The Heritage Foundation’s latest document, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years,” was published in January, and its purported goal is to reverse the country’s declining birthrate.
See, if you can’t physically force women to have more babies, which is what abortion restrictions aim to do, you design government policies that pressure women into having more babies.
You cut off opportunities outside the home, you make the public sphere hostile to women’s independence and you create a system where the only viable path left for a woman is dependence on a man for survival. In other words, you drag the country back to a time when women had fewer choices.
Ethics aside (yes, I know that’s a huge asterisk):
We’ve set up society to be dependent on dual-income households. Given that the most commonly cited reason people aren’t reproducing (starting later, stopping sooner, w/e) is economics, limiting women’s ability to contribute financially to a household is only going to exacerbate this.
As a childfree man, I don’t want a woman to be dependent on me. If my partner is stuck at home due to being unable to work, that isn’t going to make me suddenly decide that I want to become a parent. If I was on the fence (which I’m not), it would definitely push me onto the “no” side of the fence due to financial considerations.
This is just fucking stupid and won’t work the way they think it will.
On your second point: I’m pretty sure there will be a push to ban all contraceptives so the only option you have to not have children is to not have sex. Of course some people will abstain or do non-vaginal sex but it will be a numbers game.
Will be? They’ve been attacking them from every angle they can think of for years.