travel for American Families Act,” co-sponsored by Reps. Ryan Mackenzie (R-Pa.) and Valerie Foushee (D-N.C.). The bill would require the TSA to build on its Families on the Fly initiative for two years, prioritizing airports with high volumes of family travel and looking at ways to improve the passenger experience while maintaining security standards. The bill passed by a resounding 398-12 majority, with ten Republicans and two Democrats voting against it.

I’ll be blunt: This is a very nice bill and the Senate should pass it as soon as possible, and President Trump should sign it shortly thereafter!

“As the father of two young children, I know firsthand that the existing TSA screening process creates an added layer of stress for families already navigating the challenges of travel,” Rep. Mackenzie said in a press release. “Parents must wrestle with strollers, bags, and young children while trying to move through security lines that were not designed with families in mind.”

That kind of intentionality is too often missing in Washington. Of course, not every family flies, and not every trip to the airport is a hassle. But this is the kind of practical, common-sense approach to giving parents a little forbearance in our public spaces that we need more of. (We should also tip our cap to Secretary Duffy’s efforts to make travel great again, which have included some family-centric messaging, such as encouraging travelers to help pregnant women put their bag in the overhead bin.) But it’s nice to see Congress taking some action as well, rather than relying on executive branch agencies to take up and formalize these initiatives on their own. After all, that is the way our constitutional order is supposed to work.

As the Families on the Fly initiative grows, we might imagine a dedicated partnership with the DOT’s campaign to expand amenities for families. More airport play areas and nursing rooms for moms, yes, but we could think bigger; free strollers to help families get from security to the gate; foldable cots at customer service areas to help toddlers get naps in during flight delays; a family-friendly lounge or two; or other, better ideas (feel free to submit your own!) Not every pro-family policy needs to be centrally planned; but if you’re operating a large (or small!) bureaucracy like the TSA, and you’re not thinking about what you can do to make the lives of the parents and kids you interact with better on a day-to-day basis, you’re missing a big opportunity to make America more family-friendly. Kudos to Representatives Mackenzie and Foushee.

Dipping into the SIPP

Family Matters readers come to this newsletter expecting the best in all that has been written and researched in family policy. This week, we’re taking advantage of that trust to give you something a little bit more provisional — a first cut at data from the 2025 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), a longitudinal survey that tracks family dynamics in a unique way. The SIPP’s primary purpose is for evaluating participation in and eligibility for government programs, and also asks some pretty detailed questions about financial well-being and assets. It also has a reputation for being a bit of a handful to work with, so I will ask the readers’ forbearance if this initial look at the most recent SIPP data didn’t get the replicate weights quite right.

Class differences in childhood

In addition to participation in government programs, the SIPP also asks parents about their child’s participation in various activities, including after-school lessons (like music, dance, or language), religious services or social events, or a sports team (in or out of school.) It’s perhaps not especially surprising that children raised by college-educated parents are more likely to participate in academic extracurriculars, but note that sports participation is even across the two groups. For this breakdown, we are looking at religious participation in one event or service a week or more. One other thing I’d point out: Kids being raised by parents without a college degree are 21 percent (7 percentage points) less likely to participate in a religious activity than participate in a sport.

We can also see some class differences in other aspects of family life as well — college-educated parents are 31 percent (18 percentage points) more likely to report having dinner with their children every night in a typical week than those without a four-year college degree:

Some of that is unquestionably driven by the higher prevalence of single parents among households without a college degree; they might be pulling a double-shift or working a service-sector job without much control over their hours. But it could also reflect different attitudes to technology or other distractions as well — I wonder if it’s another warning that, as University of Chicago pediatric surgeon warns in her new book, Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity & Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI, human attention itself could be on track to becoming a kind of privilege.

Financial differences in parenthood

One of the points I return to again and again in interviews and talks is the mathematical reality that parents bear certain costs that non-parents don’t — both in terms of diapers, carseats, and bigger cars, as well as in forgone opportunities to earn income or increase earnings. This is a major reason why I support expanding the Child Tax Credit, upfront assistance for new parents, and other ways of shouldering the financial burden of raising the next generation.

One simple illustration of this imbalance is simply looking at household balance sheets across the life cycle. What the graph below is showing us is the total value of household assets held at a financial institution (think savings and money market accounts, not illiquid sources of wealth.) Married couples without kids (DINKs) see a very healthy financial picture, particularly into old age — which makes sense, given they have two potential earners and no dependents. Married couples with kids start off with very low financial assets in their 20s and 30s (there is some selection here — families with a stay-at-home parent, who might be more likely to marry young, will have fewer earners and higher expenses) but by their 40s and 50s their financial picture starts to look pretty rosy.1 And, unsurprisingly, unmarried adults tend to see lower balances in their bank accounts, though single parents catch up to their childless peers as their kids leave the house.

Remember, this is what we might consider liquid assets, so it’s not the full financial story, but if we think of it as a proxy for “what’s readily available in case of emergency” it tells a certain story. One takeaway, for example, might be a greater interest in helping families time-shift more of their resources — recall then-Senator Marco Rubio’s proposal to allow parents to borrow from their expected Social Security benefits tomorrow to pay for paid leave today. Two other thoughts it might leave you with: a future with fewer marriages is one that will lead to greater financial precarity, and a culture that expects couples to delay having kids until they are financially “stable” and independent will lead to lower fertility rates overall.

By Your Leave

Lastly, a new bipartisan paid leave bill has been introduced, featuring a Republican Senator who hasn’t previously taken a leading role on the topic: Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.,) a former optometrist and the senior senator from the Natural State, has partnered with long-time paid leave stalwart Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) on a bill they are calling the “More Paid Leave for More Americans Act” (section-by-section here).

Structurally, it builds off the bipartisan IPLAN (Interstate Paid Leave Action Network) act introduced last year in the House, which would create a kind of interstate consortium oriented towards harmonizing paid leave laws across state lines, reducing administrative burdens for employers, and improving technical assistance for employees, employers, and insurers. The Boozman-Gillibrand bill supplements that approach with a three-year pilot program that would give states grants of up to $7 million to stand up a public-private partnership paid leave program.

The pilot program is a nice idea, though the parameters on it are probably too restrictive to get many states to buy in who don’t already offer some kind of paid leave already (in other words, it feels more likely this ends up subsidizing blue states’ paid leave offerings than inducing red ones to launch a new effort.) To get the funds, states would have to set up a partnership to provide a minimum of six weeks of paid leave (once a year) for new parents, family care, and personal leave, at a benefit of 50-67 percent of weekly earnings; that gets pricey (for reference, Minnesota’s comprehensive paid leave program has already paid out $600 million in its first year of operations.) Interestingly, the summary of the bill provided by the sponsors says it would allow DOL to give preference to states that provide paid leave benefits for the arrival of a new child, but that seems to conflict with the bill text’s comprehensive vision of leave and a national floor. If the bill does end up offering some flexibility for states to offer a more narrowly-defined benefit, it could provide an interesting opportunity for reddish-purple states.

Either way, it’s heartening to see new voices and perspectives bringing ideas to the table, and one could conceivably imagine a kind of interstate partnership and technical assistance paid leave package getting included in what is likely to be a divided Congress next year.

It’s Me, Hi

My most recent Family Matters update, on Finland’s intergenerational baby bond proposal, was included in Liz Wolfe’s roundup at Reason magazine.

These United States

• The number of abortion-related ballot amendments this November now stands at four: voters in Idaho, Virginia and Nevada will be considering moves to liberalize abortion law, while Missouri voters will be asked whether to bring back a version of state’s abortion ban (Associated Press)

• Georgia: A new law aimed at protecting kids - requiring child care programs to get approval from two state agencies before beginning background checks on new hires - is slowing the hiring process down and making it harder for providers to fill open positions (WMAZ)

• New Jersey: A temporary boost in the state’s Child Tax Credit will bring the value per-child up to $1,250 through next tax year — it still has a pretty less than optimal design, however (N.J. Spotlight)…Gov. Mikie Sherrill also announced a free website designed to help lower-income New Jersey families quickly apply for the state’s Child Tax Credit in 15 minutes or less (New Jersey Monitor)

• California: San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Danny Sauter wants to make public transit more reliable and safe for families (San Francisco Examiner)

• Kentucky: Lawmakers passed a pilot program authorizing child care “micro-centers” earlier this year, but Gov. Andy Beshear, unhappy with being turned down for a statewide universal program, signed an executive order mandating a pre-K for all pilot program in two counties at a cost over nearly $1.3 million (Lexington Herald Leader)

Parting Shots

• highlights the gap between some child care plans and parental preferences, and suggests people take a look at the proposals offered by the Bainum Family Foundation, which suggests “reimagining childcare policy to support two pathways for families: high-quality licensed [early childhood education], and “trusted caregivers” which include parents and [family, friends, and neighbors] caregivers.” (The 74 Million)

• The country of Turkey (Türkiye, if you watched any of the World Cup) has fined more than 100 OBGYNs for excessive C-sections, saying the nation needs to work harder to bring down its rate of C-section births, the highest in the OECD (SCMP)

• The regional government in Madrid, Spain, has introduced a law that would allow families to claim certain benefits linked to family size after the 14th week of pregnancy, causing reproductive rights groups to charge it is “an attempt to control women’s bodies” (Politico EU)

• After a two-year legislative battle, the parliament in France has voted to legalize physician-assisted suicide. Un vrai dommage. (New York Times)

• U.S. Senators Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-La.) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) introduced the Strengthening Transparency and Oversight to Prevent (STOP) Child Care Fraud Act, which would eliminate parental self-attestation of income, citizenship status, and other characteristics, and statutorily require attendance-, not enrollment-, based payments. States with high rates of improper payments will be at risk of having their block grant funds withheld.

• Is there a big city mimayor in America having more fun than ? His latest proposal is squarely aimed at parents, offering 500 families free babysitting for an inaugural “Parents’ Night Out.” (ABC 7)

• Fitch ratings finds that the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act will not affect the credit quality of U.S. single-family rental (SFR) securitizations, suggesting that the new legislation’s greater regulatory clarity “partially offsets” the constraints on open-market acquisitions.

• Senators Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Jim Banks (R-Ind.), and James Lankford (R-Okla.) have introduced a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds for depicting or describing sexually explicit content, gender dysphoria, and transgenderism. Bill text.

• My EPPC colleague has some interesting thoughts on the current dust-up between pro-lifers and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche during his confirmation hearings (National Review)

• Fascinating, if not fully persuasive, case from for on why age-gating the Internet will ultimately be a higher price for kids’ safety online than she’d be willing to pay. This idea behind this paragraph, however, deserves much more attention:

“YouTube is happy to help me restrict my kids’ viewing to YouTube Kids, which is full of algorithm-promoted hypnotic slop, but offers absolutely nothing to let me enable a bunch of content marked for adults (like documentaries, historians’ channels, or math videos) that I think are good. There are tons of tools to spy on my kids so I know whether they’ve been served gruesome videos of murders but none to just avoid gruesome videos of murders.”

The Argument

Jonathan Haidt is wrong about age-gating the internet

I grew up substantially on the internet, and while my school made a halfhearted effort to block the bad websites, it was comically easy to evade. This was good for me. I read a lot of blogs a…

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2 months ago · 155 likes · 36 comments · Kelsey Piper

• writes for The Free Press on the restorative reproductive medicine approaches that helped her become a mom — twice (mazel tov!):

  The Free Press

  Why the Left Hates the Medicine That Made Me a Mom

  Just over a year ago, I stayed up until 2 a.m. editing a story, because the deadline was harder than most: The writer, Madeleine Kearns, was on the brink of giving birth. And the story in question was about what she had gone through to bring her baby into the world. Many of you read—and loved…

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  2 months ago · 361 likes · 299 comments · Madeleine Kearns

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

• The Finn-ish Line: Standing athwart fertility doomerism, yelling “pysähdy”

• Can We Actually Regulate Vice?: Yes. Duh.

• Laudable Bicameral Bipartisanship: Joint letter on discrimination against the disabled and elderly

• It’s Me, Hi: Washington Examiner, The 19th, Washington Post, Civitas Outlook

• Parting Shots

The Finn-ish Line

Finland (Suomi, in the native tongue) is considering one of the most innovative ideas for tackling the decline in births. Could America get there first? We’re not as far away as you might think.

For a decade, the biggest battle was to get people to take the fertility decline seriously. Lots of people thought birth rates would bounce back, or that it was just a temporary dip as people had more choices, or that immigration would cover up any decline in native-born fertility. But it increasingly feels like just as the world is taking falling birth rates more seriously, we’re skipping right to the stage where we throw up our hands and declare there’s nothing that can be done about it, or that the “cure would be worse than the disease.”

In National Review last April, I took on this increasingly-prevalent defeatist mentality:

“One flavor of feigned helplessness comes from places like ABC’s The View and other peddlers of pop progressivism. Childlessness, in this telling, is a rational response to the predations of late-stage capitalism (or patriarchy, or racism, or cis-heteronormativity, or fill-in-the-oppressor). You have the gall to sit there and tell people it’s okay to have kids? On a planet that is literally burning? In this economy?…

“[Meanwhile,] many conservatives correctly observe that low birth rates aren’t caused by the out-of-pocket cost of child-care or anxieties du jour like climate change, but this can slip into a kind of fatalism. Why tinker with the gears and levers of policymaking when the only things that ultimately matter are religious beliefs and cultural behaviors that are, appropriately, beyond the state’s direct influence?

“The fatalist attitude partly reflects political reality: a coalition that disproportionately caters to older voters is necessarily going to find it hard to prioritize ideas aimed at younger, less dependable voters. But limply gesturing at the black box of “cultural change” in lieu of a responsive policy agenda is throwing in the towel before the opening bell—like Ned Flanders’s parents in an early episode of The Simpsons, they’ve tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas.”

When it comes to birth rates, America is both in a more enviable position than most of the developed world and also has not particularly begun to fight. One of the countries that has, in fact, begun to fight has the population of South Carolina, the GDP of Utah, and shares a border with a country currently engaged in belligerent military actions. If the Finns can start to get serious about fertility decline, why can’t we?

Finland already offers a fairly generous suite of child and family benefits, including a universal child benefit (with higher amounts for young children), a baby box (or, optionally, cash payment) with infant supplies offered at childbirth, parental leave, expansive funding of child care plus a home care allowance for parents who opt out of using child care, and a heavy focus on sports and community centers to ensure a wide availability of youth activities.1

But while those provisions may make life easier for parents — a laudable enough goal, in my opinion — they have not proven sufficient to insulate Finland against the broader decline in fertility, and the collapse of the theory that the Scandinavian model would be enough to sustain birth rates. For most of the 1990s and 2000s, Finland and the rest of the Nordics had fertility rates noticeably higher than the European average — no longer.

To address this, Väestöliitto, the Family Federation of Finland, has proposed what they are calling the Intergenerational Baby Fund, or vauvarahasto. The approach mixes a little bit of upfront spending with a focus on the “desired/realized fertility gap,” and applies the magic of compound interest to supersize a “baby bonus” approach to increasing birth rates.

Under this proposal, the Finnish state would create a €5,000 account ($5,710 in current US dollars) for every child born in Finland, which would then be invested in an index fund, not dissimilar to the newly-launched Trump Accounts. But whereas the Trump Accounts are, essentially, a retirement account (the funds can’t be touched until age 59½, with some penalty-free withdrawal exceptions like paying for college or making a first-time home down payment), the vauvarahasto would be directly tied to fertility. When that child grows up, and one day gives birth to their own child (so long as they still reside in Finland), they unlock access to the accumulated balance of the invested funds. If they do not have a child by age 45, the money gets recycled into the investment pool.

In other words, even assuming a conservative real rate of return, a couple from Rovaniemi expecting their first child a few decades hence would be sitting on a €26,000 “baby bonus.” That’s half of the current median household income in Finland (a comparable payment in the U.S. would be equivalent to about $40,000). Compared to the $2,000 and $5,000 baby bonus proposals that have been floating around in the ether, that’s a pretty hefty willingness to support — or, if you prefer, incentivize — potential parents who might be newly willing to take the plunge.

Because it takes time for the principal in the fund to grow, Väestöliitto also proposes a near-term stopgap, giving first-time parents €5,000 upfront, with a €2,000 payment for second children and €500 for third births. By 2046, they estimate, the first fund recipients would begin having children and the payouts would begin, with the interim payments gradually being phased out in favor of the full amount by the 2060s.

It’s an improvement on Trump Accounts, which largely benefit parents who have the means to put their extra disposable income in a long-term savings account. By contrast, the Finnish program would be egalitarian — “a fund share is opened for every child born in Finland regardless of income level.” The program also — laudably — scales the benefit per parent, rather than strictly per child. Even in socially progressive Finland, Väestöliitto’s proposal would, appropriately, reflect the importance of involved fatherhood and scaling benefits by the number of individuals that make up the household.

You could imagine a line of critique going something like this — why do we need to create the individual “share” approach, relying on compound interest and delayed gratification, when we could be funding such an approach out of general revenues? Or, barring that a sovereign wealth fund?

The first objection is dealt with simply; the dollar amounts that would be necessary to meaningfully bump fertility rates up are likely out of the range of most budget-constrained governments (that is to say, all of them.) Remember — it’s not that pro-natal incentives don’t work; it’s that they’re very expensive. Assuming away the potential impact of AI, end of capitalism, or heat death of the universe, putting aside money today will make it easier to afford pro-family incentives tomorrow even given an aging population and an expensive welfare state.

I’m not convinced there is a solid policy rationale for making the shares individualized, rather than a collective “Intergenerational Wealth Fund” that pays out a given amount at the prescribed time, but it does fit nicely into the precedent created by Trump Accounts. Politicians are celebrating Trump Accounts for helping young people “buy in” to the concept of free market capitalism and stock ownership; all the more should they celebrate the same concept applied to the work of shoring up the family as the building block of a healthy civilization.

The lowest-effort way to adopt this mentality would be to tweak the Trump Accounts structure to increase the amount new parents could withdraw from their retirement plans to say, $15,000 per parent, up from the current limit of $5,000. It still wouldn’t be good enough, given the way that Trump Accounts (and other savings-based vehicles) mostly benefit parents who have excess disposable income (and whose heirs, presumably, won’t be hindered by finances when considering starting a family as much as those whose parents came from more middle-class backgrounds.) Those who didn’t have much to put into the accounts in the first place, obviously, wouldn’t benefit much. But it would be a start. Ultimately, a long-term wealth fund approach, coupled with upfront cash assistance to today’s parents on top (or in lieu of?) the Trump Account seed money, would make sure we weren’t pitting people’s retirement security against their fertility goals.

The Institute for Family Studies’ and propose adopting the vauvarahasto approach on steroids. They would like to see $17,000 in up-front seed funding, and then following the Finland example along most parameters (they would, for example, shift the window of eligibility to ages 21—50.)

Lyman Stone

We Should Have a Mega-Baby-Bonus

At the Institute for Family Studies I and my intrepid associate at IFS Peter Foreshaw Brookes have just released a new article, the major annual report for the Pronatalism Initiative, foreshadowing some key themes we will be working on this year…

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2 months ago · 49 likes · 58 comments · Lyman Stone and Peter Foreshaw Brookes

I don’t think you need nearly that amount of up-front capital to harness the power of this idea, and I’m not as convinced as Stone and Foreshaw Brookes that the possibility to push low-income households over various thresholds to make them lose safety-net benefits is a feature rather than a bug, one that could be avoided by making the disbursal non-taxable income. But the general principle is sound and deserves to be added to the quiver of pro-family ideas that we could pursue if only Mike Pence (and, in fairness, many other Republicans) had the courage.

Can We Actually Regulate Vice?

Other people summarize family-related white papers more reliably and more in-depth than I do (shoutout to ’s “Family Stuff” for doing so on a weekly basis!) but every once in a while a new NBER working paper is too juicy not to spend a bit of time on.

We often hear that attempting to legislate against vice, like drugs or sports gambling, is pointless because the demand is, essentially, perfectly inelastic. If we make it harder for people to access vice legally, the argument goes, they will just turn to the black market to get their fix — and possibly even end up worse off than under a regime of toleration.

That is quite silly on a theoretical level — do we really think that making sports gambling legal in most states didn’t lead to an increase in demand for the product, and that making it illegal (or only legal in-person rather than on an app) would correspondingly reduce demand? But a new NBER working paper from Matthew Brown and Devin G. Pope of the University of Chicago and Emily Davis of the University of Notre Dame find — unsurprisingly, by my lights — that putting age restrictions on sexually explicit content online leads to lower levels of consumption. In other words, even with VPNs and various other work-arounds, age verification reduces online porn consumption on the margin.

They are able to compare internet usage between the states that have adopted age verification and those that haven’t, and find that about these restrictions reduced overall time spent on adult websites by about 10 percent. As the below chart shows, when Pornhub — one of the largest explicit video providers — shut down in protest of state age verification laws, overall usage fell by a statistically significant amount, even accounting for users switching to sites that didn’t comply with the state’s law. They find that time spent on adult websites fell in states with these laws relative to those without “by roughly 0.5 minutes per machine, which is 8% of the baseline mean.”

They point out that “technological circumvention and substitution toward alternative providers muted the impact of access restrictions on overall consumption. These results highlight that the design and enforceability of online regulations matter for their ultimate impact.” The point is well taken; but it also points out that even leaky restrictions can have an impact on casual use of content that has socially negative externalities. A finding worth taking into consideration as age verification and youth engagement with technology continue to be debated in Congress and elsewhere.

Laudable Bicameral Bipartisanship

Most letters from Members of Congress go unnoticed; but one should inspire some hope for bipartisanship and recognition of human dignity. Senators James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Reps. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) and Luis Correa (D-Calif.) joined on a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to monitor assisted-suicide programs for discrimination against the disabled and other vulnerable adults.

“There are grave informed consent issues within physician-assisted suicide,” the Congressmen write. “An individual with terminal illness meets the definition of a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In fact, individuals with disabilities and disability civil rights groups have raised this argument and alleged physician-assisted suicide laws violate federal disability rights laws in litigation across the country.”

They also point out, logically, that “Physician-assisted suicide undermines America’s national posture of suicide prevention,” and that the U.S.’ laudable efforts to expand mental health resources to those considering taking their own life sits uneasily with advocates’ political and legal movements to remove guardrails from physician-assisted suicide programs.

The authors encourage Secretary Kennedy and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz to “establish reporting requirements within hospice programs regarding physician-assisted suicide,” including monitoring for

• Discrimination against individuals with disabilities, older adults, and other vulnerable populations;

• Proper disposal of unused medication and prevention of drug diversion;

• Insurance denials of life-sustaining medical care that offer to cover physician-assisted suicide drugs instead;

• Drug complications;

• Consistency of drugs prescribed “off-label” for use in physician-assisted suicide;

• Compliance with federal restrictions on using funds, directly or indirectly, for health care items or services for physician-assisted suicide.

These are common-sense protections aimed at preserving human dignity in its final stages. The economic and autonomy argument for assisted suicide will continue to gain steam as the Boomers age, but there’s no reason why an effort to ensure that the elderly, disabled, and infirm are treated with respect needs to be a partisan issue. Kudos to the four Members of Congress for coming together for a bipartisan, bicameral letter on this topic, with hopefully more to come.

It’s Me, Hi

I spoke to of the Washington Examiner about the nomination of Chris Klomp as deputy HHS secretary, and why it will be important for him to work with social conservatives in his new role:

“I’m sure that someone with Klomp’s experience is familiar with the concerns that the pro-life movement has had with the Trump administration’s lack of action on their priorities,” Brown said. “It will be essential for Klomp to hear pro-life concerns about actions that could cheapen how the federal government treats unborn human life.”

