Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years is the chilling title of the Heritage Foundation’s latest policy blueprint. The far-right organisation behind Trump’s second presidential program, Project 2025, is determined to reverse the “decline” and “erosion” of American marriage, the “precipitous drop in fertility” and the “collapse of church attendance”.
Describing how “family breakdown and rampant abortion tears at the soul of our country and saps it of strength and moral authority”, the foundation’s Project 2026 policy priorities are a dangerous wish list of misogyny: eliminating access to abortion and contraception, censoring discussion of gender and sexuality in schools and gutting income support for single mothers.
Against the “scourge of woke ideas like critical race theory and radical gender ideology”, the far right is determined to make traditional gender roles compulsory again—celebrating domestic servitude and women’s submissive position in the family and society.
Since the overturning of Roe v Wade, many Republican-controlled states in the US have imposed sweeping abortion bans, criminalised people who help women travel interstate for care and challenged “shield laws”, designed to guard abortion providers from out-of-state extradition and prosecution. Referring to himself as “the fertilisation president”, as Trump did at a White House event celebrating Women’s History Month, the president has established a baby bonus system—children born between 31 December 2024 and 1 January 2029 are awarded US$1,000, which can be deposited in a Trump account established in their name.
The US is not alone in this. In Europe, organisations targeting gender ideology have raised US$1.18 billion between 2019 and 2023, according to the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights’ latest report. Much of this is in Hungary, where currently the government is importing Russia’s anti-gay laws, including banning LGBTI content from schools and prime-time television.
Reform UK’s candidate in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election, Matt Goodwin, has made a substack post advocating a “negative child benefit tax” on people “who don’t have offspring”. In South America, Javier Milei leads the charge, vowing to eliminate femicide from Argentina’s penal code.
While numerous governments and political parties promote these ideas and codify them in social policy, they are popularised online via influencers who encourage men to see women as sub-human and warn that women’s rights have “gone too far”, a sentiment now held by 40 percent of Australian men under 35, according to the UNSW Centre for Ideas. The normalisation of misogyny and sexual objectification is connected to support for violent extremism—in 2024, research by the University of Melbourne found that nearly 20 percent of Australian men believe that feminism should be violently resisted if necessary, making anti-feminist politics the most prevalent form of violent extremist attitudes in Australia.
For the far right, campaigning for the nuclear family is not just about a lifestyle preference; it’s essential for strengthening capitalism and obedience to its hierarchies, norms and institutions. The less freedom women have—over their reproductive rights, sexuality and independence—the more the family is entrenched as the inescapable norm, and with the family come the stability, free labour, economic dependence and ideological control that capitalism thrives on.
To capitalism, human beings are first and foremost factors in production, not people deserving of freedom. Without people to work for them, the wealthy would not be able to generate the huge profits they depend on for their wealth and power. So controlling what the mass of people think and do in capitalist society is paramount, not just in the workplace, but in every facet of society.
This extends even to the supposedly most private and personal parts—our sex lives, our relationships, our reproductive choices. The choices we make here affect the current and future size and nature of the workforce that is available to be exploited—which is why the capitalist class wants to control it. And as the most brutish expression of capitalism and its priorities, the far right is open about this.
Perhaps some of the most open are the pro-natalists, campaigners dedicated to raising the Western birth rate. To them, “demographic collapse has become the global warming of the New Right”. These are the words of the infamous pro-natalist Malcolm Collins, who, alongside his wife Simone Collins, proposed a city-state government plan for “incentive systems that grant more voting power to creators of economically productive agents”, run by a single “executor”. Their 15-page slide deck, entitled “The Next Empire: Leveraging a Changing World to Save Civilization”, is a playbook for a dictatorial society in which women making more babies is a strategy for strengthening the US’s industrial and military capacity.
It’s this attitude of expendability and dehumanisation that means that, while Trump can proclaim he will “protect women whether they want it or not”, he can simultaneously be embroiled in one of the most revolting examples of systematic sexual abuse ever exposed. The Epstein files have uncovered what has been the disgusting open secret of ruling class circles—that the rape, abuse and domination of young women are their modus operandi.
This level of sick and unrestricted entitlement is not incidental. It flows from class power itself. Those who order the murder of civilians, who keep millions in preventable poverty, who deny health care or welfare to those who need it, come to believe that because they have the physical and financial means to exert control over our lives, they also have the right to do so. Other people, especially women, are there to use, mistreat and exert power over, to dominate and humiliate. That is what power is and does.
Defending women’s reproductive rights and social freedoms in this context is essential, but it is not enough if the economic system that depends on inequality remains intact. As long as wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, our freedom to decide our own futures will always threaten their rule. If we want a different world, we have to fight every manifestation of sexism, an ever powerful far right and the whole system that makes women’s oppression profitable and politically useful.
