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On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported the Heritage Foundation, the conservative group behind the Project 2025 playbook, plans to propose economic policy encouraging heterosexual couples to have more babies.

The nuclear family has long been a pillar of traditional conservative values in the United States. Pronatalism argues the return of the traditional nuclear family is crucial to fighting social decline due to low birth rates. Financial incentives for those who have more children long preexisted the adoption of prenatalist ideology in the U.S. as a radicalized, right wing belief. The ideology’s implications are much larger here.

As the baby boomer cohort ages rapidly into retirement, the long-anticipated crisis confronts us: how do we account for the fiscal and social implications that arise with the now uneven ratio of dependents to working-age Americans?

While other more developed countries have implemented policies to bolster birth rates for the sake of social welfare, the U.S. pronatalist ideology argues it’s the responsibility of conservative, heterosexual white people to sew the torn social fabric of the U.S. back together by having lots of babies. This targeted call to action resembles policies throughout history that encouraged family-making as a means of eugenics.

The pro-birth argument by right-wing governments throughout history is frequently posed as crucial to society’s well-being, but discriminates against non-traditional forms of conception and any type of family-building that falls outside of their narrow view.

The decline of marriage must first be addressed to effectively rebuild the ideal of the American family, according to the Heritage Foundation’s paper. The paper blames careerism, birth control, abortion and no-fault divorce as a few of the reasons why the institution of marriage in the U.S. has declined. But the decline of marriage as a foundational element of American society is linked to our development as a nation.

While pronatalism is directly concerned with regressing the opportunities of women in the domestic sphere and the working world, it emerged alongside trending conservative women who promoted their traditional lifestyles.

The content often features “tradwives,” or traditional wives cooking, cleaning and tending to their children, all while wearing beautiful, sometimes runway-level, dresses. The lifestyle of a “tradwife” is unrealistic and often popularized because of its satisfying, almost ASMR-like content style that often fails to depict diaper changes and the non-glamorous side of motherhood. The content isn’t relatable and therefore appears idyllic.

It’s important to recognize the difference between being a “tradwife” and a stay-at-home mom. “Tradwife” culture embraces the surrender to male dominance in the home and in society at large.

While the women associated with this content currently have full legal and social autonomy to choose this lifestyle and post content about it online, powerful organizations capitalize on this trend we’ve become comfortable with to further their anti-woman agendas.

The “tradwife” lifestyle becoming an aesthetic trend on social media serves the Heritage Foundation by changing our cultural norms enough for our population to accept patriarchal standards as appealing.

The “tradwife” aesthetic acts as propaganda for a lifestyle that discourages the autonomy of women. Whether young people reference it as an ideal or a meme, women’s rejection of their own autonomy has garnered resounding popularity and thus worked its way into our lives as a normal topic of conversation.

It falls on the shoulders of young people to recognize where cultural products become a more serious, passive acceptance of problematic ideology. Embracing “tradwife” culture at face value detaches the regressive implications of the often appealing content.

In the current environment, feminists can’t glamorize personal choices that reject women’s autonomy, as our broader personal choices are increasingly at risk. It’s our responsibility to be nitpicky about language in social settings and online, to be “feminist killjoys” as our cultural landscape comes to accept words like “tradwife” and “submission” to men as the romanticized norm.

Maya Aguirre is a senior magazine news and digital journalism and history major. She can be reached at msaguirr@syr.edu.

Published on September 8, 2025 at 10:26 pm