And I spoke to of The 19th about the political fight to defund Planned Parenthood, and why the math of a razor-thin Congressional majority and a White House reluctant to devote political capital to the issue meant the one-year ban expired:

“At the time people were hungry for something that they could spin as a political win for the pro-life cause, and it wasn’t like it was nothing — but it was kind of the lowest-hanging fruit,” said Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative think tank the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “I can’t say I’m terribly surprised that even that low-hanging fruit is not able to be plucked again.”

My 2023 Public Discourse piece on the social capital-enhancing aspects of sports was cited by in his Washington Post piece (citing Michael Novak!) on how he became a convert to the social utility of belonging to a community of sports fans.

For Civitas Outlook, engages with the proposals laid out by me and , suggesting that his solution to uproot and eliminate the welfare state would be better.

These United States

• Michigan: House Speaker Matt Hall (R) is leading efforts to prevent the state from using TANF dollars to fund an expansion of its Rx Kids program to support pregnant and new moms (WEMU)

• North Carolina: The state house approved the “Tax-Free Family Essentials Act,” which would exempt diapers, baby wipes, and feminine hygiene products from state and local sales taxes (WBT)

• Washington: The Seattle Times profiles Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) and her efforts to relax regulations around food preparation in child care facilities

Parting Shots

• Alice Miranda Ollstein covers the discontent among pro-lifers that the one-year funding ban on Planned Parenthood was not extended (POLITICO)

• profiles ’ work to expand awareness and availability of root cause approaches to addressing infertility (New York Times)

• Two important stories about a grassroots pushback to screens in classrooms: Madina Touré for POLITICO and for the Wall Street Journal. "Screens Down, Pencils Up” is a message just waiting to become a rallying cry.

• “The women of Scandinavia might take paid leave and universal childcare for granted, but a lot of Americans would be thrilled to see such policies implemented—and with more possibilities open in front of them, may be eager to take advantage. But they’ll want a good man along for the ride.” sounding like a conservative (!?) in Slate

• Potentially valuable boost in state capacity: Newborns can now be enrolled in Trump Accounts when their parents apply for Social Security Numbers (New York Times)

• Megan O’Rourke criticizes some of the more colorful ideas included in the Institute for Family Studies report on cultural change (Reason)

• A nice reported piece from Claire Cain Miller on the newfound flexibility that remote work has given parents (New York Times)

• Vietnam is now exploring baby bonuses as a way of shoring up its declining fertility (SCMP)

• Arizona has reduced the number of SNAP recipients by half, or nearly a half-million including 200,000 children, with the intention of curbing fraud but while also removing some eligible families from the rolls, reports Hannah Knowles and Mariana Alfaro (Washington Post)

• This one’s more just for fun: Every parent knows their child can’t live without fresh berries. Julia Moskin explores the economics of the industry and its biggest player, Driscoll’s. (New York Times)

• My EPPC colleague continues his Substack, Confirmation Tales, with an interesting dive into the politics and jurisprudence around abortion at the time of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation in 2009:

Ed Whelan’s Confirmation Tales

Sotomayor and Abortion, Part 1

The role of abortion in the politics of Supreme Court confirmation battles changed dramatically over the decades, from the defeat of Robert Bork’s nomination in 1987 to the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination in 2020. Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation battle in 2009 provides revealing signs of the transformation that was underway…

Read more

2 months ago · 7 likes · Ed Whelan

• In her Bloomberg column, explores the pros and cons of eliminating cost-sharing in maternity care:

Abby McCloskey

No-Cost Birth Is a Bipartisan Idea

Childbearing in America isn’t cheap. For most families, the costs start accumulating right away, with prenatal appointments, ultrasounds and blood tests. One in five pregnant women will also need miscarriage treatment…

Read more

2 months ago · Abby McCloskey

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

O Beautiful for Patriot Dream

As a number of opinion polls continue to show, Millennials and Gen Z self-describe as less patriotic than previous generations, and there’s no shortage of theories as to why. They’re more cosmopolitan and secular than their predecessors, taught history with a greater emphasis on critical theory and identitarian understandings of the American story. Some of them graduated into the teeth of a recession and experienced a lagging economy through many of their formative early professional years. Culturally they’re more into irony and relativism than even the most jaded members of the Baby Boom, who may have burnt their draft cards but sang out “This Land is Your Land” with Pete Seeger.

That young professional-class progressives might have a view of America heavy on the critique isn’t surprising. But at times, certain strains on the “New Right” have hit surprisingly similar notes. In the first Trump Administration, you didn’t have to go to that many D.C. happy hours to hear young men happy to unleash their inner “American Carnage” riff, decrying a country being torn apart by opioids, the China shock, or what we would come to call “wokeness” run amok. The whole “post-liberal” flirtation had a lot to do with people seeing a country that seemed to care too much about GDP and too little about family ties and community.

You can get something of the conservative sense that everything was spiraling out of control in a 2023 essay by Michael Anton for the Claremont Review of Books:

“Our predatory elite would be bad enough. But it’s made exponentially worse in being the cause of so many other evils: crumbling infrastructure, dirty and dangerous cities (that’s to leave aside the ones that are all but abandoned), falling life expectancies, sky-high “deaths of despair” from substance abuse and suicide, crashing birth rates, soaring crime, two-track “ justice,” the de facto criminalization of self-defense, and so much else that even the attempt to list it all would exhaust every page in this issue…If you think America 2023 is in good shape, that is ipso facto proof that you lack sense.”

Three years later, even given the purported dawn of America’s “Golden Age,” our country still has any number of problems we could list. But from this Millennial’s perspective, at least, so much of the carping about the exhaustion of the American experiment and the need to fundamentally reorient our politics, economy, and constitutional order feels increasingly tone-deaf, exhausted, and shrill.

There has been nothing that has stuffed any passing post-liberal fancies back in the bag quicker than comparing how America has bounced back, by and large, from any recent number of challenges better and stronger than any other nation on earth. Despite post-Covid inflation and self-inflicted economic turmoil, our economy remains the envy of the world, with innovative companies and surprisingly robust job and wage growth. Our politics, though frustrating, can get the job done when push comes to shove1, and our many veto points check at least twice as many bad ideas as they do good ones. Despite the many illiberal excesses of Floyd-era “peak woke,” the “vibe shift” has helped restore a culture of freer speech than any number of our purported peers — we can openly pray outside abortion clinics, criticize the President, question accepted orthodoxies around gender, and defy the attempted dictates of public actors in ways that feel unthinkable elsewhere. And for all the (correct) concerns about declining family formation, fertility, and religious adherence, America remains in an enviable demographic position relative to so many developed nations across the West and East.

I suspect, and hope, Millennials will exhibit less resentment and more patriotic fervor as they (we) enter firmly into middle age. More of us will be able to buy a house; more of us will have kids; more of us will take over for retiring Boomers (…eventually) and feel more bought into the system. Maybe we can even solve some of the perennial problems facing an aging society and a polarized people. But even with all that ahead of us, it seems almost churlish not to approach our semiquincentennial with anything other than gratitude for what America is and has given to us, and the knowledge that the world would be a poorer, quieter, less vibrant, less free place if it wasn’t for the United States of America.

I’ve even been alive for less than 15 percent of American history. But I’ve called enough different regions of the country “home” across my life — born in California, raised in the Pacific Northwest, college in the Midwest, early professional years up and down the mid-Atlantic, and now living in SEC Country — that I’d like to offer, if you’ll permit me the indulgence, a short reflection on America’s unfinished symphony in its many hues and tones.

America is the Santa Monica waterfront, the Jersey Shore boardwalk, the Chicago River, the Mississippi Delta. It’s Wall Street, Sixth Street, Peachtree Street, Beacon Street, Market Street, Beale Street, and any number of Main Streets. It’s Charleston red rice, Maine lobster rolls, hash brown casserole at a Midwest potluck.

America is the farmers, truckers, and line cooks who get the food to the diner counter, and the wait staff who make sure your coffee mug is always topped off without asking. America is a cash-only car repair place and a no-cash latte bar operating out of a former car repair place. It’s a weekend of Friday night lights, Saturday afternoon tailgates, a fiery sermon on Sunday and no small amount of Monday morning quarterbacking. It’s the city that never sleeps, my kind of town, dirty water, the bluest skies you’ve ever seen, another perfect day, the Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River…

In America, our national meal is a grilled hot dog with ketchup and yellow mustard on a white bun. But you can also have tacos for breakfast in Austin, pho for lunch in Orange County, and Alaskan salmon for dinner in Seattle — all in the same day, if you want.

America is a Ford pickup truck on a moonlit Texas highway and it’s a red convertible cruising with its top down as the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean. It’s a NASCAR race. It’s a Harley-Davidson. Sometimes, it’s even a Tesla.

America has given us Mark Twain, the post-it note, Coca-Cola, the baseball cap, and more world-changing inventions and innovations than you can count. It’s given us the cotton gin, the bachelor’s degree in Exercise Science, the mortgage-backed security, the social network, suburban sprawl, the Colt .45, the single-use plastic straw, the pink lawn flamingo, and other inventions with complicated legacies but that we couldn’t imagine modern life without. America has colonized nature through air conditioning and suburbia, and distance via a national highway system and a reliable and affordable system of cross-continental air travel that everyone who tweets plaintively at an airline about a missed connection absolutely takes for granted (myself included.)

America’s quintessential art form is the Broadway musical, from “The Music Man” to “Hamilton,” but our greatest cultural export is the blockbuster motion picture: “Gone With the Wind,” “Star Wars,” “Titanic,” “The Avengers.” America is felt in the hometown connection of the Green Bay Packers, the glitz and glamour of the Los Angeles Lakers, the — as much as it pains me to say it — legacy of excellence of the New York Yankees.

America is Duke Ellington and George Gershwin, Bob Dylan and the Beach Boys, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Tupac Shakur, Madonna, Nirvana, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift. It’s Babe Ruth and Ken Griffey, Jr., Mark Spitz and Michael Phelps, Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles, Mike Eruzione and Jack Hughes.

It’s Carrie Nation and Carrie Bradshaw and Terry Bradshaw and Terry Crews and Tom Cruise and all our other great men and women and great con artists (who are sometimes the same person). After all, our most American of idols are the self-starting, big-talking showmen who change our culture by giving us something we’ve never seen before: P.T. Barnum is America, Ray Kroc is America, Steve Jobs is America — and yes, Donald Trump is America, too.

Certain names still prove our mettle. Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, the Bulge, Normandy. There’s Gemini, Apollo, Challenger, Artemis. Washington and Lincoln, of course, but we also remember Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Rick Monday, Pat Tillman. America is “I can hear you,” “nothing to fear but fear itself,” “tear down this wall,” “yes, we can,” and — second only to E Pluribus Unum as a national motto — “let’s roll.”

Sure, we have the worst form of government — except for all the others that have ever been tried. Yes, we’re the people who you can count on to do the right thing — only after we’ve tried everything else. We’re a country whose many social problems and stresses tend to come not from the fact that there’s not enough to go around, but because we are so unfathomably wealthy that we are all too often seemingly chasing after the same higher-order goods. We are at risk of losing the guardrails that yoked our pursuit of profit to the pursuit of happiness, and our tremendous prosperity threatens our cherished ideals of egalitarianism. Housing is too expensive, health care is too complicated, too many regions remain economically adrift and too many young men and women feel like a middle-class life feels unattainable, even if the numbers suggest a more complicated story. We’re brash, we’re loud, we’re too often shallow, too quick to look for a chance to make a buck, polarized to the point of enmity, with all the growing pains of the most racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse democracy the world has ever known.

And yet despite — or, sometimes, because — of all that, we keep on chugging. We remain free to pray, to speak, to publish, to assemble, and even to petition the government for redress of grievances. Our alabaster cities and purple mountain majesties gleam because there’s no other country in the world that offers us the freedom to put our talents to use, and use them we do. Even as the digital revolution threatens to call into question what it means to be human, I put my money on the U.S. above any European bureaucrat or Chinese commissar to figure something out because when the chips are down, we organize, we scheme, we pray, we innovate.

When you’re abroad, nothing makes you more homesick than a glimpse of the stars and stripes, and when you’re home, nothing makes you want to defend her excesses more than a European trying to convince you relative poverty is actually a sign of societal advancement.

In any country with 330 million people, there will be some bad eggs, bad neighborhoods, and reasons for gloom. America’s past — and its present — has had enough of bad politicians and foolhardy policies to prove, once and for all, that God really has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America. But there are other times to focus on the things that divide us and those that need to be fixed.

As our nation reaches the quarter-millennium mark, it’s impossible to look at our material blessings, our cultural patrimony, and our political freedoms, and not feel a surge of gratitude at the tremendous, unearned blessing of being an American. How could we ever take for granted the richness of this land, the generosity of its people, the ingenuity of its problem solvers, and the brilliance of its founding? To look at what’s been built over the past two-and-a-half centuries should leave us humbled. And to reflect upon our nation’s accomplishments, and its promise, should renew and undergird all of our efforts to improve our imperfect union.

Happy birthday, America. Here’s to 250 more.

America, America
God mend thine every flaw
Confirm thy soul in self-control
Thy liberty in law

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

• This One’s for the Dads: This Father’s Day, everyone’s noticed that dads are doing more at home

• The Most Important Chart in U.S. Fertility: Unmarried birth rates now down 30% since 2007

• End of the ROAD In Sight: Sometimes, the system works like it should

• The Last Five Years: Look what we can do, and I’m a part of that

• It’s Me, Hi: National Catholic Register, Public Discourse, Made With Care webinar July 9

• Parting Shots

This One’s for the Dads

Shoutout to all the dads out there. This year really feels like the year that ’s ceaseless (and correct!) drumbeating on the point that today’s fathers, mainly Gen X and Millennials, are doing more on the homefront than ever has finally gone mainstream (for examples, see and at Thompson’s Substack, at IFS, at his Substack, for the New York Times, and for The Free Press, and others.) I don’t have much to add to the flurry of pro-involved dad propaganda other than to say, yes, it’s true, all of it.

Father’s Day feels like it inspires fewer unhinged takes than Mothers’ Day, perhaps because we have a cultural sense that fatherhood often takes more forms than motherhood, for better or worse. (Also, perhaps partly because there is more demand for pieces telling moms that no matter how they’re doing it, they’re doing it wrong.) One of the most enduring explorations in anthropology is how societies build structures around the recognition that maternity is rarely disputed, but paternity can be. At a time when 40 percent of kids are born to unmarried parents, and one in four children are raised without a father in the home, we know too well that kids need father figures in their lives, even if they aren’t biologically related to them — and we know what happens to young men, in particular, when other male role models don’t fill the gap left behind when their biological father isn’t in the picture.

Yet in our efforts to build connections, mentorship opportunities, and relational scaffolding for the young men who don’t have dad in their lives, we don’t want to downplay the foundational question of how to make it more likely that more children are born within stable two-parent families. Fatherhood is a transformative, powerful experience [no citation needed], even if the experience of becoming a father is more attenuated than the nine months of gestation and pregnancy that mothers experience. We can start by celebrating the biological connection between men and the children they father, rather than effacing it, as advocacy groups continue to push for. Dads are doing more than ever, so we should treat them as essential, rather than biological accidents.

New York lawmakers, for example, in an effort to make some sections of state family law more “inclusive” and gender-neutral, will replace terms like “paternity” and “father” with “parentage” and “non-gestating parent.” On the one hand, one can understand the desire to update legal terminology for a world in which marriage and parenthood have been redefined to legally accommodate more family types than your classic heterosexual couple. On the other, it’s diminishing the role and relationship that mother and father have to the child they have created through their egg and their sperm. Not all “fathers,” in the social sense, have a genetic relationship to the kids they care for — but every child, no matter what the legal language and structure New York comes up with, has a biological progenitor in the form of a given human male. Ignoring that relationship feels like a legal fiction masquerading as social inclusiveness.

It’s reminiscent of ’s piece for , in which he explores how the progressive urge to be maximally inclusive leads to a sort of insistent opposition to making any normative statements at all. This “tyranny of the edge case” (variously dubbed “Pareto tyranny” by and the “tyranny of the exception” by ) means we can’t pursue policies that could make a small fraction of the population marginally worse off (or not equally better off) at the risk of not improving things for the greater good. Johnson highlights how this logic means that we can’t ban phones at concerts out of the purported concern for the neurodivergent who need constant access, can’t require standardized tests or maintain orderly public spaces because they might lead to undesirable racial outcomes, or build housing because it might impact local shadow patterns.

Similarly, we can’t refer to “father” and “mother” in family law because some relatively small number of children are being raised by gender non-traditional households. Well, okay. You’d think the left would have learned its lesson when the Biden administration took any number of political hits for its efforts to replace “mother” with “birthing person” in its HHS budget (though, oddly, references to “maternal health” went unchanged.) But it’s apparently important enough to the groups pushing for more inclusive and gender-neutral definitions of family to keep going back to the well. They clearly have a vision of the good that involves a diverse and inclusive definition of “parenthood.” But pursing too vigorously risks rendering men functionally obsolete.

As a trio of New York state senators wrote in a letter to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, “to even consider replacing the term ‘father’ with ‘non-gestating parent’ diminishes the role that so many fathers play in their children’s lives.” The Governor’s office thoughtfully responded that the lawmakers’ concerns were “bulls***.”

But they are not, because what the law says matters. Maybe it feels like politeness, or a simple cosmetic change to help more families feel recognized. But changing “father” to “non-gestating parent” is putting a legal thumb on the view of fatherhood that treats it as a purely social relationship rather than a biological one. We live at a time where we have learned so much about how our genes influence our health, and how our various predispositions for various illness or traits are inherited and influenced by our genetics. Family medical history and genealogy tell us so much about who we are and where we may be headed that legal paternity should be treated with a fair amount of deference, rather than ignored. On those grounds alone, the law should recognize actual biological parentage.

But it goes deeper than just those health outcomes. This weekend above others, recognizing the hunger that so many children feel when they don’t know who their father is — and that many fathers feel when they don’t know where their children are — should push us to reflect a little more on the difference a seemingly cosmetic change to legal language might make. It goes to the way a father looks at a sleeping child and sees a flash of recognition of his younger self in the blissfully unaware toddler, the passed-along facial structure or cowlick, the personality traits of a parent or grandparent that are irrepressible, the fact that so many novels and stories revolve around wanting to find one’s biological father to better understand where one came from, even when those answers are frequently disappointing. We need more institutions that invite men into involved fatherhood, rather than laws and approaches that treat them as functionally unnecessary to the process of human reproduction beyond the anonymous production of sperm.

The biological reality of fatherhood will always be different — less visceral, less innate — than the mother-child relationship. The contribution that fathers make to creating and raising a child feels socially fraught in this brave new century. We can start by celebrating the work that dads are doing at home, and try to think of more ways to establish the irreplaceability of involved and engaged fathers (not least by commemorating the difference becoming a father makes on men), rather than taking legal steps that treat their role in the process as accidental or purely socially defined.

The Most Important Chart in Fertility

It’s easy to get lost in the minutiae or the gender war hot takes when it comes to talking about the decline in births in the United States. But with the final births data released from the CDC earlier this month, we can now officially update the most important chart for understanding declining fertility — fewer babies is downstream from both fewer babies being born out of wedlock and fewer marriages.

In 2024, there were 35.5 babies born per every 1,000 unmarried women ages 15-44 — the lowest such level since 1986. The post-covid bump up in married fertility seems to have ended, though the decline (from 81.6 per 1,000 married women the year prior to 81.3 in 2024) isn’t particularly meaningful. Another way to visualize the change since 2007 (“peak baby”) is to look at the relative change in birth rates by marital status:

Since 2007, the decline in the birth rate among unmarried women has been almost linear — down by over 30 percent over the seventeen years since the iPhone was introduced. Among married women, birth rates have relatively declined by about 10 percent, with more fluctuation. Some related stats: 2009 saw the highest share of births to unmarried women (41 percent); it’s now down to 39.5 percent. 47.5 percent of births to white women were to moms with a bachelor’s degree or more; the average age of mothers at first birth reached a new all-time high of 27.6 years of age. And the only two states whose general fertility rate rose from 2023 to 2024 were Colorado and West Virginia.

For more, my 2024 National Review piece remains a good primer, though what was once speculation has increasingly become conventional wisdom:

“If you’re concerned about declining fertility, you must be concerned about declining marriage. Reshaping the cultural narrative about marriage, and making it financially easier and more culturally acceptable to marry earlier, will give the most couples a better chance to have more children. A natalism that underemphasizes marriage will fall short.”

End of the ROAD In Sight

In a better timeline, our system of governance working as designed shouldn’t be cause for comment, but given Congress’ tendency towards sclerosis, the fact that bipartisan, bicameral negotiations seem to have gotten the ROAD to Housing on the road to passage deserves commendation. Representatives French Hill (R-Ark.) and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), and Senators Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) led talks that resolved some of the sticking points between the House and Senate versions of the bill, removing some of the more noxious poison pills and adding in enough sweeteners to get to yes. The Senate voted 84-8 to invoke cloture on the bill, and it seems likely to pass both chambers and head to the President’s desk in advance of the July 4 recess.

As previously covered in Family Matters, this bill is best thought of as a collection of singles and doubles, which makes it a little bit of an anachronism in our polarized times. Indeed, our Constitutional system is designed to produce the equivalent of 1970s-era baseball teams — sacrifice bunting, stealing bases, and stringing some clutch singles together — rather than the swing-for-the-fences approach of today’s modern game. Today’s baseball players are incentivized to accept a higher risk of striking out for a higher chance of hitting a home run — the same go-big-or-go-home approach in the BBB (“Build Back Better”) or the OBBB (“One, Big, Beautiful Bill.”)

Trying to muscle through an all-encompassing reconciliation bill on partisan grounds has gone from a necessary evil to a preferred approach for too many in Congress. What the 21st Century ROAD to Housing bill shows is that giving space for Congress to work as it’s supposed to, where nobody expects to get a full win and everybody is comfortable with getting a half-loaf, can still get something meaningful across the finish line.

In order, here are some of my favorite substantive wins in the final package (a section-by-section is here):

• Streamlining environmental reviews, including a simplified NEPA process for smaller and infill housing projects;

• Allowing HUD to explore federal models for allowing single-stair apartment buildings, rather than requiring dual-staircase floor plans;

• Increasing the cap for the Rental Assistance Demonstration program and increasing multifamily loan limits;

• Giving additional weight to housing grant proposals that are located in Opportunity Zones; and

• Tweaks to manufactured housing requirements, including the infamous requirement that units have a permanent chassis, to open new pathways to manufactured and modular housing.

The whole thing could have gotten derailed by Sen. Warren’s 11th-hour intervention to try to dramatically restrict the supply of newly-built rental housing. While frustrating, the “build-to-rent” exercise was a useful dye marker in the housing debates, showing who had seriously thought through the economics of a more “populist” approach to housing finance and who was mainly in it for the vibes. Similarly, it showed the lack of seriousness from backbenchers who criticized the bill as making housing costs “worse — not better.”

But the Congressional staff who were able to rack up enough individual pet projects to get the bill from “nice to have” to “must have” status deserve plaudits. So, too, do the housing policy advocates who were able to push for the good while acknowledging it was never going to be perfect.

Perhaps the only downside of a singles-and-doubles approach to policy is that it will make it harder for any politician or party to claim credit. Making it marginally easier to build new homes and finance more housing starts is not going to result in seas of Levittowns springing up over the American plains and prairies, nor will it be immediately felt in the pockets of young couples who find it unacceptably hard to get started in life because of the feeling a down payment feels so out of reach.

But a policy can be the right thing to do even if it’s not a cure-all; responding to housing inaffordability, even if not all the ideas are winners, is better than inaction. And as we approach our nation’s semiquincentennial, it’s a welcome reminder that our constitutional system, creaky as it can feel, still works when we give it the time and space to do so. Let’s pass this bill and build, baby, build.

The Last Five Years

Lastly, as we start to head into the Independence Day/semiquincentennial festivities, when we are particularly grateful for America’s blessings, I want to express my gratitude to my institutional home, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, for five years (and nineteen days) of partnering on developing a pro-family agenda.

Founded in our nation’s bicentennial year, the Ethics and Public Policy Center is Washington, D.C.’s premier institute working to apply the riches of the Jewish and Christian traditions to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics, in pursuit of America’s continued civic and cultural renewal. And the staff and scholars celebrating their fifth year with the institution are proud to be carrying on that legacy into America’s 250th year and beyond.

Congrats to my fellow quinquennialists on our five years in the books, and here’s to many more developing ideas to shape culture and influence policy and make our nation an even better place to have and raise kids.

It’s Me, Hi

I spoke to the National Catholic Register about recent empirical work looking at the impact of digital tech on family formation, and encouraged an attitude to tech that recognizes how it impacts our relationships and decisions:

“It’s clear that increasing availability of digital tech has been a prime cause for declining relationship formation,” Brown said…“[Pope Leo’s] recognition should inspire us to push for more limits on kids and tech, to recognize the hollowness of dating apps and short-form video apps, the need for greater legal barriers to access explicit content, and more.” (National Catholic Register)

I joined my fellow Public Discourse contributing editors with a peek into what’s on my current bookshelf this summer:

I am sure I am far from the only member of the Public Discourse family to be preparing for the release of Christopher Nolan’s adaption of The Odyssey later this summer. In part because the tale was initially orally transmitted (and in part because it’s easier to sneak in chunks of listening time while watching kids at the park), I made a point of picking an audiobook recording—Sir Ian McKellen reads the Fagles translation with characteristic aplomb. Samuel Moyn’s Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It is on my list for professional reasons, and Leander Schaerlaeckens’ history of the U.S. soccer program The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top is helping me get in the World Cup spirit. Then I have to decide whether I want to make room for Caro Clare Burke’s viral tradwife novel Yesteryear …

, in a piece exploring different female perspectives on declining marriage and fertility rates, links to my piece about the “girlboss” and fertility for the Daily Wire.

There’s still time to sign up for a rip-roaring discussion of care, family, and values on our nation’s semiquincentennial. , , , and I will be hosted by at her Substack, , on Tuesday, July 9, at 2 p.m. EST. The discussion will be held on Zoom, free to all subscribers of Elissa’s newsletter — luckily for you, she is offering a 15% discount to those who sign up. Join us!

These United States

• Ohio lawmakers have passed a bill that would require schools to teach students to graduate high school, get a job, and get married before having a baby. (Ohio Capital Journal)

• Nebraska has raised the eligible income level to receive child care assistance to 185% above the federal poverty level (KETV)

• Michigan is launching a new state-led resource hub for child care providers to help them build out their business operations side, address licensing requirements, and other aspects of running a business. (Michigan Public Radio)

Parting Shots

• “Stop yapping and pay parents” — has a particularly concise headline on his piece about the need for upfront support for parents at Jacobin.

• has some worthwhile thoughts on what a conservative child care agenda should encompass; though she also maybe underlines the debate over whether the work of a stay-at-home parent is best conceptualized as “child care” or not (Family Studies)

• A new report from on how the big talk and inflated promises of sports betting-driven revenue are failing to pay out for most states — the optimal tax rate is one that “minimizes harms, not maximized revenues” (Manhattan Institute)

• “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now reports that one in 31 American children carries the diagnosis, nearly five times the rate recorded in 2000” — exclusively among children with “mild” autism symptoms. “We are not discovering more disabled children. We are sweeping ordinary variation into a clinical category that was never designed to hold it,” write and (National Review Online)

• Two different angles on a related question — one, by for her Substack , pointing out that a distinctly right-wing form of anti-natalism that “makes family life look so all-consuming, so self-erasing, that anyone observing it from the outside would reasonably conclude: I don’t want that.” And then though from a different angle, argues that part of the reason why it feels like families and children are less welcome in American society is because “gentle parenting” has made children less well-behaved. Not sold on the thesis, but certainly identifies the growing frictions as a result of lower fertility:

The Mom Wars

Antinatalism on the Right

This is what right-wing antinatalism looks like in practice. It is dressed as virtue, as devotion, as a kind of moral seriousness about parenting that is portrayed as admirable but is actually extraordinarily corrosive…

Read more

5 months ago · 222 likes · 1 comment · Bethany Mandel

Restoring American Adulthood

How Gentle Parenting Helped Turn America Against Children

I’ve got a new piece up at Daily Wire arguing that the problem with today’s kids in public is two-fold. Yes, first, they often behave abominably. But second and equally importantly, we have a generation of adults who want to be insulated from children writ large, even well-behaved ones. We need to both raise kids past toddler-hood and ignore solipsistic…

Read more

3 months ago · 38 likes · 8 comments · Elizabeth Grace Matthew

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

• Beautiful Game, Where Are You: New report stresses parents’ hemterogeneous preferences

• TV Off: Weighing in on whether the ratings system adequately supports parents

• Take the “A” Train: Sec. Sean Duffy introduces a new dashboard on family-friendly transit

• It’s Me, Hi: Daily Wire

• These United States

• Parting Shots

Beautiful Game, Where Are You

For the first time since 1994, the FIFA World Cup is back on American soil, with plenty of rapacious greed, abject corruption, and political cynicism attendant. Despite the predictable pre-event grumblings from sports columnists, I’m sure it will be a ratings success, even if it doesn’t impact the cultural landscape the way the prior U.S.-hosted edition did (my predictions: the Americans valiantly get bounced in the Round of 16 and Kylian Mbappe and the French team take home the trophy in East Rutherford on July 19.) If nothing else, we are getting some absolutely spectacular home jerseys for the U.S. side out of it.1

There’s little to be said in defense of Gianni Infantino’s ruthless pursuit of revenuemaxxing the largest-yet edition of the World Cup in the richest market in the world. Perhaps FIFA deserves a grudging respect for seeking to capture as much of the producer surplus as possible, rather than allowing scalpers to get their hands on some of consumers’ willingness to pay (even as this has led to rushed, last-minute ticket giveaways to local residents). But as I wrote last summer, there was nothing forcing FIFA to price tickets as high as the market could bear, rather than delivering a product that was more affordable for middle-class families:

“Aside from the token 22 young people that routinely flank the two teams’ starters as they walk onto the pitch, the games themselves will be for adults, not youth. The demand to attend a World Cup match will always exceed supply – yet a stadium full of corporate executives is not the atmosphere that inspires dreams and builds lifelong fans.”

It’s not just the ticket prices; the whole tournament is about TV revenue and corporate dollars, even breaking up each game’s halves with a “hydration break” that serves as another ad slot. Two of the U.S. Men’s National Team’s group stage matches kick off at 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. EDT — the perfect way to ensure kids on the East Coast aren’t able to make the memories to fuel the next generation of would-be Landon Donovans. The 1994 World Cup was intentional about cultivating the next generation of fans; this edition feels more like soccer is eating its seed corn.

But this weekend also features a different kind of corruption of the commons for private gain — the installation of a fighting ring on the South Lawn of the White House, and the hosting of a mixed martial arts contest by the President of the United States, on his birthday, as a kind of tribute to our nation’s 250th anniversary. Bud Light and Polymarket ads are prominently displayed on the octagon. At best, the spectacle promises to be tawdry; at worst, degrading.

This is where I out myself (again) as reflexively opposed to the “Barstool Conservative” brand of right-wing politics. The Ultimate Fighting Championship has unmistakably grown in popularity, racking up about as many viewers as your typical Big 12 mid-season football game, and recently signing a $7.7 billion, 7-year deal with CBS/Paramount. UFC impresario Dana White spoke at the 2016, 2020, and 2024 Republican National Conventions, and has been a big supporter of the President Donald Trump’s, so it’s not surprising that he would have offered to cover the expenses of a star-spangled event just off the National Mall.

But the White House should have said no to the offer — not just because of the dubious grounds of commercializing the South Lawn (the UFC expects to make millions back through advertising and VIP hospitality packages), and not just because it is part and parcel of the second Trump administration’s act-first, ask-forgiveness-later (or -never) approach to public lands.2 But let’s be honest — there is no honor in politics; the partisan outrage about the commercialization of public institutions would surely be flipped if a President from the other party were host a sponsored WNBA shootaround.

But primarily, they should have declined to host the event because American culture is not enhanced by promoting or endorsing bloody pugilism. There is violence, or the potential for it, in a lot of professional sports, but moving it from incidental to the action to the action itself turns us into worse versions of ourselves. We become habituated to, rather than horrified by, blood and barely-checked aggression on the mat.

Religious conservatives have had concerns over violence as entertainment ever since St. Augustine helped dissuade his friend Alypius from attending the violent “circuses” in the fourth century. When the UFC was first getting started, the Washington Post’s George Will quoted the late Senator John McCain’s concerns about the sport: “He also worries about the ‘glorification of cruelty,’ which raises the problem of virtue: What do we want government to do in the name of that?… ‘[E]xtreme fighting’ forces a commercial society to decide when the morals of the marketplace are insufficient. Do we really ban cockfighting only because the birds cannot consent?” Or ask Matt Morin, a former mixed martial artist turned divinity school grad, who wrote some years back for The Other Journal:

“If you go to any live event, you will know why: the fans are there for blood. Well, more accurately, they are there to get drunk, whistle at ring-card girls, and bullshit about why they would fight if some circumstance outside of their control were different. But mainly, they are there to see blood…By their cries, many fans make it clear that they are there for one reason: to see someone get hurt.”

To be certain, UFC has become more upscale from its origins as sheer gladiatorial spectacle, and there are doubtless habits of perseverance, discipline, and courage that can be exemplified in the octagon. Boxing, too, was once a form of organized violence that thrilled the American imagination. But those virtues can be found elsewhere, too, without the risk of disfigurement, concussion, or even death that commercialized human-on-human violence condones. Turning MMA into a pay-per-view profit center suggests a cheapening of our national culture. Putting it at the symbolic heart of our civic semiquincentennial celebrations feels ever crasser.

In too many cases, sports feel like they are reflecting a commercialized degradation of our culture, rather than a communal escape towards something more diverting. Is there a single college football fan happy with how the defanging of the NCAA, the advent of the transfer portal and conference realignment, and the destruction of decades of tradition in the name of ever-higher TV revenue has changed their sport?3

The latest example comes from Texas, where a judge ruled for Texas Tech QB Brendan Sorsby, allowing him to play and collect millions of dollars in NIL money this season despite having admitted to having bet on his own team at least 40 times. That was once the cardinal sin in sports — just ask Pete Rose or Shoeless Joe Jackson. Now, the world of uninhibited sports betting demands we take Sorsby’s claims of a chemical addiction to gambling at face value and welcome him back to the starting lineup. His lawyers, displaying the chutzpah of the child who kills his own parents and pleads for the court’s mercy as an orphan, argued that it would be harmful for Sorsby’s mental health and recovery from his gambling addiction if he were to be punished for having bet on his own games. It’s a mockery of actual mental health treatment and of the integrity of the game.

Some of fans’ frustrations there are no policy solutions for. As happy as I am for my New York Knicks-supporting friends, there was no world in which tickets for the NBA Finals wouldn’t cost thousands of dollars, given the team’s (a) large fan base in (b) the wealthiest city in the US (c) facing a decades-long title drought and (d) a capacity of only 20,000 seats inside Madison Square Garden. Tickets to the World Cup and the Olympics were always going to be expensive because America is a wealthy country. Some constraints you can’t supply-side your way out of.

But that doesn’t mean every sporting event should be an exercise in ruthless profit extraction either. The growing, $40 billion business of youth sports is gauging parents, exploiting dreams of college scholarships, and turning 10-year-old soccer teams into nation-trotting powerhouses, community ties and family dinner nights be damned. Senator ’s (D-Conn.) bill, recently discussed in Family Matters, would take that head-on. We can take policy steps to prioritize local leagues and kids having recreational fun, or we can let investors seeking big returns turn youth sports into another profit-maximizing venture. I see very little benefit for American culture in the latter.

Sports, or “sport,” if you’re feeling continental, is one of the few communal experiences that we can tap into — live sports, for example, is pretty much the only thing keeping the monoculture together (even if the fragmentation of the media landscape makes some of these “big events” feel a little less monolithic than they once did.) But without guardrails — moral ones, yes, and appropriate legal ones as well — it will consume itself. Rampant profiteering, the embrace of unchecked sports betting, rising interest in combat sports, the subordination of regionalism and tradition to the almighty dollar — policy alone will not put the genie back in the bottle and make sports fun again, but better ideas can at least take steps to prevent it from getting worse.

TV Off

The current TV ratings system was created when the top-rated series were ER, Friends, and Touched by an Angel. Technology has changed, but TV-Y, TV-Y7, TV-PG, and the rest have not. If you pay attention to the small letters in the black box at the outset of your program, you might see some content descriptors, like crude language (L), violence (V), or sexual situations (S). Those are assigned by an industry-appointed Monitoring Board whose job it is to self-police TV programming.

Last month, the Federal Communications Commission issued a public notice as to whether the decades-old Monitoring Board system is responsive to the world of streaming and video-on-demand. In particular, some parents have found themselves surprised at age-inappropriate content around gender identity and sexual orientation. In its notice, the FCC notes that “family-oriented perspectives [ ] are not well represented in the media industry,” and asks whether “descriptions of the content provide a sufficient basis for parents to make informed decisions concerning viewing decisions for their family, including when gender identity themes are discussed or displayed?”

These are good questions, answered in a new, well-researched brief by my EPPC colleagues , Rachel Morrison, , , , and Chloe Lawrence.

In particular, they point out that many of the institutional voices on the advisory board have taken public positions that are out-of-step with many parents around gender ideology, and point out that “placing faith-based groups, including faith leaders and religious media, on the Monitoring Board would also help protect ‘the rights of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children.’” They also call for more than the current system of periodic “spot checks” for a more comprehensive approach, and argue that the extensive jurisprudence around children’s exposure to LGBTQ issues in the classroom should “apply equally to parents’ concerns over children’s TV programming.”

In a post-Obergefell world, a pluralistic approach to these questions may require messier compromises than some social conservatives would prefer. But taking seriously parents’ responsibility to raise their children well, and the state’s obligation to support their ability to do so, should lead to more robust conversations around what the role of government and industry is in informing parents about their entertainment options — at least, until the rise of YouTube and other online content makes conversation about the “entertainment industry” as traditionally understood rather moot, for better and for worse.

Take the “A” Train

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy continues his surprising reign as highest above-replacement-value Cabinet official continues. This week, he announced a new Federal Transit Administration dashboard that will measure “key family friendly metrics on transit systems across America.”

In a press release, Duffy says that “American families deserve transit systems that actually work for them. That means a safe, clean, and reliable experience every time…By focusing on these family friendly features, transit systems will be putting the needs of American families first. It will also help states learn from one another on what efforts are already helping communities elsewhere.”

Safety is an important part of this dashboard; so, too, should be reliability, family-friendly pricing, and stroller accessibility. If you have ideas, submit them to FTA by August 3. A welcome endeavor!

It’s Me, Hi

At the Daily Wire, I offer some quick thoughts in response to the viral new NBER working paper from Middlebury College’s Caitlin Myers and Ezekiel Hooper on the rollout of mobile broadband and fertility rates:

The paper gives “us more evidence (as if more was needed) that the digital revolution is upending the way we interact as humans…[even if the] iPhone had flopped, the introduction of social media, short-form video, and always-on communication, information, pornography, and entertainment on whatever device would have still had an impact on our dating and mating culture.”

Going to try something different this week — breaking out our local and state updates worth noting and then slightly meatier one-line responses to the pieces and commentary that caught my eye:

These United States

• Ohio: A bill would direct the state director of health to create a list of high-risk drugs that cause severe adverse effects in more than 5% of the drug’s users, which could include the abortion-inducing pill mifepristone (WOUB)

• South Carolina: After the success of “Operation Ganjapreneur,” which resulted in the seizure of more than 30,000 pounds of illegal THC products, the state legislature is debating new limits on how THC products can be sold in the state ( for S.C. Daily Gazette)

• Indiana: 19.8% fewer children in the state are enrolled in Medicaid/CHIP than in January 2025, part of the more than two million fewer children who are enrolled compared to January 2025, per the Georgetown Center for Children and Families

• New Jersey: A bill aimed at expanding the Garden State’s protection of abortion rights would allow people to be charged with “interference with reproductive health care services,” including causing “mental anguish or emotional harm.” This dubiously-constitutional provisions concern the New Jersey Press Association, among others, who point out it could criminalize reporting out any negative stories about abortion providers. (POLITICO)

Parting Shots

• Two contrasting but complementary pieces on child care prevalence and demand: writes about the “obsession” Democrats have for daycare subsidies for the Washington Examiner. covers the New America survey discussed in Family Matters at her Substack, , pointing out that “Among young kids broadly, American reliance on formal childcare is quite low.”

  Family Stuff

  Rightsizing the Daycare Theory of Everything

  For a certain type of person, the explanation for all that ails the modern American child pretty much boils down to daycare. The scourge of ill-behaved kids in America? That’s a byproduct of the fact that kids in the U.S. are “largely not raised by their mothers.” The loss of emotional resilience among young adults these days? That’s because they’re the first generation to do “long hours in third-party daycare from babyhood, at scale” obviously. ADHD epidemic…

  Read more

  3 months ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Stephanie H. Murray

• A quick follow-up to last week’s item on Medicaid work requirements: CU-Boulder’s and Harvard’s have weighed in with a closer look at the dubious math included in HHS’s rosy picture of the labor market response. Worth digging into at the Substack:

  Can We Still Govern?

  The Trump Administration’s Dubious Case for Work Requirements

  Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services, under the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) released a new “study” on the effects of work requirement policy on employment and poverty. You might not have heard of it, but it represents a potentially important step in the federal government pushing a policy that w…

  Read more

  3 months ago · 58 likes · 3 comments · Chloe East and Adrianna McIntyre

• covers the transition to parenthood for dads — apparently some more involved fathers are showing signs of post-partum depression. It’s an interesting discovery, one I’m not fully sold on — there’s a lot going on in the days and weeks after baby is born that could be causing symptoms even if the chemical/neurological pathways may be different than what moms experience. (The Cut)

• writes about how the newfound Democratic enthusiasm for moderation has not extended to positions on abortion that more closely map on to the preferences of the median voter (something short of full “reproductive freedom,” that treats a fetus at six and twenty weeks of development differently, and that has broad health exemptions.) Well-intentioned advice that I think runs into the implacable belief from many Democratic voters that full “reproductive autonomy” is a matter of principle, not political expedience (New York Times)

• “The rising tide has lifted all boats notably, even if unequally. It has not left everyday Americans stranded on the economic shore.” If you see AEI’s on an op-ed you know it will be puncturing declinist economic narratives, and on this one he teams with Stephen Rose for an op-ed about how — despite rumors to the contrary — the middle-class is shrinking not because Americans are moving down, but because they’re moving up. (New York Times)

• Eric Levitz reviews the latest on fertility, technology, and family, and warns that the future of AI-powered relationships with chatbots could offer a good-enough substitute for human companionship that the future could look grim indeed. Another piece that illuminates, rather than obscures, the realities of our demographic crunch. (Vox)

• “The sheer logistical and financial madness of raising children in America is now officially a matter of political concern,” writes for the New York Times Magazine, though I must confess I see it less as a break and more of a continuing trend of greater interest in family policy issues (in other words, NYT readers have read this kind of piece before.) She quotes my EPPC colleague , among other legal scholars.

• An absolutely fascinating on-the-ground piece from , reporting on Turning Point USA’s annual Women’s Leadership Summit: “With Erika [Kirk], a former New York City entrepreneur, now serving as CEO, it’s difficult to avoid the ambitious career-woman associations. Perhaps, consciously or not, the organization is making room for them.” (The Atlantic)

• A new report from researchers at the Institute for Family Studies and students at Wheaton College find a gap in expectations and standards around parenting: “18% of liberals are unsure whether they would be a good parent, compared to only 9% of conservatives. Similarly, whereas 36% of liberals view parenting as “very complicated, difficult, and stressful,” only 24% of conservatives do.” The cage of high-intensity parenting is, in many cases, locked from the inside!

• looks at a new study that shows that 1 in 100 Oregon youth ages 8 to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and about 1 in 250 natal girls were taking testosterone ():

  Hazard Ratio: Benjamin Ryan

  Over 1 in 250 Natal Girls Were Taking Testosterone By Age 17 in Oregon, From 2016 to 2023

  The use of gender-transition drugs among insured adolescents in Oregon soared between 2016 and 2023, charting a nearly 10-fold increase among biological girls and a 14-fold increase in natal boys. Across this period, about 1 in 100 insured youth ages 8 to 17 in the Pacific Northwest state were diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a psychiatric condition involving distress stemming from a conflict between an individual’s natal sex and their gender identity…

  Read more

  3 months ago · 48 likes · 23 comments · Benjamin Ryan

• Welcome, , to Substack! His new newsletter, Per Capita by Joe Waters, promises to explore what “a true, authentic moral reformation for this moment” could look like. Available here:

  Per Capita by Joe Waters

  Per Capita explores the major transformations in culture and society that are already reshaping the lives of families and the communities around them.

• Welcome, , to Substack! Her new newsletter, Rethinking Fertility, is about “navigating reproductive technology, and what it means to be human in an age of limitless medical possibility. Available here:

  Rethinking Fertility

  Hosted by Emma Waters, a policy expert in reproductive health, Rethinking Fertility is about navigating reproductive technology, and what it means to be human in an age of limitless medical possibility.

  By Emma Waters

Editor’s note: Joe Waters and Emma Waters are not, so far as I know, related — except in both being interested in questions of what it means to be fully human in an increasingly technocratic age.

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

• Child Care Deserts Are Not What You Think They Are: Viral claims about lack of supply don’t account for lack of demand

• Work Requirement Watch: A ticking political time bomb

• It’s Me, Hi: Webinar on Magnifica Humanitas, The Lion, The 74

• Parting Shots

Child Care Deserts Are Not What You Think They Are

American legislators are fond of saying our child care system is in a perpetual state of crisis. Last year, (D-Nev.) responded to a report calling the state of Nevada a “child care desert” by introducing a bill that would subsidize the “soaring costs of child care.” Senator (D-N.Y.) cited a study that found that two-thirds of children in New York state “lived in a child care desert” when introducing her bill to expand workforce development grants for early childhood workers. And HR 1443, a “sense of the House” resolution introduced in 2024 by Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), would have had Congress officially declare that “more than 50 percent of families in the United States live in child care deserts.”1

The concept of a “child care desert” was popularized in 2016 by Child Care Aware of America and the Center for American Progress. In “introducing a working definition of child care deserts,” CAP said, it was borrowing “its terminology from the frequently studied problem of food deserts,” the idea that parts of the country lacked access to fresh fruit and vegetables, and other healthy foods. Child Care Aware said it was introducing the concept to highlight that “the identification of deserts is important, because it identifies an absence of an essential commodity that results in limited access.”

But food deserts, as it turns out, are basically fake. Or, if you prefer a more “nuanced” view, the very concept of “food deserts” themselves have come under fire for representing a misunderstanding of the dynamics of healthy food access (see SIDEBAR: Food deserts are basically fake, below). And the idea of a “child care desert” itself may obscure at least as much as it clarifies when it comes to building an early childhood system that meets parents’ desires and needs.

Let’s unpack the way the most commonly-cited method of identifying a “child care desert” is constructed. According to CAP’s definition, “a family is considered to live in a child care desert if they reside in a location with more than three local young children, under age 6, per local licensed child care slot.” In other words, if the following equation is true for a given area, you have a certified Child Care Desert™:

Surely you can see the problem?

The first objection is raised by child care advocates who dislike the denominator’s focus on licensed child care. As a brief published by the National Women’s Law Center argues, “the phrase ‘child care desert’…obscures and further stigmatizes the existence of Family, Friend, and Neighbor (FFN) Care.” For its part, CAP’s most recent “desert” report does state that FFN “providers are an important part of the care ecosystem...[yet] are unlicensed and frequently unregistered with the state, [and] there are no standardized data on where each such provider is located nor how many children they serve. Therefore, while child care deserts are a useful measure of supply and access, they do not provide a comprehensive picture of the child care arrangements families use.” That important caveat tends to get lost when the “desert” terminology starts getting thrown about.

But the broader conceptual flaw is thinking a little harder about the numerator. 45 percent of kids age 5 and under are not involved in regular child care, per the 2023 Early Childhood Program Participation survey. An area with a higher-than-average birth rates, or with a high share of moms at home — think Provo, Cheyenne, and Billings — is going to mechanically show up as a “child care desert” despite the fact that these families may not be actually seeking out child care (and some wouldn’t regardless of the level of subsidy.)

In other words, the most popular measure of “child care deserts” plausibly overestimates the desire for care and certainly underestimates the supply of child care options. It counts every young child as contributing to “unmet demand,” regardless of whether parents actually want a licensed slot. Citing it uncritically should be a sign that you are looking to score rhetorical points, rather than actually understand and solve access problems.

There is a different method of calculating the “child care gap” that looks at just the delta between the number of licensed child care providers and the number of children with all available parents in the labor force. This metric, supported by the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska, finds that 28 percent of children do not have access to child care within a “reasonable distance.” That’s probably a safer ballpark estimate than the idea that half of American children live in a child care “desert.” But it rests on the assumption that the ratio between slots and kids reflects some relationship between the demand for professional child care and the underlying characteristics of the region.

The more interesting question we can ask is whether a “desert” reflects an area where people are seeking professional licensed child care and not finding it, or if it, instead, identifies areas without a lot of child care demand.

The answer is obviously “some of both,” but a new paper from a leading child care researcher can help us make some better sense of the facts on the ground so you can “well, actually” your friends the next time someone naïvely cites the “more than half of American children live in a child care desert” line.

At this point, we need to make a disclaimer — what follows are my views, not those of the paper’s author. Any questions of interpretation, extrapolations beyond what the text of the paper says, or normative claims about how policymakers should apply this paper’s findings to their work should be attributed to me and me alone, and the author of the paper has not reviewed, and would not necessarily endorse, the way this newsletter characterizes the paper’s findings. All opinions and errors are mine alone and should not be considered the intellectual equivalent of community property.

IZA Working Paper No. 18597 uses vacancy rates at child care providers to proxy for the underlying demand in a given area. After all, if providers are facing wait lists out the door, families can be presumed to be looking for child care and having a hard time finding it.

The problem, the working paper finds, is that being labeled as a “child care desert” is “only weakly correlated with low vacancy rates,” suggesting that, as you might expect, the areas identified as “deserts” are not necessarily the ones with unmet demand. Accounting for demographics, the “child care desert” approach does not actually correlate with the observed provider vacancy rates outside of one-year-olds. Thus, the author writes, “targeting funds based on this measure (as some states did with American Rescue Plan Act dollars) could lead to misallocation.”

The IZA paper, however, takes a different approach than counting slots and kids, accounting for demographic characteristics like religiosity, education, urbanity, race/ethnicity, and family structure to produce a predicted number of licensed child care slots in each county. “Parents differ in their demand for care,” the author notes, “and what may be an inadequate level of care in one area may be sufficient to meet demand in another area.”

Accounting for this allows for a more fine-grained approach to evaluating where is — and is not — an actual “child care desert.” More importantly, that insight should help inform a more nuanced conversation about parents’ preferences than simply relying on a mechanical approach that paints misleading pictures about the extent to which parents want and can’t find licensed child care.

SIDEBAR: Food deserts are basically fake

As a well-informed, highly savvy reader of Family Matters, you probably already know this, but on the off chance you’ve missed it with everything else going on in the world…For a long time, anti-poverty and anti-hunger advocates would blame high rates of obesity and food insecurity on “food deserts” — places where residents did not have access to healthy, affordable food. Progressives were traditionally quick to blame corporations or capitalism for “supermarket redlining,” or not investing in grocery stores in low-income areas and preventing food desert residents from being able to buy fruits and vegetables, instead forcing them to rely on ultra-processed foods or high-sodium snacks.

It’s not that observers are wrong to note the lack of grocery stores in inner-city and low-income neighborhoods. It’s that attributing that to supply-side, rather than demand-side, factors gets the equation wrong. In 2019, a team of researchers (Allcott, et al.) published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics finding that “food deserts” are largely a function of household preferences in those areas, and that “exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only nine percent” (working paper version here.) They measure this three ways; by looking at the exogenous entry of new supermarkets into neighborhoods, household moves to new neighborhoods, and cross-household purchasing patterns (different people in the same household with the same level of access to local food retailers).

Across all these measurements, they find almost no evidence to suggest that it is lack of access to healthy food that is driving poor nutritional outcomes; rather, it is “differences in demand” across income levels. Their findings suggest that higher-income households have stronger preferences for healthy foods2, and that educational attainment is one of the strongest predictors of being willing to pay more for fresher, healthier foods. They also point out that the very notion of a “food desert” is partially misleading because it ignores the degree to which nearly all Americans travel some distance (median travel time to grocery store: 10 minutes) to purchase their groceries. In sum, they suggest, “supply-side policy initiatives aimed at eliminating food deserts will have limited effects on healthy eating in disadvantaged neighborhoods.”

Work Requirement Watch

Seven months ahead of the end-of-year deadline, CMS has issued its interim rule for implementing work requirements for adults on Medicaid. States now have to ensure non-pregnant adults age 19 to 64 are working at least 80 hours per month to receive Medicaid benefits. They can meet the requirement by working, participating in community services, enrolling in education on at least a half-time basis, or earning an income of at least $580 a month. Exemptions include American Indians, Alaska Natives, disabled veterans, pregnant or postpartum moms, and parents or guardians of those 13 years old and under.

Work requirements as a condition on getting health care benefits is one of those things that polls well and Republican activists love to tout. Yet we should expect this roll-out to have, at the very least, some growing pains, and most likely fall short of its boosters’ rosy expectations of labor force participation growth. For instance, as of Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health pointed out on Twitter, one of the analyses CMS relies on to find work requirements will lead to more hours worked explicitly assumes “all eligible adults enroll, and immediately find adequate employment to meet the requirements.” And yes, if you assume away any implementation problems, then your study won’t find any implementation problems!

In reality, most of the non-exempt Medicaid recipients are already working (as subsidized health insurance doesn’t particularly keep the lights on or put food on the table.) In many cases, the states that experimented with work requirements saw rolls fall not because people were increasing employment, but because of the administrative hurdles of maintaining eligibility. Perhaps states and CMS can build a user-friendly system of easily confirming eligibility status in a half-year; perhaps the impact won’t be increases in the number of individuals going uninsured. But my provisional bet is that this will be an administrative headache and a political weight for the party that likes to style itself the party of the working class.

It’s Me, Hi

I joined Cynthia Schmidt, executive director of the Catholic Pro-Life Community of the Diocese of Dallas, for a conversation about Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and about what it says about the distinctiveness and dignity of the human person as we head into an era where that may be increasingly called into question. Video is available here:

My EPPC colleague and I spoke to of The Lion about the recent Office of the Surgeon General’s report on kids and screen time, previously covered in Family Matters:

“‘The report is a nice summary of a lot of the conversations that have been happening in the public square, and now to have them summarized and given a stamp of public health approval by the Office of the Surgeon General is really notable…This is something that’s gaining momentum across the country’…

“Brown said schools and state governments should help families reduce technology dependence across multiple areas of life.” (The Lion)

My Family Matters write-up of Gov. ’s diaper initiative was mentioned by in his column on the program for The 74.

Mark your calendars! Some of my favorite voices from across the political aisle will be joining for a semiquincenntenialicious discussion of care, family, and values. , , , and myself will be hosted by at her Substack, , on Tuesday, July 9, at 2 p.m. EST. The discussion will be held on Zoom, free to all subscribers of Elissa’s newsletter — luckily for you, she is offering a 15% discount to those who sign up. Join us!

Parting Shots

• Everything Yuval Levin writes is worth reading, but that especially goes for his reaction and reflection to the Pope’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas — including thoughts on where it doesn’t go far enough, and where future work on AI and ethics should focus (The New Atlantis)

• Indiana Gov. Mike Braun is having his state review child care regulations, including getting rid of degree requirements for child care workers, allowing different age groups to mix at the end of the day, and permitting centers to use sleeping mats instead of elevated cots, among other provisions (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

• In Pennsylvania, House Republicans are proposing a fourteen-bill package of child care updates, including clarifying requirements, reducing some regulations and — most intriguingly — offering low-interest expansion loans to child care providers.

• reports on the difficulties New Mexico is facing in standing up their new child care scheme — as it turns out, simply subsidizing demand is not enough to build out enough options for parents, and in fact is crowding out the lower-income parents who the system was originally designed to help. A cautionary tale for would-be universalists! (Vox)

• In a new book, Tim Goeglein of Focus on the Family weighs in on some of the debates around family, marriage, and masculinity. It’s a nice summary of where social conservatives have been all along — and correctly so — stressing the importance of healthy marriages to a flourishing society and a healthy model of masculinity for helping young men find the role models and scripts they need to thrive. At a time when the online debates around sex, family, and gender feel increasingly heated (and often, counter-productive), “What Really Matters” is a reminder that there’s nothing new under the sun, and that sometimes revisiting old debates can help you find a richer perspective on contemporary ones.

• lays out a compelling understanding for why pro-life Democrats — always endangered — are now extinct, including the secularizing of America and the shifting racial politics in the South (Politics of the Cross)

  Politics of the Cross

  Why Pro-Life Democrats Disappeared

  Today there is only one Democrat left in the House of Representatives who opposes abortion. There are no antiabortion Democrats left in the Senate…

  Read more

  3 months ago · 13 likes · 3 comments · Daniel K. Williams

• reports on the growing tensions between the institutional pro-life movement and the White House, including some previously unreported details about a meeting between President Donald Trump and that gives some insight into the President’s personal views on the issue. ()

  The Free Press

  Could President Trump Face a Pro-Life Revolt?

  In the final months of the 2024 presidential campaign, the pro-life movement felt that Donald Trump was drifting…

  Read more

  3 months ago · 39 likes · 97 comments · Audrey Fahlberg

• Family Matters readers will recognize some of the points made in ’ write-up of the New America covered in last week’s edition, but his post has some political advice Democrats should consider. ()

  Slow Boring

  Elizabeth Warren’s “new“ child care push doesn’t make sense

  Join us for our D.C. happy hour tonight at 6:30! Details here for paid subscribers…

  Read more

  3 months ago · 212 likes · 408 comments · Matthew Yglesias

• ’s politics are very much not my own, but the read of the cultural moment offered at his Highly Respected Substack feels right: The vibe shift is over, dead at the hands of some of the Trump administration’s self-inflicted wounds, but what comes next remains to be seen.

  Highly Respected

  The Vibe Shift Is Over

  America 250 is turning into a major disappointment. On top of the public not really caring about the special occasion, the events planned by the Trump administration are falling apart…

  Read more

  3 months ago · 182 likes · 109 comments · Scott Greer

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

• Diff’rent Strokes for Diff’rent Folks: New report stresses parents’ heterogeneous preferences

• Oh, the Magnificent Humanity: Pope Leo XIV’s latest remarks

• Encyclical Webinar — June 2: Virtual conversation on Magnifica Humanitas

• It’s Me, Hi: POLITICO

• Looking for a Few Good Men and Women: Richard John Neuhaus Fellowship

• Parting Shots

Diff’rent Strokes for Diff’rent Folks

The tectonic plates of family policy move slowly — but they are moving.

In 2021, the progressive left was riding high — they knew their solution for the problems facing American families and it was the “American Families Plan,” the “social infrastructure” component of the Build Back Better reconciliation package. It was legislation by, of, and for The Groups — a paid leave, a universal pre-K, and a child care subsidy approach all designed independently of each other and then bolted together at the last minute.

During these debates, pointed out at his Substack, Slow Boring, that the Frankenstein’s monster approach to the legislation left a key question partially unanswered: “What are we trying to achieve with our early family policy?” Instead of neutrally supporting families with young kids, Yglesias argued, “Democrats have written a bill that, WWII-style, subsidizes child care rather than the cost of parenting, which might include child care.”

As I wrote at the time, this was the result of a cultural blind spot influenced by interest group politics. Many of the architects were college-educated professionals who were (or knew people who were) paying uncomfortably large amounts for professional child care, and many of the loudest supporting voices were groups pushing for higher wages for child care workers. As a result, the plan focused heavily on increasing wages and subsidizing costs for formal child care without asking whether that was, actually, what parents wanted.1

We know now the answer was — not really. There have been a series of polls suggesting that the voices of parents looking for something other than full-time work and center-based care are underrepresented in the D.C. dialogue. And the latest entry stressing that point is the 2026 National Parent Survey, which comes from New America, a leading center-left think tank. The poll’s findings, if taken seriously, could help ratify an ongoing shift among the “groups” that used to prescribe more rigid approaches to early childhood supports — and chart a new, more productive path forward for many of our family policy conversations.

In some respects, the entire report could be summed up in one bullet point from the executive summary:

In a country that’s as big, diverse, pluralistic, and complex as ours, a policy program that starts by embracing different preferences for work, care, and leave will lead you in a different direction than one that assumes a predominant model that some may deviate from. We might shorthand this as the difference between the “Care Economy” and a family-centered economics.

For instance, 72 percent of parents reported wanting more quality time with their children, while only 24 percent of parents said they wished they had more time for paid work. (In theory, those two groups don’t even have to be distinct!) But a BBB-style subsidy that only subsidizes formal child care increases the returns to paid work while making time at home out of the labor force more costly. In other words, Build Back Better would have put taxpayer money on the opposite side of the work-life equation from what many parents say they want.

In other words, as the report lays out: “No single preferred work schedule is chosen by more than 46 percent of parents, no single child care arrangement by more than 31 percent, and no single leave duration by more than 38 percent, suggesting that parents’ needs are genuinely plural.” (emphasis mine)

The correct way to read this chart is to recognize that each question is asked separately, and it’s not the same block of parents responding that they both want to work full-time and to provide child care themselves. Instead, parents are genuinely divided about what their “ideal” looks like, even as some broad desire for more time with kids emerges. For instance, there is a wide spread of attitudes around parental leave, even as 55 percent of parents reported wishing they had been able to spend more time with their new baby (a cause which, as I wrote last week for Deseret News, more Republicans should think more creatively about).

This even goes for parents who are currently working full-time: 71 percent of dads say they want to continue working full-time, all else being equal, while only half of moms working full-time said the same thing.

After BBB flamed out, and the 2024 election showed progressives that their grasp on the views of the median American may have been less well-founded than they thought, there are signs of a growing shift toward an understanding of family policy that is more egalitarian and — to use my favorite word — pluralist. In Rep. ’s $10-a-day child care proposal, for example, he included a $3,600 stipend for parents of kids under 3 who opted for at-home care. Mayor gestured towards pluralistic support for families during his campaign, but has not produced a plan that would enable New York City parents of young children to stay home with their young children — even as demand for the city’s free 3K program flatlines. At The Bulwark, got a look at the first policy proposals from Project 2029, a group that wants to replicate the playbook approach of Project 2025. In it, the group gestures to the fact that many families “can’t afford to stay home” and that the next President should give “parents back the power of choice on how to support their young children.” The proof will be in the pudding — but that rhetoric could lead to some interesting policy proposals, if taken seriously.

But that’s far from a foregone conclusion. Certainly not all progressives are noticing where the wind is blowing. “It would be political malpractice for Democrats not to be talking about childcare every chance we get, going into the midterms and beyond,” said at the Center for American Progress’s IDEAS Conference last month, per reporting by the Washington Examiner’s .

To put it bluntly, I do not think that is true. Child care costs are extremely salient for a relatively narrow slice of the electorate — namely, those with kids under six. Once you get past that window, it stops being as big of a motivating force. As Yglesias pointed out on Twitter, you can see this play out in public opinion polls — the share of voters who cite child care as a big concern for them personally is, essentially, a rounding error.

This is not just because most voters don’t have children under six, but because most parents with young children do not pay for child care! (two-thirds of parents with children under six do not pay for child care; table 9 here, though backed up in other surveys as well.)2 So a sharp focus on subsidizing child care alone will leave many parents out of the conversation.

But an authentically pro-family public policy apparatus — a message that encompasses a broad array of work-life situations, a policy that is most generous with support in the weeks and months after birth, and an approach that is able to distinguish the desires of the child care industry from the desires of parents3 — has more of a chance of getting people excited and solving more of the problems facing more families. (It’s an open question, I suppose, as to whether the cleanest policy solution (subsidize parents, not just child care) is also the most salient political approach, but I think there’s sufficient evidence to give it a go.)

This kind of vision has limited, though growing, purchase on the right. It may end up picking up steam on the left as well.

Oh, the Magnificent Humanity

As you may have heard, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical letter Magnifica Humanitas was released earlier this week. Subtitled “On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” it’s the kind of document that deserves to be mulled over and digested rather than quickly metabolized for hot takes, so if you came to Family Matters looking for hot insta-reaction to the encyclical — sorry to disappoint! (It’s available to read on the Vatican’s website, should you be so interested, and I also particularly appreciated my EPPC colleague ’s commentary for the Acton Institute.)

Yet lost in all the encyclicitement was a speech the Holy Father gave earlier last week to an audience made up of representatives of the European Parliament. It deserves to be excerpted at length:

“The problems resulting from zero-growth demographics are many and complex, and include, not least, the pandemic of loneliness. Moreover, demographic data are not merely statistics, but speak of fatherhood, motherhood and children. And children are the future!…

“Furthermore, over recent decades, we can see that a rejection of the Christian inspiration of the founding fathers of the EU institutions has led to a time of drastic sterility, not only because too many have been deprived of the right to be born, but also because there has been a failure to pass on the material and cultural tools that young people need to face the future. As a result, we are not infrequently faced with the contradictory claims of purportedly family-friendly policies, which simultaneously promote discrimination against motherhood, exalt abortion as a right, and undermine the very foundation of the desire to start a family…

“At the heart of these pressing challenges, and the key to providing solutions, lie the fundamental dignity of all persons and the role of the family in society. As Saint John Paul II reminded us, the family is “the first and irreplaceable school of social life” (Familiaris Consortio, 43) and is founded on marriage between a man and a woman, a reality that unites the personal and public dimensions…For only by respecting and promoting this central place of the family, and applying the principle of subsidiarity, is it possible to avoid the two extremes of excessive State intervention and individualism…

“Finally, this approach is not a matter of returning to social models of the past, but of providing the men and women of our time with the unchanging principles that can surely guide them in answering the fundamental questions asked in every age: What is the meaning and value of human life; what is an authentic human society; and what kind of world do we want to hand on to future generations…Indeed, only a fresh springtide for the family can transform the winter chill of our ageing populations!”

That question is what Magnifica Humanitas seeks to address — and will, I hope, take up a large part of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate.

Encyclical Webinar — June 2

Okay, so when I said I didn’t have hot insta-reactions to the encyclical, I was mostly telling the truth…But come next Tuesday, June 2, I intend to have appropriately thought about and reflected on Magnifica Humanitas enough to participate in a webinar on what the new encyclical means for the Church, young adults, and the pro-life movement.

Join me and Cynthia Schmidt, executive director of the Catholic Pro-Life Community of the Diocese of Dallas, for a conversation about the Pope’s new message, how Catholic Social Teaching can help inform our public policy discussions, and what the pro-life and pro-family movement can take from the Pope’s writings and insights.

📆 Tuesday, June 2, 2026 | ⏰ 1:00p ET/12:00p CT | 💻: Zoom [Register here]

It’s Me, Hi

At POLITICO, Alice Ollstein interviews me and other members of the pro-life movement about frustrations with the Trump administration’s slow-walked review of the abortion pill mifepristone and other pro-family priorities:

“You see some social conservatives, bless their hearts, talking about a third reconciliation bill which will be the one to go after Planned Parenthood,” said Brown. “But if you believe that, I got a bridge to sell you…

“Are there some die-hard pro-lifers who are going to be disappointed if the White House doesn’t [restrict mifepristone]? Absolutely. I am one of them,” said Brown. “But ultimately, there’s a lot of people out there who are still going to vote Republican because of immigration, crime, inflation, the war, or whatever it happens to be. And whether or not the administration did enough to get an A grade on abortion is not going to keep people home.” (POLITICO)

Looking for a Few Good Men and Women

If you are a young, or young-ish, policy professional in or around Washington, D.C. with an interest in how America’s Judeo-Christian tradition influences public policy and the mediating institutions of civil society, you absolutely should apply for the Richard John Neuhaus Fellowship on American Flourishing.

Co-hosted by the Ethics and Public Policy Center and The Public Interest Fellowship, the Fellowship explores the underpinnings of American public policy, with an eye towards the intersection of faith and public life in areas ranging from constitutional governance, education policy, family policy, economics, technology, bioethics, and more.

If this sounds interesting, and you or someone you know has two to eight years of professional experience (particularly in government, journalism, and think tank-type work) and is able to attend in-person programming in Washington, D.C., apply now! Tell ‘em Family Matters sent you.

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

Parting Shots

• The new app for Trump Accounts has officially launched — available at an app store near you — and it was fascinating, heartening, and a little inspiring to hear Vice President talk about the importance of good end-user design in promoting the new app: “Great policy only works when people can actually use it. That is the power of design. When government is easier to understand, easier to navigate, and easier to trust, people benefit. The American experience should be as great as the American promise.”

• has an interesting policy idea for an ambitious pro-family legislator — change TRICARE rules to exclude maternity care for any military spouse hired as a commercial surrogate (First Things)

• and report on the young men who are unhappy with what both political parties are offering them (New York Times)

• offers a fascinating report into the unlikely coalition maintaining the fight against assisted suicide in Connecticut (The Dispatch)

• Roni Caryn Rabin reports on the latest RxKids study that finds the cash assistance program led to better health outcomes for babies (New York Times)

• weighs in on the Great Smartphone and Fertility Debate, finding (correctly) a need to “rewrite the social contract” around phones and interpersonal connection or else watch birth rates continue to drop (Washington Post)

• Allan Carson suggests that we already had a pro-family federal policy push in the first half of the 20th century, and that it was successful — one question is how much these policy efforts were creating a new consensus or simply reflecting one that already existed (Family Studies)

• A push to mandate health insurers cover in vitro fertilization failed in the Minnesota state legislature (Minnesota Star Tribune)

• The Mississippi Department of Human Services is directing $5 million of TANF funds to expand child care assistance to low-income parents through the state’s voucher system

• Unsafe at Any Download Speed: A new Surgeon General report on screen time

• It’s Me, Hi: Deseret News, Daily Wire, New York Times

• Looking for a Few Good Men and Women: Richard John Neuhaus Fellowship on American Flourishing

• Parting Shots

Unsafe at Any Download Speed

In 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry released a 387-page report that had taken ten men fourteen months to write. He summarized the findings, based on an exhaustive review of the available studies, much more concisely at a news conference: “I would advise anyone to discontinue smoking cigarettes.” At the time, 42 percent of American adults smoked cigarettes.

It took decades for America to implement the aggressive anti-smoking measures that took smoking rates down from 42 percent of American adults at the time of the report’s release to 12 percent in 2022 (younger Family Matters may not recall that restaurants were still offering “smoking” and “non-smoking” sections up into the 1990s). It’s not that no one prior to 1964 had ever thought smoking might be bad for you. But the Surgeon General’s report was instrumental in turning a personal choice into one that had political ramifications: “Cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States to warrant appropriate remedial action,” the report found.

The office of the Surgeon General, much like the entire public health apparatus, has seen its prestige and implicit levels of public buy-in go down since the high-trust post-War period. But it’s still notable when the Surgeon General releases an advisory, reserved for “urgent public health issues” that “require the nation’s immediate awareness and action.” And this week, the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General released an advisory and toolkit on the harms of screen use for children and adolescents. It’s welcome, practical guidance based on what we know and what we don’t know about the roles that screens play in young people’s lives — and why we need better public action to tackle it.

The document’s summary offers a sample of its vision for the role that policy can play:

“Parents, caregivers, schools, communities, health care providers, and children and adolescents themselves have an opportunity and responsibility to help reduce the role of screens in the lives of our nation’s children. Likewise, policy makers and tech companies need to acknowledge the potential for harm and create frameworks to protect children to allow for healthy and joyful use. Policy makers should also seek to create safe community spaces for play, learning, and connection without screens.”

The report mostly avoids scaremongering, admitting that the research base on harms for digital childhood is “mixed,” relying heavily on associational rather than causal work, there remains “sufficient evidence of potential harms” to merit appropriate steps. After all, the case for prudence on tech is strongest when it comes to childhood. Everyone can see the impact social media, short-form video, and digital tech are having on all manner of aspects of adult society. Why wouldn’t we want to urge caution before plunging full-speed ahead on kids’ brains and social skills?

This approach won’t be anything new to anyone who has ever read a piece by or . But while the kind of parent who read “The Anxious Generation” — broadly stereotyping, parents who read books about parenting and worry about cultivating resilient and gritty high achievers who will have a shot at a selective college in a decade — knows about the need to curb or tone down a reliance on screens, many parents who don’t have the time or inclination to follow the Discourse can benefit from top-down guidance.

The push for bell-to-bell phone bans in public schools is primarily being led by elites — as most policy change tends to be. Affluent parents can pay for hands-on after-school classes in lieu of the electronic babysitter, or seek out private schools or camps that pride themselves on being screen free. But many working-class parents haven’t given much thought to the downsides of relying on an iPad to keep a kid quiet during dinner, or belatedly found out their pre-teen signed up for Instagram and have little desire or capability to enforce a dubiously-effective ban. Lower-income families also frequently have fewer safe spaces for children to gather and play, more unpredictable work schedules, and less ability to buy into curated, screen-free environments. They could absolutely benefit from schools, states, cities, and other institutions taking the recommendations in the toolkit seriously, and becoming part and parcel of a pro-family approach to tech and social policy.

The advisory encourages individual families to create a “family media plan,” including screen time limits, screen-free zones and times, and encouraging parents to be deliberate about screen time use. It even explicitly encourages parents to “Delay giving children access to tablets, smartphones and social media as long as possible” and to “discuss why you are limiting or controlling access to certain devices, platforms, or media.” If that guidance makes its way to pediatricians’ offices and elementary school handouts across the country, it will be doing American families a great service.

But this effort has to be more than just families on their own. They urge schools to enable “distraction-free teaching” and “create opportunities to displace screen time,” and encourage policymakers to “take steps to increase safe access to alternative activities such as parks, playgrounds, recreation centers, libraries, and after-school programs.”

This is a different vision of pro-family tech policy than the conversations that tend to end up in high-level fights over age verification, “duties of care,” screen time limits, Section 230, and other policy debates. Instead, it recognizes that incrementally shifting the burden from parents to tech firms to keep kids safer online — a laudable goal, to be sure! — won’t be enough if there aren’t proactive steps being taken to make “IRL” childhood more attractive and vibrant than its digital simulacrum.

That’s why the push to save childhood from digital dependency needs to operate on a faster timescale than the social pressures that made smoking less common. It wasn’t until 1984 — two decades after the initial “Smoking and Health” report — that Congress mandated a Surgeon General’s warning be printed on all cigarette labels in a conspicuous way. We don’t have that kind of time.

My EPPC colleague , who has been a vocal advocate for a screen-free (or at least -minimized) childhood, tweeted earlier this week that she has “never been more encouraged” about the cultural momentum against a childhood intermediated by technology.

You don’t need to draw a full analogy between Big Tech and Big Tobacco to recognize the downsides of a childhood lived too online. (Cigarettes, after all, are inherently harmful in a way that technology is not.) Verily, I say to you, let he who has not let his toddler watch (m)an(y) episode(s) of Wild Kratts on an iPad cast the first stone. But part of equipping parents to make the right choices for their child means changing the physical and digital environment to give parents actual choices — allowing the digital world to colonize the physical one means crowding out some of the habits and institutions that parents used to be able to rely on.

This week’s advisory deserves to be taken seriously as a moment where some parts of the public health apparatus issued a big, red flag on the need to do more to help parents raise happy, well-adjusted kids. Even the most well-meaning parents can’t do it on their own, and many harried, overburdened parents don’t know where to start. A pro-family tech policy agenda must also be a pro-social one — and the Surgeon General’s advisory should galvanize those efforts just as effectively as its 1964 predecessor did.

It’s Me, Hi

For the Deseret News, I look at options that might enable states to tweak existing child care and welfare programs that could enable low-to-moderate income families who want to have a parent at home while their new baby is under one year old to be able to do so:

“Taxpayers may rightly look askance at limited childcare dollars going toward enabling the mom of a 4-year-old to stay home full time. But for babies under the age of 1, when costs are highest, receiving federal permission to give families who want to use federal childcare dollars to enable a parent to stay home could make fiscal sense. Indeed, Montana and Minnesota each piloted a similar option in the early 2000s, experimenting with welfare reform to fund At-Home Infant Care rather than subsidizing pricey childcare.

“Today, only families whose babies are cared for by someone who is not the child’s parent are eligible for CCDF support. That approach might make sense as kids get older; after all, 80% of households receiving childcare assistance are single parents, who we may rightly want to help establish a connection to work. For newborns and infants, however, we should explore more flexibility.” (Deseret News)

In my first piece for the Daily Wire, I recap some of the Trump-Vance administration’s recent moves rolling back excessive federal regulation around child care assistance programs, and suggest their emphasis on parental choice is a fruitful angle for federal child care policy:

“For many parents, the right child care provider isn’t the one that scores highest on a clipboard checklist of various “quality metrics.” It’s the one that speaks the same language as their child, shares their faith, is located near the office, or is the one their child’s friends all attend as well.

This is the spirit that animates ACF’s guidance. While care by relatives, friends, or neighbors is provided for in the statutory text of the child care block grant, it tends to be given short shrift by too many states, whose accumulated regulations and red tape naturally favor larger, more established providers. The administration stresses that making parents aware of this kind of informal care “could expand the supply of home-based child care,” and reminds states that they can exempt certain informal care arrangements from licensing requirements so long as they do not endanger a child’s health or safety.” (Daily Wire)

My Family Matters installment on the misconceived rush to lay the blame for falling fertility at the feet of the “girlboss” was cited in ’s latest newsletter for The New York Times:

“[T]hough Brown is also a conservative, he disagrees strongly with Miller and her compatriots. There’s been an increase in births by college-educated mothers, while births by women without high school diplomas have decreased and women with college educations are more likely to be working than those with less education.”

And my EPPC colleague cited me (and this very newsletter!) among other religious pro-family conservatives that those interested in declining birth rates should be reading in his column for The Federalist.

“[Those] who claim to care about the baby bust ought to pay attention to the religious conservative family policy wonks, because they represent the only Americans still having plenty of babies.”

Looking for a Few Good Men and Women

If you are a young, or young-ish, policy professional in or around Washington, D.C. with an interest in how America’s Judeo-Christian tradition influences public policy and the mediating institutions of civil society, you absolutely should apply for the Richard John Neuhaus Fellowship on American Flourishing.

Co-hosted by the Ethics and Public Policy Center and The Public Interest Fellowship, the Fellowship explores the underpinnings of American public policy, with an eye towards the intersection of faith and public life in areas ranging from constitutional governance, education policy, family policy, economics, technology, bioethics, and more.

If this sounds interesting, and you or someone you know has two to eight years of professional experience (particularly in government, journalism, and think tank-type work) and is able to attend in-person programming in Washington, D.C., apply now! Tell ‘em Family Matters sent you.

Parting Shots

• Telehealth abortions made up more than one quarter of overall abortions by the end of last year, reports Claire Cain Miller and Margot Sanger-Katz (New York Times)

• Ohio gubernatorial aspirant plans to eliminate income taxes on capital gains, such as stocks, bonds, and real estate, with the aim of eventually eliminating the state’s income tax. His opponent, , is pitching a refundable earned income tax credit and child tax credit in lieu of broad-based tax cuts. (Columbus Dispatch)

• Minnesota legislators passed a bill that will require children under 16 to have parental consent to create social media accounts, default privacy settings to their highest levels, and strip down features like push notifications. (Minnesota Catholic Conference)

• Illinois lawmakers are seeking to create an Abortion Access Fund Grant Program, which would use money from the state’s health insurance exchange to fund abortion access for un- and under-insured pregnant women.

• “A newborn credit seeks to help a well-defined group in a way that is easy for families to claim,” write and for the Tax Policy Center, noting that a $500 version of the newborn tax credit could have a ten-year budget score of just $18 billion. “It’s an untested but potentially powerful idea.”

• explores the progressive push to decriminalize prostitution, and alternative approaches to actually help women leave the industry — I did not know 20 states are currently weighing legislation to increase penalties on buyers, rather than sellers, of sex (Wall Street Journal)

• The State Department is revoking passports from parents who owe six figures in child support or more, with the intent of eventually scaling that threshold to $2,500 or more (Daily Caller)

• If you’re at all interested in the state-by-state laws governing surrogacy, polyamorous parenting, and other progressive approaches to family building, the coalition has put together a useful scorecard.

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

• Would You Look at that Headline?: A veritable slew of notable new bills

• California Dreamin’: Gov. Newsom announced a free diaper program. Conservatives pounced.

• Now Hiring: Niskanen Center child care policy role; “Get Married” research associate at IFS

• It’s Me, Hi: Washington Examiner, Washington Examiner again, The 19th

• Parting Shots

Would You Look at that Headline?

To paraphrase Vladimir Lenin, there are some weeks in which nothing worth mentioning on the family policy front happens, and there are some weeks in which too much happens on the family policy front to fit in a weekly newsletter. And this is one of those weeks! We now go to Capitol Hill for a live look at some new, worthwhile pieces of legislation:

Supporting Newborn Parents Act of 2026

As Family Matters regulars will remember, I have long written in favor of upfront support for parents around the time of birth (Institute for Family Studies; American Compass, covered in PolicySphere; IFS again; here; National Review; a Capitol Hill one-pager with polling data; and many other places). And now, for the first time, a bipartisan bill proposes to bring that idea to fruition.

The Supporting Newborn Parents Act of 2026 is led by Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) and co-sponsored by Reps. (D-N.Y.), Blake Moore (R-Utah), and (D-Mich), and would establish a standalone tax credit, separate from the existing Child Tax Credit (CTC), of up to $2,000 for families welcoming a newborn child (Bill summary; full text).

Crucially, this would be available within the weeks after childbirth, though parents who chose could opt to take it off their next year’s income taxes instead. Low-income parents would receive a portion of the credit, with the amount phasing-in with income, though they could choose to use either their current or prior year’s income to ensure more families have access to this financial support around childbirth. It would be a straightforward, highly salient, meaningful way of recognizing the income volatility around childbirth and celebrating the joy of new life in a substantive way.1 It’s not especially pricey, either; the Tax Policy Center estimates a $70.7 billion budget score over ten years.

As a wise man said in support of the bill’s introduction:

“In an era of declining family formation, we need action to support new parents during a vulnerable and volatile time of their life. This bill would support parents of newborns in a direct, visible way, helping make America a meaningfully more welcoming place to have a child. If it passes, it would become the most high-impact piece of pro-family legislation in a generation.”

Let’s do it and be legends.

Promoting Childhood Independence and Resilience Act

There are few advocates who have done more to push back against a “safety-ist” approach to childhood than , founder of the “Let’s Grow” movement, and it’s not a surprise to see her endorsement prominently touted (“Excess overprotection has been disastrous for kids’ mental health”) on Rep. Blake Moore’s new bill, the “Promoting Childhood Independence and Resilience Act” (one-pager; bill text). The motivation behind the bill is the spate of stories criminalizing parents who choose to give their children an above-average amount of freedom — walking to a park, hanging out at a McDonald’s, playing unattended after school — and find themselves with a visit from Child Protective Services, often summoned by a well-meaning but overbearing busybody neighbor.

The bill itself is largely a messaging exercise, meant to draw attention to the problem, because most of the child welfare and CPS apparatus lays largely outside the reach of the federal government. It spends as much time laying out the problem as prescribing anything that would directly get at it — a report on independent childhood from HHS, a requirement that states train child welfare workers to “prevent unnecessary and traumatic investigations,” and other efforts to increase awareness that when it comes to child safety, it is, in fact, possible to go too far.

My sense — borrowing from ’ post earlier in the week — is that while overzealous CPS visits are indeed a real problem, the door preventing more independent childhoods is largely locked from the inside. It’s physically safer to turn on a Playstation after school than bike around the neighborhood looking for demogorgons. It’s easier to be bored on an aimless afternoon without electronic stimulants than with them. It’s less risky, as a parent, to default to performative overparenting than risk the wrath of a neighbor one phone call away from 9-1-1. But to the degree that officers of the state are acting to buttress that tendency, as continues to point out, they should cut that out.

The bill is bipartisan (co-sponsored by Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-Va.) and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) and would be a meaningful, welcome signal that the helicopter parent era is rightfully fading into the distance and Americans are willing to give each other a little more tolerance when it comes to parenting decisions again. Worth taking up! Worth talking about!

Screen-time Management And Recommendations for Teens (SMART) and Kids Act

Elsewhere on the protecting childhood front, (D-Penn.) and Congresswoman (R-Ind.) introduced a bill that would sidestep some of the larger fights around “duty of care” and age verification that are swirling elsewhere in Congress to direct the Surgeon General to develop recommendations around screen time limits for kids of different ages, including whether certain types of screen time may be more or less harmful to children.

We will, of course, ultimately need legislative action to rein in some of Big Tech’s more egregious behavior. But remember that what helped begin the change in the the landscape around smoking in the U.S. was not a big lawsuit or legislative action but a Surgeon General’s report that made clear what many people had increasingly starting to suspect — namely, that cigarettes were bad for you. Parents who right now default to iPads as babysitters in restaurants, and have not read ’s “The Tech Exit,” could benefit from straightforward recommendations. Clear guidance from the Surgeon General giving parents actionable guidelines around phones and tech for kids could help amplify the growing anti-screen movement (Toy Story 5, out later this summer, may help too), and the SMART Kids Act would facilitate that within a year of its potential passage. (Bill text)

Let Kids Play Act

We have a second sighting! This time teaming with (D-Conn.) around a bill that would seek to defuse some of the growing arms race around youth sports (they are joined by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Rep. (D-Wash.), Rep. (D-Minn.), and (D-N.Y.); One-pager, bill text).

Sometimes, the anti-private equity voices can get a little bit carried away — PE firms are very good at finding inefficiencies and boosting returns, and that can be a useful function in many parts of the economy. But there are other parts of the economy where we are not striving for efficiencies and higher profit margins — nursing homes might be one, youth sports leagues another. Private equity firms are increasingly charging families $20 and up per ticket to watch their child play, crowding out recreational and lower-intensity leagues with pay-to-play travel ball, preventing parents from taking pictures and videos of their own kids’ games while requiring them to purchase professional photos, engaging in kickback travel arrangements that require families to stay in a certain hotel for above-market rates, and, in numerous other ways, enhancing shareholder returns at the expense of American childhood.

Getting private equity out of youth sports, as this bill would do, won’t automatically end some of those practices. But removing the drive to see youth sports as a resource to be mined, rather than an opportunity to be provided, could lead leagues to refocus on more affordable, less intensive offerings. Either that or some might fold up shop — not necessarily an undesirable outcome.

It’s possible for anti-monopolists to, at times, overgild the lily. But there’s no good reason — and a lot of bad ones — to let the forces of capitalism turn the institution of youth sports into just another profit center. The reason for conservatives to sign onto this bill isn’t to stick to aspiring corporate titans, or even to embrace a “affordability” angle to youth sports (we need to lower stakes around juvenile athletics, not make it easier for more parents to afford the higher ones.) But even if this wouldn’t solve every problem, there’s no compelling reason to let investors hijack Little League. The Let Kids Play Act would be an initial salvo aimed at making kids sports fun again — worth bipartisan sponsorship, and soon.

Other Bills of Note

Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) introduced a suite of maternal mortality bills, including one that would establish a pilot program exploring alternate payment methods for perinatal care — some ideas worth exploring…Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) introduced his Barring American Citizenship by Keeping Out Foreign Fraudsters (BACK OFF) Act on the Senate floor, which would crack down on the burgeoning business of “birth tourism” here in the U.S. by, among other things, authorizing immigration officials to deny or delay issuance of a visa if someone is suspected to be traveling to the U.S. for the purposes of birth tourism… (D-N.J.) joined Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Penn.) on legislation that would require a federal survey to ask about multigenerational caregiving, something that we don’t have great data on currently…100 Congressional Democrats introduced the Universal School Meals Act, and Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), Darren Soto (D-Fla.), and Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.) introduced the Feed Our Kids Act, which would make breakfast, lunch, and afterschool snacks free for every K-12 public school student in the U.S. This stuff polls insanely well but the cost could easily push past $70 billion per year….Senators (D-Nev.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.) introduced a bill that would change the Safe Routes to School program so that projects to make school bus stops safer would be eligible for federal funding. Almost half of public school students take the school bus and giving parents more peace of mind that their kid can get to school and back safely is a worthwhile goal (and not unrelated to the Promoting Childhood Independence and Resilience Act!)

California Dreamin’

File this one in the category of “no good deed goes unpunished.” After last week’s Family Matters went to press, California Gov. announced that his state would be contracting with a nonprofit to ensure that every new mom in the Golden State receives 400 free diapers upon leaving the hospital after giving birth, enough to cover the new baby’s first two months or so.

Almost immediately, the internet pounced, fed by some bad math and assumptions about how the program would operate. The Wall Street Journal editorial board said it was evidence the “cradle-to-grave entitlement state really will now start in the cradle.” accused Gov. Newsom of “using babies as a cover for corruption,” suggesting the state was overpaying per diaper by at least a factor of two.2

Those criticisms were not well-founded — the actual budget for the program, including start-up costs, is well within the normal operating range. By the time the pilot program rolls out to serve all California moms, the state anticipates spending $12.5 million to provide 80 million free diapers (a projected 15 cents per diaper, for those playing along at home, nowhere near the inflated costs that had been tossed about.)

Is this program alone going to reverse California’s slumping fertility rates, or mitigate the need for cash assistance for new parents à la the bill proposed by Rep. Valadao? Of course not. But is it a tangible, up-front gesture that will make life a little easier for new moms? Yes. And it’s worth doing.

The whole thing illustrates the dangers of allowing partisan or sectarian lenses to cloud one’s judgment. Perhaps California’s diaper program will turn out to be a boondoggle — it certainly wouldn’t be the first California initiative to do so.3 But even if the program design could theoretically stand to be improved, it hardly deserves the scorn being directed at it. For so many conservatives to immediately jump to finding fault with Gov. Newsom felt a little opportunistic. Sometimes a program can be good without being perfect; and sometimes we should do a better job resisting the temptation to hold our political opponents’ ideas to a higher standard than our own side’s.

Now Hiring

The Niskanen Center is hiring a policy analyst to help with their work on child care pluralism and parental support as part of their work on reforming and expanding traditional cash support for workers and families.

They’re looking for someone with expertise in pre-natal-to-five policies and a willingness to delve deeply into relevant issues (federal block grant financing, rules and regulations, program integrity), and — fair warning — you’d probably get stuck in a non-zero number of Zoom meetings with me and others in the conservative pro-family arena. If that sounds interesting, apply today!

And the Institute for Family Studies is looking for a research associate for its “Get Married” initiative, based on the book of the same name by IFS’ Brad Wilcox. If you don’t know whether or not you want to encourage people to get married, this is not the position for you, but if you do — and if you have a background doing statistical work, some writing ability, and an interest in state and federal marriage policy, this could be the job for you! Apply here.

It’s Me, Hi

It’s always nice to have the chance to level-set a conversation around the future of the right, and I was happy to offer some brief thoughts for the Washington Examiner in their ongoing series “The Right Way Forward”:

“There are no silver bullets to help us here. Building a pro-family economic agenda starts with recognizing the burdens parents bear and then beginning the slow, deliberate work of putting political muscle behind that vision. For a conservative movement looking for a post-populist economic vision to rally around, one that centers families’ needs could provide a compelling start.” (full text available here)

I again graced the pages of the Washington Examiner, speaking about the Trump administration’s rollout of fertility insurance regulation in and ’s story:

“A lot of pro-lifers have significant moral concerns with IVF…This sort of split-the-baby, pun intended, approach to try to expand access for IVF, like they talked about on the campaign trail, while also acknowledging the moral and ethical concerns that a lot of pro-lifers have…They were very careful to write this in a way that allows for coverage of not just IVF, but all these other things that there's been growing attention paid to.”

And I spoke to The 19th for and Barbara Rodriguez’s piece on the firing/resignation of former FDA commissioner Marty Makary:

“Social and religious conservatives have been really disappointed with how the FDA has slow-walked responding to their concerns, especially with regards to mifepristone, and it’s possible a new head could be more responsive…But it’s also possible that whoever he or she might be, they’d be stuck facing the same political realities — serving in an administration that has so far been very reluctant to stake much political capital on the concerns that animate pro-lifers.”

Parting Shots

• Nobody does a crisp, clean micro-site like and his People’s Policy Project have come up with a comparative approach to child care policy in the U.S. vs. the Nordics (take with grain of salt)

• The Trump administration is exploring how to correct the over-expansion of eligibility under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (women seeking to become pregnant via IVF are, by definition, not yet “pregnant workers,”) and Senate Democrats are upset, reports (MS NOW)

• Claire Cain Miller reports on the corporations that are trimming paid leave and dropping IVF and surrogacy benefits to help rein in fringe benefit costs (New York Times)

• praises Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee’s proposal to replace the state’s existing dependent exemption with a fully refundable child tax credit of $325 per child. (Boston Globe)

• offers a respectful yet critical review of ’s new book, GIRLS® — “the arguments in GIRLS® fall flat not because India’s thesis is wrong but because she overstates the problem.” (The American Conservative)

• offers an eminently readable and, at times, extremely funny profile of some of the voices and personalities behind the “masculinist” strain on the right (The Atlantic)

• of the California Catholic Conference writes that the first thing to tell a mom facing an unexpected pregnancy is “Congratulations!” (OSV News)

• Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed legislation cracking down on surrogacy contracts signed with residents of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Syria. (Florida Politics)

• A lovely piece, written with a deft touch, by on why a brute-force binary approach to family planning decisions fails to capture the complexity of whether or not to think about adding a child (The Dispatch)

• Incredible discovery from Tobias Peter and the AEI team about the limitations of a big Urban Institute paper on housing supply, showing that relying on machine learning led to totally unreliable findings, summarized by (Public Comments)

• Former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney writes against the Trump administration’s embrace of prediction markets — “offering “event contracts” on the outcome of a football game or on how many points LeBron James will score is not financial innovation. It is sports betting.” (Commonplace)

• If you’re at all interested in the dating habits of young Gen Z Catholics (and who isn’t), you’ll want to make time for a reported piece from , a master’s student at Benedictine College, on how young adults are treating dating both too seriously and not seriously enough (The Pillar)

• reports on a new initiative in Arkansas, where younger lawmakers are teaming up across the aisle to improve maternal health and newborn outcomes ()

  The Renovator

  Lawmakers Finding a Way Forward

  Arkansas is a tough state to have a baby. Compared to the rest of the country, statistics on maternal health and infant health have been poor. In the past, too many pregnant women weren’t getting the prenatal care they needed, especially in the rural areas, and prenatal care providers were going out of business at an alarming rate. But thanks to the Hea…

  Read more

  4 months ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Joanna Kenty

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

• Money Won’t Get You Too Far: Are we miserable because we’re wealthy?

• One Year of Pope Leo: The quiet American

• Comments Worth Comment: EPPC scholars weigh in

• It’s Me, Hi: Princeton video, The Dispatch, Washington Examiner

• Parting Shots

Money Won’t Get You Too Far

There seems to be a growing recognition that America’s social malaise is not caused by outright economic distress but the choices we’ve made. Which is good news, in a sense — if we’re making suboptimal choices, we could just decide to start making better ones. But it’s also bad news, because if there’s no one to blame for the strain too many Americans say they feel, then the political solution has to be something other than “look in the mirror.”

Everyone’s favorite recent example of this is the Utah couple profiled in the New York Times, working as a firefighter and a nail technician. Their income is enough to buy a 2,000-square-foot house and maintain a golf hobby, but they don’t feel their house is big enough to raise kids or that they are financially stable enough to start a family (“If we were rich, I would definitely have kids.”). The internet had its fun, just like with the memorable Utah couple interviewed by for his book, “Family Unfriendly:”

Nicole nods and says, “We don’t want kids.”
I ask if she means they don’t want kids right now, or they don’t ever want kids.
“Probably ever,” Isaac says.
I ask why not.
“We can’t afford it,” Nicole replies.
What costs in particular do they have in mind?
“Everything,” Isaac begins. “Health care.… But honestly, it’s just selfishness.”
I look at Nicole’s face, but she gives little reaction.
Isaac continues: “I joke with Nicole, ‘some people are watching Teletubbies and cleaning up vomit, and we’re going to be drinking margaritas in Paris.’”

Two young couples from Utah, a few years apart, are not able to stand in for an entire generation, but I do wonder if they aren’t just a little more willing to say outright what a lot of people are thinking. It’s not that we couldn’t afford to have kids — it’s that what you’d have to give up in order to do so, be it golf on the weekends or margaritas (?) in Paris (??) is more than what we’re willing to give up.

I frequently use this framing device when talking about declining family formation — part of the reason for declining marriage is that marriage has become less “necessary,” materially speaking, and your bundle of consumption options expands with rising wages and a higher standard of living. But that doesn’t seem like the whole story to me, either. As both the Biden administration and now the Trump administration have learned, trying to convince people that the economy is, actually, doing just fine when polls show Americans feel like too little butter scraped over too much bread is not a recipe for success. There’s something about our aspirations that exceed our grasp even in the wealthiest economy the world has ever known. And maybe it’s because our economy feels increasingly optimized for “premium” consumption by affluent adults without dependents, rather than the broad middle class in which many parents of young children find themselves.

One angle on this question was offered by in his excellent March New York Times column, entitled “How Can America Be So Miserable When It’s So Rich?” He ticked down the usual economic statistics, shared by researchers like AEI’s , to demonstrate that the populist doom-and-gloom stories just aren’t that true.1 French identified the key paradox at the heart of the “affordability” debate and the sense that it’s gotten harder to achieve the basic building blocks of a normal life. “America is still the land of opportunity. We can still generate enormous amounts of wealth for tens of millions of people…[but] we are miserable in part because we are wealthy.”

His piece was pegged to last summer’s Disneyland Discourse, which focused on the way that limited supply (when Orlando’s Magic Kingdom opened in 1971, there was about 1 domestic Disneyland destination per 100 million Americans, now it’s 1 per 170 million) and growing demand (real median household income is almost 40 percent higher today than in the mid-80s, without getting into debates over the statistical niceties) have led to the emergence of premium tiers of Disneyland experience — Lightning Lanes, perks for on-site hotel guests, VIP access, even the exclusive, semi-secretive world of frequently Disney attendees known as “Club 33”. As wrote following his own trip to the Happiest Place on Earth™, what grates is less Disney’s ability to charge a high price for an admittedly high-quality experience than the “damned unfairness” of the sense that some people are able to buy their way out of the democratic lines the rest of us have to wait in to ride Space Mountain for a third time.

But there’s another way in which Disneyland represents the pain points of a modern economy — goods have gotten cheaper, but services (particularly highly labor-intensive experiences, like a theme park) continue to rise. As wrote for ’s Substack last month, “The screens got cheap. The shared experiences got expensive.” It’s not just about cheaper consumer goods — as I wrote last year, it’s fundamentally easier to turn on Netflix and order DoorDash (or, heaven forfend, a food delivery robot) than it is to make plans to meet friends for a movie and a night out. But the in-person experience is at a premium now too — per The Atlantic’s , the price of attending an N.F.L. or M.L.B. game has roughly tripled since the early 1990s as teams increasingly cater to the suits in the suites rather than the sandlot kids in the bleachers.

And then you have the phenomenon of “Disney Adults,” profiled by for The New Yorker, who are willing to spend themselves into debt to recapture the joy of their childhood trips to Anaheim or Orlando. It is a free country and no one is proposing barring them from spending their money if that’s how they so choose…but it is also a sign of some disordered preferences, and reflects poorly on Disney for choosing to lean into premium-tier solo travelers as a business model rather than trying to use their willingness to pay to subsidize families, for whom the park is nominally supposed to be about. (Currently, ages 2 and under don’t need a ticket to Disneyland, while children ages 3 through 9 get a whopping $10 per child discount off the full adult rate…a family-first pricing scheme would give kids a bigger discount, and maybe even offer a “family ticket” so families with four or more kids weren’t unduly penalized.)

A country in which more people can afford to make trips to Disney World— some annually or even more often — is one that isn’t too poor to make ends meet. But it’s a country that feels like it’s harder to attain a “solid, middle-class standard of living” because firms are increasingly targeting high-end consumers. Cass cites a model from a travel research company that finds “Disney prices its theme parks for the top 20% of American households by income.”

They’re not alone — a New York Times guest essay from Clifford Winston finds that Detroit automakers have left the “economy” class of car behind, favoring luxury S.U.V.s and sedans over the compact cars of a decade ago. Home developers, too, favor “luxury apartments” with all the bells and whistles, knowing that if they are constrained on how many units they can build they need to find other ways of maximizing their return. Per in this week’s , bourbon makers have pivoted towards a more premium demographic for the past decade, with “premium large format” movie theaters following a similar trajectory — $5 tickets at a humble movie house are harder to find, while Regal will gladly charge you $30 for a reclining seat at an IMAX screen. The demise of the “starter home,” for similar reasons, has been well chronicled, including in a podcast with . And have you looked at World Cup ticket prices?

Producers know there are enough wealthy consumers willing to pay a premium for a premium product and thereby neglect the “affordable” end of the spectrum. In French’s words, using the parlance of the extremely anti-democratic world of airline boarding: “We have a Group 1 economy for a Group 9 nation.” Consumers have more disposable income to chase services and experiences because their wages are rising and the cost of consumer goods continues to fall (it’s never been cheaper to hear Bruce Springsteen sing, but never more expensive to hear him sing live). This shift benefits those without dependents — the empty-nesters and the DINKs — while making the young couple aspiring to start a family feel behind the eight-ball.

If I was a better writer, I could probably come up with some cutesy name for this phenomenon — maybe the “inner ring economy,” after the C.S. Lewis essay of the same name, where he states his belief that “in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.” After all, if everyone is in Premium Preferred, then no one is. That’s the uncomfortable, “look in the mirror” version of this thesis. But if we wanted to blame the supply side of the equation, we might also call it the “distracted boyfriend economy,” after the meme of the same name:

And it’s far from unclear this is a bad bet for the businesses themselves — there’s plenty of money in the premium banana stand! Adults without dependents, for example, have more discretionary income, and are often less price-sensitive, than parents trying to stretch every dollar. But it does help explain why consumers might feel dissatisfied with an economy that, on paper, seems to be performing well. For instance, I think it helps explain ’s treatment of the question for National Review, arguing that in our gender-egalitarian world “men are worth less to their households and women are more burdened in them…We’re growing the economy — at the cost of dad losing his feeling of contribution, at the cost of mom burning out, at the cost of many opting out of parenthood entirely.”

As an empirical story, I don’t think that’s wholly true — as pointed out on Twitter, married-couple families have increased their hours in the labor force by 17% since 1980 while their incomes have gone up 70%. But it does contribute to a kind of “penalty” facing those who want to opt out of the dominant model — the most accurate part of ’s “Two Income Trap” book was her point that when housing in desirable neighborhoods is supply-constrained, single-earner families get outbid by dual-career households, or, increasingly, priced out by incumbent empty nesters who bought in decades ago. And parents as a whole have more costs relative to the empty-nester or DINK household.

What can you do about it? You can try to redistribute your way out of it through higher taxes and bigger child credits, but that’s a political tightrope walk. You can try to make it easier for firms to build more homes, cars, and Disneylands so the market does a better job of serving more points along the price spectrum. You can tell people they shouldn’t go into debt to go to theme parks, and shame people who strive to become members of “Club 33” (and the companies that try to induce them into it.) And you can lean on corporations, cities, international soccer governing bodies, movie theaters, health insurers, and other institutions to recognize the burdens that families bear — particularly in a world with a downward demographic trajectory — and press them to make their usual business model slightly more family-friendly. Ideally, we’d do all of that — and more.

One Year of Pope Leo

Happy one year anniversary of ascending to the chair of St. Peter to Pope Leo XIV. Funny story — I had started putting together a few scattered thoughts about a month ago about the relief (to many American Catholics) of having a Pope who (wisely, it seemed to me) had spent much of his first year focused on quietly repairing relationships within the Church rather than opening contentious discussions about issues long thought settled. As someone I knew analogized, the previous Pontificate had devolved into a relationship resembling a disappointed, at times erratic, father and his disputatious children rather than the kind of trust and stability many Catholics had come to expect during the modern Papacy.

That was then! In recent weeks, we’ve learned that the Holy Father is “WEAK on crime” and thinks “it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” news that would come as a surprise to many, including Pope Leo himself. As Bill McGurn wrote for the Wall Street Journal, the Pope has largely avoided taking the bait, but he hasn’t been unsubtle about his criticisms either. Conservative Catholics should have their consciences pricked by a Pope who is inclined more towards peace than their political leader (just as they should have had them pricked when his predecessor John Paul II opposed the war in Iraq.)2 But so, too, should the Vatican remember that the plaudits of progressive commentators (who deliberately avoid sharing the Pope’s condemnations of abortion and other Church moral teachings) can be a trap of their own.

When it comes to secular squabbles, this too shall pass. Pope Leo’s legacy for the Church will be decided by how he shepherds his flock through an age of technological change and apparent signs of religious revival (or, to be precise, a stalling out of decline, which is its own sign of promise) both in the United States and on the Continent. The Holy Father’s forthcoming encyclical, rumored to be on AI, and his October gathering of bishops to discuss the family, should be worth plenty of our attention. The right way to think about the Pope, for now, is as my EPPC colleague speaks about him in a piece for The Dispatch: A pope you don’t “have to think about every day.”

“The restoration of normal governance in the Vatican, and the reaffirmation of settled truths of Catholic faith, may not have the snap, crackle, and pop of a putative dog-and-cat fight between a pope and a president,” Weigel writes. “But that restoration and that reaffirmation seem to me the most important stories of the first year of the pontificate of Leo XIV.” Happy first year anniversary to our first American Pope; ad multos annos.

Comments worth a Comment

My EPPC colleagues have been heavily engaged in the regulatory process lately, with some filings worth your notice:

• Responding to a CDC/CMS Proposal on medical codes for gender detransition

• Responding to an NIH Notice on human embryonic stem cell research

• Comment on a Federal Reserve Board Proposed Rule on debanking and “reputational risk”

• Comment to the Social Security Administration on terminology to use around gender ideology

And, lastly not not leastly, an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court on the mifepristone case out of Louisiana, noting that the Biden administration’s elimination of the requirement that pregnant women meet in-person with a physician to obtain the abortion pill put more women at risk of coercion and complications, and that restoring the 2016 REMS would help ensure women’s safety.

As noted in last week’s Family Matters, EPPC’s gala featured speeches from and Ryan T. Anderson on the past and future of our work. Worth a watch if you’re interested in the trajectory of social conservatism:

It’s Me, Hi

Video from my (friendly!) debate with and Wendy Wang at Princeton University’s James Madison Program on the question of whether the state can do anything to support family formation is now available. Just look at what a great time we had!

I spoke to the Washington Examiner about the recent guidance from HHS that seeks to expand the suite of family planning options to include conversations about both attaining and avoiding pregnancy and adopt a root-causes approach to reproductive health concerns:

Patrick T. Brown, fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, called the new guidance “a great move” in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “We’re well overdue for a better conversation around what family planning actually means,” he said. “Moving away from some of these methods that I think are seen as more invasive, more artificial … towards a more holistic approach … could be a big win.”

I joined Victoria Holmes on The Dispatch’s podcast, “The Skiff,” to talk about my recent piece on falling fertility rates and all things marriage and family related. I believe it’s for subscribers only…but don’t let that stop you!

While I’m grateful to AlterNet for highlighting my thoughts on the tensions between the pro-life movement and the White House, I would like to correct for the record that I am not the “director of anti-abortion policy” for the Ethics and Public Policy Center — and everyone is grateful for that!

Parting Shots

• Everybody’s talking about “Yesteryear,” the new novel about a tradwife influencer who hops back in time, but there hasn’t been a better review about what the book misses (and doesn’t) than ’s (Fairer Disputations)

• “Trump is the problem. The president is the problem,” says pro-life leader Marjorie Dannenfelser. (Wall Street Journal)

• interviews on the economic impact of falling fertility (Financial Times)

• and his AEI team have a new survey out about neighborliness, including the fact that the percentage of young adults who talk to their neighbors at least a few times per week dropped from 51 percent in 2012 to 25 percent last year. (Survey Center on American Life)

• Jason DeParle reports that Utah lawmakers have put aside — for now — a plan to build facilities to treat homelessness on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, but the push to consider new treatment options instead of prescribing “housing first” will continue (New York Times)

• writes on American helicopter parenting as being downstream from American street design. There is clearly something to that, but I also suspect European and Asian parents are more hands-on and intensive than they were in previous generations too… (The Dispatch)

• offers her “vibes” theory of fertility decline — “young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood.” Does that lens conflict or overlap with our lead item today? (New York Times)

• writes that low birth rates “don’t have to be a crisis” for Vox and warns about excessive deregulation of the child care industry for Jacobin

• Two states - Iowa and Indiana - don’t plan on offering any hardship exemptions when implementing Medicaid work requirements, and state human services agencies are grappling how to define categories like “medically frail,” even as Nebraska launched its work requirements earlier this month (KFF Health News)

• Connecticut lawmakers decided against passing a state child tax credit or a ban on phones in schools as their legislative session ran out (Connecticut Post)

• Gov. continues his efforts to back up Utah’s pro-family culture with pro-family policies, and signed three bills on family issues — enhancing their state child tax credit, a child care business tax credit, and expanding paid leave for state employees — this week.

• Genuinely beautiful zoning reform package in Missoula, Montana — you love to see it (Sightline)

• Sarah Mervosh, Francesca Paris, and Claire Cain Miller report on the impact of declining birth rates on K-12 enrollment: Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Dallas, and Philadelphia school districts are all down more than 10 percent relative to 2014 (New York Times)

• writes on the surplus embryos created using conventional IVF techniques, and why it relies on a commercialization of reproduction that raises significant moral questions, for ’s Substack:

  Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Frozen and Forgotten: The Moral Failure of IVF

  The argument: Embryo adoption does not resolve the central problem: IVF generates overwhelming numbers of surplus embryos that cannot be cared for, leaving many indefinitely frozen, neglected, or destroyed…

  Read more

  4 months ago · 91 likes · 16 comments · Daisy Mae Inglese

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1

For another, fuller accounting of where this debate lies, see Winship’s recent Substack:

First World Problems

There Are Many Reasons to Cheer Up About the State of the Middle Class

This piece originally appeared at National Review Online and is reprinted here with permission…

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5 months ago · 1 like · Scott Winship

• The Rocky Road Facing the Pro-Life Movement: Is the post-Dobbs moment over?

• Gonna Be, Gonna Be Golden: Fifty years and counting for EPPC

• “The K-Shaped Marriage”: To those who have, more will be given

• It’s Me, Hi: National Review, The Family Frontier, Spotlight on Maryland

• Parting Shots

The Rocky Road Facing the Pro-Life Movement

Leading up to and in the wake of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, there were a number of conservatives, myself included, who wanted to see the Republican Party respond to the moment by expanding support for pregnant moms, particularly those facing an unexpected pregnancy.

As a matter of justice, it’s the right thing to do — a full recognition of the burdens of pregnancy and childbirth that women uniquely bear should require society to step up its game. There was also the matter of pure politics — laws that protect the unborn from the violence of abortion are worth passing even if they are politically unpopular, but being able to point to supports for moms in difficult situations is an easy way to deflect some of the criticism.

And, in the years following Dobbs, as states began passing pro-life laws, they also began some steps along this route. As a report I led for the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 2024 found, “In the two years since Dobbs, every state that has laws on the books protecting life in the womb has passed laws that expand support for pregnant and new moms and their babies, some to the tune of tens of millions of dollars annually.” That momentum was worth crediting, even if it fell short of bigger visions of a fully pro-life, pro-family agenda. And now, with the dust settling on the abortion conversation, there are troubling signs that the push to pass laws seeking to both protect the unborn baby and accompany its mother along her journey of pregnancy and postpartum recovery might be losing steam.

A conservative-coded version of safety net expansion for pregnant women was always going to look different than a blue state one, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Conservatives have traditionally been very concerned about incentivizing out-of-wedlock childbearing so any such effort would necessarily focus more on in-kind support, like resources provided by pregnancy resource centers, and a greater rhetorical focus on work requirements and the “success sequence.”

While younger lawmakers on the right continue to flirt with more substantive approaches, the center of gravity in red states has led most elected Republicans to look askance at cash assistance for new parents, paid parental leave, or a deliberate expansion of the social safety net.1 As much as I might pine for a Republican governor willing to declare “let’s become a family policy utopia,” the dominant scenario has been singles and doubles, and even a few walks, rather than a red state swinging for the pro-life, pro-family fences.

One of my favorite examples of what a red state approach to supportive services for new moms could look like has been Gov. Bill Lee’s move in Tennessee to include coverage for diapers in the state’s TennCare program. For the past two years, Medicaid-eligible parents received coverage for up to 100 diapers per month — roughly half the number a typical infant needs in a month — at no cost for the first two years of their child’s life. Since its launch, reports the Knoxville News Sentinel, the program has dis­trib­uted 22 mil­lion diapers to nearly 100,000 chil­dren across the Volunteer State.

That kind of meaningful, upfront assistance could have been a signature initiative of a pro-life, pro-family Republican party. Indeed, there’s been plenty of chatter (some of it started by me) about how Tennessee could lean into this kind of approach. Alas, with Gov. Lee in the final year of his term and with a state legislature focused on other priorities, the TennCare diaper coverage was put on the chopping block. The $43 million in state spending that went to fund diapers for new low-income moms was axed, victim to the need to fund a buyback provision meant to reimburse hospitals for Medicaid provider taxes. It did not escape notice that during the same legislative session, Tennessee lawmakers had voted to extend the state’s school choice scholarship program to an additional 15,000 families, many of whom have a household income in the six figures, to the tune of $300 million.

Every legislature has to make funding priorities, and expanding school choice for more Tennessee families is hardly a negative outcome. But lawmakers should have tried harder to find the money to maintain a creative way of supporting low-income parents, and thought a little longer about the optics of expanding scholarship support for school-age students from families above the median income while at the same time taking material support away from low-income parents with very young children. It’s a sign that the political sensitivities in the wake of Dobbs are no longer as raw — and it presages a more frustrating, less compelling path forward for the pro-life movement.

We see a similar tendency in the rise of the so-called “abolitionist” movement, which is starting to slowly slide from certain corners of the internet to actually influencing real-life legislation. This movement argues that women who seek out abortions should be treated as murderers, subject to legal penalties up to years in prison or, in some cases, the death penalty.

In 2025, a dozen states introduced bills that would have allowed prosecutors to charge those who have abortions with homicide. South Carolina’s bill would have allowed judges to sentence women who obtained abortions to up to 30 years in prison, but failed to get out of subcommittee. This year, the “compromise” version of that bill — which would bring South Carolina’s current six-week abortion ban down to zero weeks — would still allow for up to two years in prison for women who obtain an abortion. The bill has passed out of committee and awaits a vote on the Senate floor. While major pro-life groups “hope the penalties against mothers will be removed,” the fact that lawmakers are including legal punishments for women in these bills suggests they are less sensitive to the politics of abortion than they were in the immediate aftermath. America is not nearly pro-life enough for an “abolitionist” inspired approach to come across as tone-deaf at best, vindictive at worst.

Other, smaller battles are testing the pro-life movement’s political deftness as well. In Pennsylvania, a state Supreme Court decision has opened up the possibility of using state Medicaid dollars to pay for abortions. In Idaho, activists say they have enough signatures to get an initiative before voters that would rescind the state’s post-Dobbs pro-life laws. A Wyoming judge has blocked that state’s attempt to place limits on abortion. In Congress, House Republicans are moving forward with a bill that will cut $200 million from the Women, Infants, and Children supplemental nutrition assistance program. All the while, pro-life leaders continue to talk about the need for policies that support women and welcome life at all stages as their leverage with the current administration remains limited.

All this means that a pro-life movement too focused on short-term political battles than the long-term public opinion one — which a robust, high-profile policy agenda could absolutely help with — is one that will continue to backslide.

There is still an opportunity for younger, more energetic Republican politicians to come up with creative policy supports to address the “demand side” of the abortion question to accompany the pro-life movement’s traditional focus on the “supply side.” But allowing initial steps like Gov. Lee’s push to cover diapers on TennCare to fade into the background does not suggest a movement or party sufficiently committed to winning over hearts and minds on an issue that is still bitterly contested, with big stakes for the future of social conservatism — not to mention the unborn lives who are at risk.

Gonna Be, Gonna Be Golden

A hearty congratulations to the think tank I call home, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, for celebrating its 50th anniversary at a star-studded gala in Washington, D.C. this week.

This year’s keynote speaker was , who delivered some stirring remarks about the path forward for “Judeo-Christian humanism” against the “multi-polar world” that is set to be fought over not by left and right, by anti-liberal progressives, right-wing Nietzscheans, and the amoral transhumanism of Silicon Valley. EPPC’s role, Douthat suggests, is not to harken back to the “Moral Majority” of yesteryear, but to apply the principles of our religious heritage in ways that defend the dignity and irreplaceability of humanity against those who would instrumentalize it for whatever ends. In so doing, he echoed words offered about EPPC during our 10th anniversary gala, back in 1986, delivered by President Ronald Reagan:

“[T]his wasn’t to be just another clever think tank, looking at — to use a term that’s received too much currency in this age — value-neutral strategies. No, it was to examine the issues of today in light of timeless moral principles, principles rooted in the Judeo-Christian ethic…

“Today, not just America but the world needs the Center and its message that the central issue of our times, the question on which the future not just of our blessed nation but of all mankind turns, yes, the issue of ethics in public policy and, yes, the issue of our vision of man and the moral order, yes, the issue of values.”

Congratulations to EPPC on its golden anniversary, and on 50 years of influencing policy and sharing culture. Ad multos annos.

The “K-Shaped Marriage”

As any of the Family Matters readers who I spoke to while I was in DC this past week know (you know who you are! Hi!) I am increasingly interested in the conversations we see among center-left writers who are slowly moving the discourse back towards a saner, more pro-social space than when aggressive cultural progressivism had the upper hand (no, I don’t have a hot “microlooting” take to offer because the concept is so self-evidently dumb.) There’s a lot in the space that intrigues me, not least a conference I attended in D.C. this week that focused on ████████████.2

Another interesting sign of this healthy evolution is a post by University of Southern California psychology professor, and author of the forthcoming book “Dad Brain,” . Earlier this week, she wrote:

“I worry that pushing men and women into not just separate households but also separate ideological corners will yield an angrier, more polarized, and less healthy society. Not only that, letting marriage and family become right-coded seems like a sure-fire way for the left to lose popular support. Like it or not, most people aspire to form families, and that frequently involves heterosexual marriage. A movement that aligns itself against marriage, or against men in general, will fail at the ballot box and in the public square.”

She also sounds notes that will sound very similar to readers of Family Matters, particularly my surprisingly-controversial (in some quarters!) Dispatch piece on the rising bar that men need to clear to be considered “marriageable,” and why working-class marriage has been hit hardest as a result:

“We used to treat marriage as a mostly economic arrangement and a way to consolidate family resources and raise children. Men and women had specialized roles and weren’t heavily involved in each others’ domains. Now, we expect not just romance and skillful negotiation of household logistics but friendship, fulfillment, and magic. As a result of our heightened expectations, the very best marriages have gotten better than ever before, but people who might have tolerated less fabulous marriages are now more disappointed and frustrated, and more people have opted out entirely. That’s the K-shaped marriage. Lowering our standards for what constitutes a good marriage can actually make us happier.”

Or, as I told an audience in Texas last week, we cannot be content with the current state of marriage, in which Americans with all the advantages of professional-class life benefit from marriage and those in lower-income strata do not. “To those who have, more will be given, and to those who do not even what they have will be taken away from them” is a poor prescription for the health of our polity. One, exceptionally difficult solution could be to try to “re-functionalize” marriage; to think about the goods, services, and status that used to be fairly exclusive to marriage and see what we can do to reconstruct the bundle. Another solution could be to help lower-SES men form the habits and practices necessary to be desirable partners.

Both of those seem quite difficult to achieve, which may help explain why some of the existing marriage promotion discussion can feel a little thin and overly reliant on bully pulpit approaches. But the fact that Saxbe, and other left-leaning voices, are interested in making marriage safe for liberals to talk about and promote might make for some interesting conversations, and maybe even more creative solutions. Plenty of food for thought in Saxbe’s post, available at her Substack, :

Natal Gazing

Can couples forecast a fair future?

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4 months ago · 26 likes · 14 comments · Darby Saxbe

It’s Me, Hi

In the print issue of this month’s National Review, I argue that — despite the doomsayers and defeatists — there are, actually, steps we could take that could boost American birth rates on the margins, and that doing so should take up more of policy conversation than it does now:

“Limply gesturing at the black box of “cultural change” in lieu of a responsive policy agenda is throwing in the towel before the opening bell — like Ned Flanders’s parents in an early episode of The Simpsons, they’ve tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas.”

Speaking of the cultural conversation swinging back to a place where Family Matters readers will recognize, very kindly spotlights my report on “child care pluralism” for the as presaging the direction of contemporary conversations around early childhood and child care:

“Back in 2021, Patrick T Brown wrote a report calling for what he described as “child care pluralism”…While there are plenty of parts of that report I and other child care stakeholders might quibble with, on a philosophical level there seems to be steady movement toward Brown’s vision.”

The Family Frontier

Child Care's Imaginary Bogeymen

Every so often, an article pops up that basically suggests liberals would really like the government (via government-funded child care programs) rather than parents to raise American children, perhaps because they would like to indoctrinate them as tiny socialists, perhaps because they’d like to use child care programs to suck money from the public teat…

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4 months ago · 6 likes · Elliot Haspel

I spoke to Spotlight on Maryland on some of the cost of living pressures on Maryland families:

Patrick Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said broader access is key. “You want to be supporting parents in the hard work of raising the next generation,” he said. “Everybody who’s in that sort of middle-class range should be able to access a broad child tax credit.”

Parting Shots

• A new report from the Center for American Progress is getting lots of attention, but remember — their definition of “child care deserts” is just looking at licensed care facilities, and says nothing about the underlying desire of families in a given community looking for care. Caveat emptor.

• “We’re going to barbecue a lot of sacred cows,” Alex Adams, HHS’ Assistant Secretary for Family Support, recently told a podcast in presaging forthcoming work around deregulating federal child care approaches, reports Coral Davenport (New York Times)

• Washington, D.C., initiated the nation’s first wage subsidy program for child care workers, which is now at risk of elimination by the D.C. City Council, reports (The 74)

• “We have a ripe moment in this new era to advance causes that are really good for families…The federal government has a real role to play here,” said Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) at a recent Heritage Foundation event.

• A crisp, clean look at options for incremental expansion of the Child Tax Credit from the analysts at the Tax Policy Center. Margot Crandall-Hollick and Elaine Maag also offer their analysis of the distributional impact of Senator Banks and Rep. Blake Moore’s “Family First Act”.

• The Oklahoma state Senate rejected a bill that would have legalized sports betting. (Oklahoma Voice)

• The American Enterprise Institute’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility has published a new handbook, “Land of Opportunity, “with a number of interesting chapters. One of particular interest to Family Matters readers will be ’s contribution, “The Unequal Erosion of Married Parenthood.”

• Among the items in progressive Democrats’ “New Affordability Agenda,” meant to be their version of the “Contract with America,” includes “create universal down payment assistance for first-time homeowners, offer federal funding for locally administered child care,” per Annie Karni (New York Times)

• For all the talk of a religious revival and wave of Catholic conversions in big cities and college campuses, the data don’t show much, if any, movement among working-class Americans (National Catholic Register)

• Catholic bishops are asking lawmakers to reject legislation that would mandate insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization (EWTN News)

• Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson has announced plans to expand the city’s proeschool program, free school meals, and free mental health screenings to teens (someone tell her about iatrogenic effects...) (KING-TV)

• and on how millennial dads are doing more at home than ever before:

  Derek Thompson

  How American Dads Became the Parents Their Fathers Never Were

  Today’s article was written with Aziz Sunderji, an economic analyst and data whiz who writes at Home Economics…

  Read more

  4 months ago · 282 likes · 9 comments · Derek Thompson and Aziz Sunderji

• I had the good fortune of being able to attend an AEI panel on women’s views of marriage, featuring great opening remarks from , and a fascinating panel of , , and , moderated by . Well worth the watch:

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

And, as a reminder for all Family Matters readers in and around Austin, Texas, come see me, Mark Regnerus, Matthew Breuninger, and talk about marriage, childbearing, and why no one is getting married or having kids tomorrow (April 25) at the Austin Institute! But as for today, if it’s Friday, it’s Family Matters:

• Baby, You Can Drive My Car: At the U.S. Capitol, it’s women and children first

• Light Housekeeping: A no-pay paywall

• A Final Word on the “Girlboss”: Correcting some misimpressions

• It’s Me, Hi: National Catholic Register, Washington Examiner

• Parting Shots

Baby, You Can Drive My Car

The movement to make America more pro-family (again?…) can sometimes fall into the trap of pointing out where policymakers are falling short against our ideal pro-family society rather than celebrating the, uh, baby steps towards creating a society more welcoming to parents and children.

But the small wins deserve celebrating too! And — just in time for America’s semiquincentennial — the U.S. Capitol is setting an example every state legislature and plenty of private businesses should follow as well.

Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia has been at the forefront of encouraging Republicans in Congress to place a stronger priority on family policy issues. And thanks in part to his leadership, that will start close to home. The House will designate 14 parking spaces for pregnant moms across its side of the Capitol complex.

In an emailed statement, Rep. Moore said “This move, which I was proud to help lead, sends an important message: we value families and are willing to make practical changes to support them. These kinds of thoughtful, achievable improvements matter—and the Capitol should lead by example in prioritizing the American family.”

This policy is a small-scale version of what an intentionally pro-family society needs to look like. As Family Matters regulars might remember, I suggested making pregnant women eligible for priority parking spots last summer, and got some pushback from disability rights groups. Creating specific spots for pregnant (and, ideally, new) moms is another way of accomplishing that same goal.1 It may be a minor inconvenience for other commuters and staffers; those 14 parking spaces would probably come in handy when it’s raining or at the peak of Summer Intern Season. But it’s a sacrifice the rest of us should be willing to make in order to make life easier for those women who are taking on the hard work of bearing the next generation.

This mindset is at the heart of a new policy brief I co-wrote with Capita’s . In “Hospitable by Design: Toward Institutions and Communities That Welcome Families,” we argue that localities and institutions can too often ignore the specific pain points facing families and children, treating them with benign (or sometimes outright!) neglect:

“If we are indifferent to the asymmetries between the vital need for families and the lack of family-friendly infrastructure, we run the risk of asking parents to bear the burden of raising children without being able to draw on the support of a community. And if we aren’t intentional about creating economic and civic infrastructure that balances the scales in favor of families, we run the risk of building spaces that cater to the autonomous individual at the expense of the messy, loud realities of family life. For instance, some American cities lack safe spaces that give families the opportunity to gather. Others prioritize amenities that appeal to those at other stages of life, ignoring the unique needs of families with children, or sending a subtle signal about who is welcome and who is merely tolerated.”

We also point out that issues like crime and urban disorder can impact families by making public spaces unusable and unfriendly, even if we don’t canonically think of them as “family policy” issues. Putting families first in our urban planning and economic development strategies means being willing to break through the mindset that too often plans for the unattached, autonomous individual:

“Authentic hospitality often fails not because of explicit hostility towards families, but because no one intentionally designed systems and structures with families in mind. This is where formal institutions can help. Changing mindsets to proactively welcome and support families, rather than treating the modal user or consumer as an unattached individual, requires new thinking.”

I would love for you to read the full brief (it’s not long!) But for those of you whose attention span has been fried by social media and short-form video content (I get it, I get it), here are some of my favorite suggestions from the report:

• Reduce property taxes or utility bills for families with minor children who have low or moderate household income;

• Create express “family lanes” in airports and for in-person government services like Medicaid or passport renewal;

• Create a flat family pricing structure at museums and theaters where families do not have to pay a per-child fee, and;

• Improve walkability and “strollerability” in neighborhoods by prioritizing sidewalk repair and curb cuts in areas with many families and adding sidewalks where there are gaps.

And, of course, to that we might add following the U.S. House of Representatives’ lead in giving parking priority to “women and children first.” There’s much more work to be done, but setting a good example of pro-family praxis is an important gesture.

Light Housekeeping

A note from Family Matters management:

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Family Matters+ gives you everything that regular Family Matters readers receive, with one exception. Effective going forward, the privilege of commenting on a Family Matters post will be reserved to paid subscribers who are part of the Family Matters+ family of product offerings. It is our hope this cuts down on the drive-by comments that lower the quality of the Family Matters experience for the rest of the readership. Maybe it will even lead a movement to eliminate (or at least improve) comments across the Internet altogether! Inshallah.

Please be advised that Family Matters content will continue to be delivered to your inbox or Substack app every Friday, to all subscribers, with no paywall. For those who only consume and/or reflect upon Family Matters on a weekly basis, you will see no change. The price of Family Matters+ was set to the absolute lowest amount allowable by Substack, because this isn’t about making money — it’s about restoring civic order.

Again, note that, aside from the ability to comment, there are no special benefits or privileges associated with Family Matters+. You are, of course, welcome to subscribe whenever your disposable income is just too high! Becoming a Family Matters+ member not only allows you to comment freely, but gives you that heartwarming glow that can only come from knowing you are financially supporting high-quality family policy #content. But, to reiterate: It will not get you any extra content (at least, not at any point in the foreseeable future) nor will it grant you immunity if your comments are deemed distasteful in the extreme.

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

A Final Word on the “Girlboss”

“Never wrestle with a pig,” George Bernard Shaw is said to have said. “You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”

Which brings me to ’s latest contribution to the interminable “girlboss” discourse, a term I increasingly regret ever engaging with, even in scare quotes. Revealed preference suggests that others derive a lot more value in creating and then demolishing straw men on Twitter than I do, so I’m going to focus on Lyman’s piece at the Institute for Family Studies, which I think relied on a mischaracterization of my views.

In the second paragraph, Lyman says that I:

“noted that the gap in completed fertility between highly-educated women and less-educated women has narrowed in recent years, and that this is due to less-educated women marrying less, in part, because of a lack of suitable men. As far as it goes, these empirical claims are plausible and, in some cases[,] undoubtedly correct.”

If only that were the end of it! Any discussion of the absurdly amorphous term “girlboss” is hamstrung by the fact it can mean everything from a partner at a New York law firm with a child in French immersion preschool to a mom of five selling LuLaRoe leggings from her mud room in Plano. I don’t think there is a workable definition of “girlboss,” which is why I proxied for it by talking about the difference between college and non-college marriage and fertility trends (on which, as stated, Lyman agrees with me.)

Lyman, instead, comes up with his own custom categorization of “girlboss,” and then accuses my article of failing short according to his constructed definition. He ranks jobs by how many women with college degrees are in them and finds, unsurprisingly, that historically, jobs in which women were less likely to have a college degree were conducive to higher fertility. Jobs that are more intensive and require more years of education — like college professor, doctor, or lawyer — have traditionally been correlated with lower fertility. Lyman has a long-running, one-sided feud against Nobel prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin, but her book Career and Family covers similar ground in more exhaustive detail.

What Lyman’s own graphs show is that the drop in fertility over the last half-century has been sharpest among women with jobs less correlated with educational attainment. I think it’s very clear that “greedy jobs” compete with fertility goals, that family formation and a model of uninterrupted human capital formation are at odds, that a more materialist culture and affluent society leads some women (and men!!) to prioritize career success over family life. But all of that — while true — does not accurately describe the trend of women lower down the career prestige scale who have seen their fertility rates fall as well. As he himself accurately notes: “‘Girlbosses’ don’t have as large of a fertility penalty as they had in the past.”

I also want to emphasize a data limitation that makes his argument even harder to know what to do with. He partials out “women who are not working” into their own category, but of course (as he notes) we are not following the same women over time. Full-time stay-at-home moms indisputably have more kids than women who work; but this chart isn’t comparing two discrete groups of women. Women who “lean out” of their career for a short time are going to show up in his charts as “non-working women,” even if they might have been “girlbosses” previously or be considered “girlbosses” down the line. It may very well be (I think it is quite likely!) that some of the women who show up as “non-working” in Lyman’s time series “leaned in” to their career earlier in life so they could then achieve the career stability that allowed them to then “lean out.”

In other words, treating “working” and “not working” in the same graph obscures the fact that these are different women at different points in their life — Lyman alludes to this in the article, but that takeaway is something too many people missed in their interpretation. (As a side note, if you mentally omit the green line from one of his graphs due to this conceptual confusion, it pretty clearly shows that women working in higher-education share professions are now likely to have higher fertility than their lower-status peers.) And, of course, conversations about how to make it easier for moms (and dads!) to flex in and out of the labor force has been part of the feminist/pro-family conversation for years.

Moreover, my recent writing on the “girlboss” and her detractors were pretty heavily focused on the post-2007 drop in fertility that has gotten so much attention. The one critique I will grant is that I may have been too quick to blithely assert that “professional-class women had their gender revolution already and came out the other side.” We don’t know marriage and fertility rates among college-educated women will be stable and certainly I didn’t mean to suggest there aren’t real costs associated with delaying family formation into your 40s. Of course I do want us to have conversations about why college-educated Americans are marrying later and marrying less.

But what I think a plain reading of my assorted contributions suggests, however, is that the biggest drop in fertility among married women happened in the 1970s and 1980s, and to the degree that marriage is increasingly correlated with education, women with a degree will continue to have more resilient family formation rates than women without. As and Phillip Levine reiterate in a new research brief for Notre Dame’s Strengthening Families Research Initiative the decline in fertility is more broad-based than can be laid at the feet of “girlboss feminism,” as the memes and posts I was writing in reaction to have tended to do. The rise in working-class women who have never been married deserves far more attention in this entire conversation than the work-life tradeoffs of the rich and famous.

The whole “girlboss” appellation and discourse is, frankly, annoying which is why I prefer to talk about college vs. non-college paths. And the trajectory of marriage for each of those groups of Americans looks very different, which is why we need to spend more time unpacking why there is a failure to romantically launch among young people today. To do that, I’d recommend starting with a very strong, insightful piece (not that I don’t have certain quibbles, but that’s for a different time) by a certain writer by the name of…:

Lyman Stone

Do Young People Suck?

Marriage rates are declining, and this is a key part of why fertility is declining…

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4 months ago · 81 likes · 21 comments · Lyman Stone

It’s Me, Hi

I spoke to the National Catholic Register’s about the decline of birth and marriage rates in the United States:

Patrick Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who studies family and demographic trends, placed these changes in a larger context. He cautioned against attributing fertility decline to a single cause, emphasizing that modern prosperity has reshaped both marriage and the prospect of having children. “We live in an increasingly wealthy society,” Brown told the Register. “You’re having to give up more to have a child than you did in a world where everyone was working on the farm.” (National Catholic Register)

My Free Press piece on the lack of attention being paid to declining fertility among working-class women was cited by in his Washington Examiner column: “The biggest driving factor of the Baby Bust is the decline in marriage, and so the working-class retreat from marriage deserves much of the blame. Sure enough, the birthrate decline is faster among the working class.”

Parting Shots

• My EPPC colleague Jamie Bryan Hall writes about the flaws in a recent report on the abortion pill, mifepristone (The Federalist)

• Adrienne Schweer encourages a baby bonus for new parents as a way of helping assuage concerns about AI disruption (Washington Examiner)

• has written a sharp piece on why the anti-feminist strain on the American right not only fails to hit the political mark, it runs the risk of being counterproductive in the lives of young women (The Dispatch)

• I found ’s column on the end of the integralist moment for First Things especially insightful and persuasive.

• , James P. Sutton, and offer a deep dive into the rollout of New Mexico’s child care program — it’s a unique set-up, not least because of the unique funding structure of the program (The Dispatch)

• The saga of a couple who gave birth to the wrong baby after a mix-up at a Florida IVF clinic continues to unfold (USA Today)

• The University of Notre Dame is allowing students to opt into a filter for explicit content on the university’s IT infrastructure, something for which students have been advocating for over a decade (Irish Rover)

• Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed bills creating a state paid family leave and paid sick leave program (Virginia Public Radio)

• After Indiana paused enrollment in the state’s child care assistance program, Gov. Mike Braun has proposed a $200 million increase in funds, which would expand the number of available enrollees by 14,000 children at or below 135% of the poverty line (Indianapolis Star)

• A new pilot program in Michigan will allow home-based child care providers to participate in the state’s PreK for All program for the first time (WJRT)

• Alabama State Rep. Kenneth Paschal writes that he will be introducing a package of bills aimed at supporting the family, including parental rights and a commission on men and boys (Yellowhammer News)

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

• Freedom and Its Discontents: What’s an American Catholic to do?

• Get Ready for Work, Work, Work, Work, Work, Work: New data on TANF

• It’s Me, Hi: The Free Press, NOTUS, &c.

• Parting Shots

Freedom and Its Discontents

The number one rule of Family Matters is that we stick pretty close to home — our focus is American pro-family policy and, with rare exceptions, we don’t pretend to be an expert in Mesopotamian crop yields, European parenting styles, or grand strategy in the Near, Middle, or Far East. Yet that principle this week conflicts with the number one rule of writing, which is “write what you know.” And the open conflict between President Donald Trump and the first U.S.-born Pope has brought what I know — namely, being a Catholic and an American conservative, in that order — to the forefront in ways that raise fascinating questions (at least, to me!) about the relationship between faith and politics in liberal democratic society. We’ll get back to child tax credits next week, I promise.

Pope Leo XIV is far from the first Roman Pontiff to use his spiritual authority to influence events in the temporal realm, and he’s not the first Pope Leo to do so. In the year 452, the first Pope Leo (“Leo the Great”) met with the invading Attila and persuaded the Hunnic chieftain to spare Rome. He’s not even the first Pope Leo to have taken on political developments across the Atlantic — Pope Leo XIII’s 1899 apostolic letter Testem benevolentiae (“Witness to Good Will”) argued against the heresy he dubbed “Americanism,” characteristics of which included “the confounding of license with liberty, the passion for discussing and pouring contempt upon any possible subject, [and] the assumed right to hold whatever opinions one pleases upon any subject and to set them forth in print to the world.” Guilty as charged, your Holiness.1

It wasn’t all that long ago that there was a veritable cottage industry of American conservatives welcoming, even hagiographizing, Vatican intervention in global geopolitics when it came to Pope St. John Paul II’s clear and powerful witness against Soviet totalitarianism.2 Ah, simple times. Today, immigration and war are the topics du jour, where the Church’s teaching about the dignity of the human person is less copacetic with populist impulses on the right.3 There is simply no doubt that the current chorus of Republican voices encouraging the current Bishop of Rome to “stick to sports,” theologically speaking, are clearly motivated by partisan interests. That’s nothing new; Catholic Democrats have long played similar games with Church statements and tenets. Just ask Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who was happy to virtue signal having met with the Pope as a dig at the President — but was just as happy to ignore a direct entreaty from Pope Leo XIV not to sign the state’s recent bill legalizing assisted suicide.

The political gambit from the President is very clear, seeking to use the Pope as a peacenik foil to help shore up sagging approval ratings amid an unpopular war. It’s cynical and I doubt it will be effective — the Pope does not have the intra-Church baggage his predecessor accrued by the end of his pontificate and is popularly associated with his love of the Chicago White Sox more than anything. He’s an odd choice for a villain-of-the-week, though that hasn’t stopped various voices on the right from trying.

But the dynamic also raises tough questions for conservatives who are not used to such overt conflict between Pope and President. Catholics on the right have long accused their co-adherents on the left of being “cafeteria Catholics” for picking and choosing which tenets of the Church to apply to social and political questions. Is the cafeteria now open for both political parties?

thinks so. His Unherd column on the affair lumps today’s defenders of the Iran War with yesteryear’s Catholic neoconservatives, who he claims “furnished highbrow Catholic justifications for Republican foreign and domestic policy; presented Catholicism as, in essence, ‘safe’ for the Right’s conception of American order; and even sought to remake Roman thought in the American image.” His charge is that Michael Novak, my EPPC colleague , and First Things founder Fr. Richard John Neuhaus were backfilling limited-government orthodoxies with proof-texted Catholic teaching that downplayed a commitment to peace and to the poor. Ahmari writes:

“In translating the Catholic tradition for Reagan-era America, Novak rendered it perfectly inoffensive. There was nothing wrong with an individualistic system that couldn’t be fixed with more individualism, bootstrapping enterprise, and a robust “public moral culture” — a pet phrase of the Murrayites. Yet in their telling, the culture or morality was completely innocent of political-economic and other structural dynamics. They were loud about restricting abortion, as Catholic doctrine insists, but refused to notice how a ruthless, efficiency-maximizing order might come to treat the unborn (and the disabled and the elderly) as disposable. More than any other sector of elite opinion, they contributed to the development of a conservatism that would police the bedroom, but never the boardroom.”

That last sentence is a great line, but I don’t think it’s fair.4 What the original generation of neoconservatives were trying to do was translate the moral scaffolding of mainline Protestantism, which had already begun its inexorable decline into irrelevance, into a low-but-solid common denominator for a pluralistic America.5 American liberal democracy had relied on the Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, and other mainline denominations to form souls outside the demands and values of the market — with that disappearing, who would provide the counterbalance to the acidifying and alienating effects of capitalism run amok? At the same time, as pointed out, the Catholic Church was firmly in its post-Vatican II era, seeing to update its application of moral principles for “the signs of the times,” offering fewer Latinate certainties and more felt banner aphorisms.

In that context, the work of Novak, Weigel, and Fr. Neuhaus looks less like choose-your-own-adventure Catholic theology than an attempt to translate it into the American vernacular. Would I, looking back from the onset of the post-religious right in the Year of Our Lord 2026, have counseled a more muscular public morality, and a heavier focus on using public policy to buttress the family against various economic and cultural challenges? Of course. One of my first published book reviews, now lost to the shifting sands of the internet, was an admittedly slightly snotty review of Novak’s 2015 final book, Social Justice Isn’t What You Think It Is (co-written with Paul Adams). I charged:

“One wouldn’t expect Novak and Adams to champion Francis’ anti-capitalism tendencies. But the book draws so heavily from the context of a Polish Pope writing as part of a global struggle against communism that it comes across — wittingly or no — as the in-house counsel for those who would argue vox commercii, vox Dei.

“The authors are not arguing for pure capitalism, and the book is a serious effort to resurrect a term [social justice] that has been inflated beyond any real meaning. But it is weakened by their attempt to downplay the real tensions between social and economic strains of conservatism. Ultimately, their new definition could be used to cover unjust corporate or social practices under a cloak of personal virtue.”

But to re-read the documents of the 1980s is to look back at a time when most thinkers presumed America’s higher baseline of religiosity would stay a permanent feature, not least because the Soviet Union provided a common enemy for business and religious conservatives to unite against. In his 1991 book, Freedom and Its Discontents, Weigel himself sketches out an agenda for American Catholic intellectualism that hardly sounds like the parody of market-first libertarianism he is accused of.

“We require a new reading of the contemporary American cultural situation, ahead of the standard left/right barricades...[this] new liberalism would reappropriate elements of the classic Thomistic moral tradition in conversation with what we might call the neo-neo-Thomistic proposals made by [Alasdair] MacIntyre...and Michael Novak’s analysis of the American ‘communitarian individual’...It would seek an ongoing conversation with the younger ‘communitarian liberals,’ like Harvard’s Michael Sandel, in their efforts to define American public life as something other than life in a ‘republic of procedures’ in which ‘rights’ are reduced to juridical ‘trumps.’ Concurrently, it would engage (rather than ignore or mock) the critique of post-war liberalism mounted by such Ur-conservatives by Russell Kirk…It would say of America, in the wonderful formulation of William Lee Miller, ‘Of thee, nevertheless, I sing.’”6

That is far from baptizing Hayek by way of Ayn Rand and Dale Carnegie. It’s a vision of taking the bounds and limitations of liberal society seriously, and seeking out interlocutors who might find ways of reconstructing a shared moral framework in a rapidly pluralizing society. You can ding the project for being unsuccessful — religious conservatives were always a junior member on the right, particularly once the Russian menace disintegrated and the three-legged stool began to wobble, and we remain so today. We may blame Novak-era Catholic intellectuals for perhaps being too blithe towards the fact that capitalism can undermine itself. But accusing them of “habituat[ing] yet another generation of conservative Catholics to bend their faith to GOP imperatives” is an overreach.

If anything, Weigel himself has been a more consistent critic of the man who launched the bombing of Iran than anyone on the post-liberal right, including Ahmari. I challenge anyone to read Weigel’s column for The Washington Post as a blind defense of this White House’s foreign adventurism. And it was only in October 2022, that Ahmari hosted a conference advocating for a more post-liberal approach to politics; the next year he told it was “fair to characterize” his politics as “post-liberal.” So it feels misguided to blame the previous generation of Catholic neoconservatives for the fact that one of the attendees at that 2022 conference recently made headlines for saying the Vatican needed to “stick to matters of morality” and informing the successor of St. Peter that “it’s very, very important for [him] to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” After all, it is the cadre of thinkers with whom the Vice President has most closely aligned himself who have most explicitly positioned themselves as wanting to move past the “dead consensus” and overturn the legacy of the Catholic neocons.

For another thing, this argument minimizes the real wins of the strategic alliances of the Reagan-Wojtyla era. Prudential questions about environmental regulation and corporate taxation, while they clearly bear on the common good, simply do not rise to the same level in a Catholic framework as issues that directly touch on human dignity, like abortion or assisted suicide. It ignores that the Catholic left was itself being wiped out as a political force; Commonweal Catholicism followed the same path to irrelevance as the Protestant mainline,7 sped on by the progressive insistence on purity tests on abortion which made the position of pro-life Democrats like John J. DiIulio, Jr., and Robert Casey, Sr., untenable. This charge also underweights the impact of the clerical sex abuse scandal, which rendered the Church’s public pronouncements dead letter to many secular ears, and some Catholic ones as well.

And, while not speaking ill of the dead, it seems inarguable that the true break between American Catholics and the ultramontanism Ahmari favors did not stem primarily from Iraq. Instead, it came in waves — first, progressives dissented loudly (and many mainstream Catholics dissented quietly) from Humanae Vitae’s teaching on birth control and the value of human life. Decades later, conservatives had their own falling-out with Rome, thanks to their undeniably rocky relationship with Pope Francis. American conservatives were not wrong to feel that the late Pope did not particularly care for them, and the rupture between shepherd and flock that the White House is trying to currently exploit wouldn’t be as vulnerable if not for the rupture between the Argentinean Pope and his American sons (and a few daughters.)

Perhaps none of this history can help Catholics today discern the right way to engage with politics. We can start, at the very least, by not overcorrecting in the other direction. We have an example of what this looks like from the progressive interpreter of Vatican news and former Democratic Congressional candidate , who publishes the Substack . On Twitter, he has suggested with “dogmatic certainty” (!) at least six times and counting that “God has raised up a pope from the Americas to help defeat MAGA authoritarianism.” Any time you are expressing the same kind of confidence in the workings of the Almighty as a second-string cornerback who tells the post-game reporter that God helped his team pull out the victory today, you’re setting yourself up for the fall. (Or…The Fall?)

Theologians can debate how thickly Pope Leo XIV has layered on his near-pacifist pleas for peace, or whether a preemptive war with modern-day technology amid densely-populated urban centers could ever theoretically be justified — I will stake no claim on that matter. I am, however, more convinced that whatever the theoretical defense of just war in the abstract, the rollout and execution of this intervention falls short of that standard, and those who are trying to inflate the Pope into a political punching bag to prop up its domestic popularity should think long and hard about what they are doing.

The role of religion in the life of any believer, Catholic or not, should be allowing it to prick your conscience, not assuage it. No one party can claim a monopoly on the Church’s distinctive vision for human flourishing and anthropology of the human person, and if there is a one-to-one match with your religious tenets and your preferred political party, your understanding of either institution is probably lacking. The post-liberals and America Firsters who are trying to marginalize the Pope’s prayers for peace are taking a political gamble that may well backfire — but even if that gamble doesn’t fail, they risk taking an even bigger spiritual one that almost certainly will.

Get Ready for Work, Work, Work, Work, Work, Work

And now for something closer back to our normal wheelhouse. HHS’ Administration for Children and Families’ recent update on state work requirements in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program offers an interesting glimpse into program design and accountability metrics gone right and wrong.

Work requirements in TANF were established in the mid-1990s welfare reform era, and they’ve always been subject to a little bit of gamesmanship. Technically, states are supposed to ensure that 50% of all families on TANF, and 90% of two-parent TANF families, meet the program’s work requirement. If you have reduced your caseload on the program since the baseline year (FY 2005), a state gets to reduce its target for the work participation rate accordingly (WPR) — in some cases, all the way down to 0.

What’s also interesting is that there’s not much of a partisan valence to who is doing a better job encouraging workforce participation, because the case reduction credits re-jigger who is aiming for what target — the top and bottom of the rankings are a mixture of both red and blue states.

Office of Family Assistance director David Swegle redesigned the letters that recently went out to state offices to more comprehensively break out the all families work participation versus two-parent families and other categories. TANF is suffering from not-so-benign neglect as Congress shows little interest in revisiting what is and isn’t working. My own belief is that the policy conditions that held in 2005 are sufficiently different than the facts on the ground in 2026 that at the very least an updating of the benchmark would seem to be in order; if not, a man can dream, a fuller rethinking of what purpose TANF should serve.

It’s Me, Hi

For The Free Press, I offer a more precise (and concise) version of the argument previewed for Family Matters readers last week — blaming the “girl boss” for declining fertility misunderstands the cultural and economic dynamics at play, and leads conversations about how to address declining fertility down the wrong track.

For the morning newsletter published by NOTUS (soon to be renamed “The Star”), I talked about the political dynamics of the Trump-Leo contretemps:

“The first American pope is pretty popular and the war in Iran is pretty unpopular,” Brown said. “Trying to polarize the former to make the latter more popular doesn’t seem likely to work.”

Elsewhere: Alan J. Hawkins and Connie Huber quote my reminder to be humble about the impact of public policy interventions on marriage scripts in their report for the Institute for Family Studies…My Commonplace piece on Paul Ehrlich’s legacy was highlighted in ’s newsletter… cited my writing in an essay exploring why working-class men are not, well, working (at least as much as they used to) in a piece for the Daily Wire…And cited my recent Dispatch piece in her own piece there on the 25th anniversary of “Bridget Jones’ Diary.”

Parting Shots

• My EPPC colleague spoke to members of the U.S. Religious Liberty Commission earlier this week on the relationship between religious liberty and women’s rights. Her remarks can be found on her Substack (The Duty of the Moment)

• My EPPC colleague Stanley Kurtz offers a straightforward approach to increasing conservative influence on education policy: “The most powerful steps we could take to wrest public schools from the hands of the woke would be for states to move school board elections “on-cycle” (to federal Election Day) and allow political parties to nominate the candidates.” (National Review)

• My EPPC colleague reviews my fellow EPPC colleague ’s new book “The Desecration of Man,” calling it “serious scholarship, delivered in an appealing way…[about] the impact on our humanity of an intensely materialist culture (Public Discourse)

• writes about the generational divide in politics, and how the unbalanced economic and political power of the Boomers is turning “respect for our elders” into “resentment.” (The Atlantic). hits similar notes in her piece for First Things.

• The South Carolina state legislature is currently debating a bill that would tighten the state’s abortion law and introduce penalties for women who obtain an abortion of up to two years in jail. They should do the former and not the latter.

• Pro-life leaders are hoping a second reconciliation bill will extend the federal ban on funding for Planned Parenthood. They face an uphill fight. (NOTUS)

• writes about the need for the administration to focus on policies that will enable more young people to form families and buy a house (Fox News)

• A new Justice Department investigation reveals the lengths to which the Biden administration went to investigate and harass pro-life activists.

• reports that the President’s recent comments that “We’re a big country, we have 50 states. We have all these other people, we’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care.” are sapping some momentum from child care efforts (The Washington Post)

• U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin is introducing a bill that would require major sports leagues to offer a free local option for nationally-televised games behind a paywall, and ensuring that subscription packages like MLB.TV and NFL Sunday Ticket have access to games that would otherwise be blacked out nationally. Congress needs to rein in sports leagues soaking fans for every dollar, and this bill is a good start to that conversation. (The Athletic)

• There is often lots of lip service paid to finding community and building a village and all the rest in the modern era, but this is one of the most practical posts on the subject I’ve come across in a while, from and :

  The Family Commons

  The Secret to Better Weekends with Kids

  Both of our weekends as parents used to suck, and neither of us could figure out why. We had a lot of theories: Lindsay thought she might need more time to herself, so she and her husband started doing more shifts. But no, that didn’t really solve it. Maybe they were doing…

  Read more

  5 months ago · 79 likes · 13 comments · Chloe Sladden and Lindsay Meisel

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

• Girlboss, Interrupted: American fertility hits new lows. Who can we blame?

• It’s Me, Hi: Commonplace

• Parting Shots

Girlboss, Interrupted

American fertility rates continue to decline and conservatives know who to blame: the much-dreaded and -derided “girlboss.” Katie Miller, the podcast host who previously worked as communications director for both Vice President Mike Pence and the Department of Government Efficiency, warned her followers that “AMERICA IS IN A FULL-SCALE BIRTH RATE COLLAPSE,” saying that women’s “biological destiny is to have babies — not slave behind desks chasing careers while our civilization dies.” Emma Waters, analyst at the Heritage Foundation and author of the recent “Lead Like Jael,” posted that “‘Girl-boss feminism’ has a body count — in birth rates.”1 At Evie, blamed the media, academia, and government for denigrating motherhood at the cost of “skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness among women who traded family for boardrooms.”

This is, of course, nothing new. One of the most clarifying explications of this theory comes from a May 2022 speech by Helen Andrews, arguing that the reason “the lie that women can have it all has as many adherents today as it does [is] because it’s not obvious why it should be a lie.” She encouraged the Republican Party to dispense with the fiction that it can champion both stay-at-home moms and working ones: “Once you lead women down the primrose path of thinking they can have a career just like a man and also the family that they want, then millions of women are going to try and do that.”

I think there’s a pretty obvious reason as to why the “blame the girlboss” strategy for fertility decline is wrong, and then a more subtle claim that’s perhaps a little more defensible. Before we get there, let’s look at what the most recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics tells us.

If you wanted to oversimplify, you could say this is the most important chart for understanding fertility decline in America since we hit “peak baby” in 2007:

Married birth rates have dropped a tick from where they were, but have largely fluctuated around 80 to 90 births per 1,000 married women of childbearing age for the past three decades. A relative constant can’t explain a variable. The biggest change has been among that traditional bugaboo of social conservatives, unmarried childbearing. To take a simple counterfactual, if the birth rate among unmarried women (including teenagers) had remained where it was in 2007, the U.S. would have avoided the bulk of its post-Great Recession “baby bust.”

Any theory of fertility decline has to account for the fact that college-educated women are more likely than their non-college peers to marry; that childbearing outside of marriage is rapidly receding for a mixture of economic, technological and cultural factors, particularly for working-class women; and that marriage remains a strong predictor of childbearing.

Let me say that again to stress it — the post-2007 decline in fertility is heavily, though not exclusively, driven by falling birth rates among single, non-partnered women, accelerated by falling rates of relationship formation. (While it doesn’t play out exactly the same across the globe, this finding has been broadly confirmed by writers as varied as and .) A straightforward reading of the “let’s blame the girlbosses” hypothesis fails to account for these social changes.

We can further unpack this by looking at the Wall Street Journal graphic shared by Miller, which shows the massive decline in births to teenage girls:

Miller suggests she finds this lamentable, an interestingly far cry from the bipartisan consensus that led to the creation of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. The fall-off in teen births isn’t limited to teens, though; the biggest relative decline is among women in their early 20s, and women in their late 20s have seen births head downwards ever since the Great Recession. That’s only modestly counterbalanced by increases in births to women in their 30s and a small rise in women over 40.

For college-educated women, the story is predominantly one of marriage deferred and parenthood delayed. The “girlboss” is getting married later than ever — but she’s getting married. She’s not having as many kids as her grandmother — but she’s having, on average, as many kids as her mom (or close enough to it). As Claudia Goldin’s book “Career and Family” explores in extensive detail, professional-class women had their gender revolution already and came out the other side.

But for women without a college degree, the picture is different — they are still living through shifting social and economic realities. Black women now have lower fertility rates than whites. Hispanic women, too, are seeing fertility fall.2 And, on average, minority women will be in lower socioeconomic strata than the white corporate strivers who we tend to think of as “girlbosses.”

As the cultural critic who goes by Miri Vinni on Twitter pointed out, lumping these trends under the “girlboss” umbrella obscures more than it clarifies. I admit to only partially keeping an eye on the cottage industry, but to my eye it seems like only fairly recently, as in a 2022 BusinessWeek profile that typified the genre, that there seemed to be an attempt to redefine “having it all” from meaning “women can have a high-powered career and kids” to “women can have a high-powered career instead of kids.”

Likewise, notes that the “girlboss” was never meant to mean “woman who has no family.” Corporate-friendly feminism in its original guise was explicitly about “having it all” — both a career and a family — as distinguished from the more anti-nuclear family campus feminism that typified the posts you might read on Jezebel. The leading prophets of 2010s-era “Leaning In,” like Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Wojcicki, and Marissa Mayer, thought they were expanding the choice set for ambitious young women who wanted to both make sure their bio got to the “Who We Are” corporate leadership web page and made sure that bio mentioned being the proud mom of a kid or two.

As Pushaw notes, this vision can be dinged for being too unrealistic for most people to aspire to. Most women weren’t trying to balance running Yahoo! while pregnant, and some of the company-first, family-later messaging clearly rubbed many conservatives (and some feminists!) the wrong way. The conversation about flex work, part-time gigs, and jobs that can be done while watching young kids is a much-needed and interesting one. But the overdue task of breaking down the false dichotomy of “stay-at-home moms” vs. “40-hour-plus working moms” presumes that kids are already in the picture. Whether professional-class moms are or are not “having it all,” the “mommy wars” are not what’s causing our recent, post-2007 plunge in fertility.

By 2023, per the Census Bureau, women with a bachelor’s or more were making up 45% of new moms; by the time we get the data for 2025, it could be up to half of moms will have a college degree.3

Much of this is obviously due to rising educational attainment, but it’s also attributable to rising wage growth, tight labor markets and increased consumption opportunities for workers at the bottom of the income distribution. They increasingly don’t need to get married for reasons of economic necessity, and the landscape of lower-income men isn’t compelling them to do so for personal ones. So they’re abstaining from relationships, which leads them to abstain from parenthood.

It’s hard to think many, save the most outré anti-nuclear family radicals, find this a desirable long-term outcome. Fewer partnerships, fewer marriages, and fewer kids will mean more loneliness and heartache even before you get to the economic and political consequences. But my reading of the evidence makes it hard for me to lay this at the feet of the “girlboss.” The strongest form of the argument might be that by telling women they could advance to the top of corporate America, the “Lean In” generation set a tone that working-class women couldn’t live up to; that by saying women could seek both professional advancement and a family life they inadvertently pushed lower-status women to only aim for the former.

But even that, more defensible story feels like it’s giving elites more power than they actually have. Do many women without a college degree aspire to the work-life balance of a corporate titan? Or are there decisions driven more by a rising standard of living and real wage growth that allows them to be choosier about their relationships and feel the opportunity cost of parenthood much more strongly?

One of the best reported pieces on this dynamic came from the New York Times team of , Claire Cain Miller, , and Robert Gebeloff in 2021, in which they explored how rising wages and the sense of increased opportunity (and opportunity costs) pushed more young working-class women to prioritize economic stability prior to forming a family. Earlier this year, the Times followed up with an article stressing the control that increased economic potential gave women:

“Saje Fedrick, 28, who works in the kitchen at a Texas Roadhouse restaurant in northeastern Pennsylvania, said all of her friends have jobs, but few have children. The reason, she said, ‘has a lot to do with the men.’ She said they watched their mothers or aunts struggle without financial independence. ‘We really started to see how men treated women — like, “I’m a provider, so I can do this,’” she said. “‘I have control over you.”’ Now, women have their own money, she said, and ‘men are shaking in their boots.’”

That dynamic doesn’t seem healthy or conducive to a healthy marriage culture. But it’s a very different one than arguing about the work-life choices of women with a college degree, which feels increasingly like debating the precise placement of deck chairs on the Titanic. The underlying dynamic for the non-college population feels more about male “marriageability” (understood beyond just earnings power) than female careerism.

It’s good — necessary, even — for both men and women to examine one’s vocation, skills, and the needs of one’s family. But beating up on the “girlboss” without beating up on her presumably male equivalent “boss” feels at times like it’s going for some cheap clapter rather than interrogating what could help more women find a spouse and have children. Those dynamics look very different for women below the median income than those whose earnings potential gives them the flexibility and opportunity to choose the right path for her. Restoring marriage among Americans without a college degree is a different, far bigger, challenge than picking at corporate elites — but America’s fertility decline won’t ever be reversed unless we figure it out.

It’s Me, Hi

At Commonplace, the journal of American Compass, I reflect on the legacy of Paul Ehrlich, and how today’s functional anti-natalism ended up giving his ideas a longer shelf life than they deserved:

“We don’t overtly punish families with higher taxes, but we do ask them to bear the rising burden of raising children individually while socializing the costs associated with old age. Our approach to housing privileges the financial concerns of the elderly and the environmental implications on the spotted owl over the need to ensure supply grows to meet demand. The resulting high prices make more households hesitate to settle down and have kids. And we hardly need the FCC to sanction people who have big families, or formal awards to celebrate the decision not to reproduce; we have TikTok and the ladies of The View to handle that.

“In too many cases, our functional anti-natalism is slowly turning Ehrlich’s dream of population decline into reality. What’s needed is an explicit political and cultural push in the opposite direction.”

Commonplace

The Long Shadow of ‘The Population Bomb’

The biologist Paul Ehrlich died last month at age 93, leaving behind his wife Anne Ehrlich, their daughter, two grandchildren, two great-children, and tens of thousands of cranks who still share his belief that humans are a pox on this planet…

Read more

5 months ago · 50 likes · 22 comments · Patrick T Brown

The piece was also syndicated by RealClear Policy.

Parting Shots

• The Department of Health and Human Services has released new Title X guidance that encourages clinics who receive federal funds to explore natural family planning methods and includes an emphasis on recognizing that “family planning” can mean both avoiding and achieving pregnancy (Politico)

• reports on a new health care white paper from the Center for American Progress, urging Democrats to examine the use of price caps to limit costs rather than focusing all their energies on Medicare for All/Some/All-Who-Want-It big swings (The Bulwark)

• Emma Green reviews the aforementioned “Lead Like Jael” amidst the ongoing conversation about what Christian motherhood should look like today (The New Yorker)

• uses Jane Austen and Gaussian distribution to argue that having kids is one of the last high-variance choices facing today’s young adults, which might explain why many are reluctant to choose it (The Argument)

• Amid the fractures between the “MAGA” and “MAHA” wings of the Trump coalition, Dr. would like to see more focus on making good food cheaper and easily available, and less on quick fixes and symbolic gestures (Christianity Today)

• A recent working paper examines the role of building codes in driving up housing costs, encouraging industry to “distinguish true minimum safety standards from the many code provisions that are more ‘aspirational’ in nature.”

• reports on the expansion of school holidays — such as the five holidays to the NYC calendar in the last decade — to examine where a commitment to pluralism interacts with the primary function of public schooling (New York Magazine).

Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.

1

I have not yet listened to it, but Emma unpacks her book’s argument with on today’s podcast:

Commonplace

Neither Girlboss, Nor Tradwife with Emma Waters

“Girlboss” feminism promised a world in which women could seamlessly balance ambitious careers and flourishing family lives. But in practice, that vision has proven far more brittle, often demanding total commitment to work while sidelining marriage, children, and the realities of time and tradeoffs. While many women are moving away from that all-consum…

Listen now

5 months ago · 1 like · Oren Cass and Emma Waters