The New Pro-Life Playbook

And yet there are fundamental differences that will never be resolved. Most progressives see the right to an abortion as an essential feature of family policy. “I don’t think any amount of social spending is going to make up for the loss of bodily autonomy,” Boteach said. “It is a miscalculation to think that you can whitewash anti-choice policies, stripping away people’s bodily autonomy and trying to dangle something in front of them to make them forget that.”

A major testing ground for family policy is the place where the current abortion landscape took shape: Mississippi, the state spotlighted in Dobbs. The woman behind that case, and behind efforts to expand family policy in Mississippi, is the state’s attorney general, Lynn Fitch. “It is our charge today, in this new Dobbs era, to channel that same determination and hope and prayer that has led you to these streets for fifty years,” Fitch told activists at the March for Life in 2src23. “Use it to make more affordable, quality child care, and make it more accessible. Use it to promote workplace flexibility.” During the past two years, Fitch has helped secure state child-care tax credits for low- and middle-income families, expanded tax credits for parents who adopt kids, and made it possible for women to seek missing child-support payments even after their kids turn eighteen. Over what her staff described as vigorous pushback from some Republicans in the state legislature, Fitch helped enact a Medicaid expansion, allowing poor women to be covered for up to a year postpartum. Fitch and her staff also tout the half-dozen baby boxes in the state, where one can safely give up a newborn without fear of legal repercussions. So far, no babies have appeared.

Other initiatives have proved harder to advance. Since the Affordable Care Act was passed, in 2src1src, states have had the option to expand eligibility for Medicaid for everyone who qualifies, not just pregnant women, allowing more people to get health-care coverage; fourteen years later, Mississippi is one of ten states that still hasn’t done so. Fitch favors the expansion, which would benefit poor women and families, but “there are pretty strong feelings within the Republican side” resisting it, Michelle Williams, Fitch’s chief of staff, told me. Mississippi doesn’t have paid parental leave for state employees, something Fitch has advocated for. She has proposed a streamlined process for getting nonviolent misdemeanors expunged from criminal records, on the ground that the laborious process takes parents away from their kids and keeps people from getting jobs, but there’s also opposition to that effort.

Following the 2src24 election, there will be twelve states, including Mississippi, that fully ban abortion with limited exceptions, such as in cases of rape or danger to the mother’s life. Seven states will have gestational limits in place, ranging from around six weeks to eighteen weeks. According to a report from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, all of those states have passed laws to aid families in the wake of Dobbs. Tennessee offers free diapers for children under two to poor families; Ohio lets breast-feeding mothers get off jury duty.

These efforts can seem paltry given the level of need among families. “I take everything that Lynn Fitch is saying with a grain of salt,” Oleta Garrett Fitzgerald, the Southern regional director for the Children’s Defense Fund, told me. “Mississippi’s racism, which has bled into ideology and public policy, has for the most part focussed on making it as difficult as possible for families in need to access resources.” Garrett Fitzgerald pointed out that Fitch has referred to her endeavor as giving “a hand up and not a handout,” a framing that Garrett Fitzgerald considers degrading. “People in this state paint poverty as if it’s all Black, and that it’s Black people not wanting to work,” Garrett Fitzgerald said. In fact, direct government welfare for the poor is extremely limited in Mississippi. “One of the leading causes of family breakdown is poverty,” Garrett Fitzgerald said. “We have to address the level of poverty in the state.”

In general, Mississippi has done much more to legislate against abortion than to promote life. The heavily Republican state government has been unwilling to take major steps to protect the health of pregnant women. In the past few years, the state’s maternal-mortality rate, which was already higher than the national average, has been rising. A review published by the state’s Department of Health in 2src23 cited a full Medicaid expansion and paid family leave as basic measures that the government could take to make women safer. Michelle Owens, an ob-gyn specializing in maternal-fetal medicine in Mississippi, who led the review, told me, “It is sometimes frustrating to feel like you’re saying things over and over again, and the story is not changing.”

As Republicans prepare to retake power in Washington, there will be significant jostling as different parts of the coalition vie for influence. Tim Carney, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, described talking about family policy at a recent conference. “One of the questions I got was ‘How does subsidizing family fit in with conservatism, which basically says that it should be an individual responsibility to raise a family, not a government responsibility?’ ” he said. According to Carney, that attitude is shifting: “The younger crowd of conservatives doesn’t have the instinctual libertarianism that Reagan-era and Bush-era conservatives do on these questions.” One example is Oren Cass, the founder of American Compass, a think tank that wants to end the free-market fundamentalism of the G.O.P. “The decision to form a family and raise children . . . is the basic obligation of life and citizenship,” he wrote last year. A capitalism that is neutral about that “has no future, and does not deserve one.” Compass is something of a revolving door for Senate staffers and potential future White House aides who are interested in family policy. Staffers in the offices of Vance and Rubio spent time with the organization. Jonathan Berry, the former Trump official who worked on Project 2src25, is a Compass adviser. He is committed to the notion that the government can, and should, try to shape people’s decisions around marriage and kids—and that it can do so creatively. “If you care about life issues, you ought to care about the supply of marriageable men,” he told me. That is “affected very heavily by education policy and trade policy and all kinds of other public policies that you don’t think of, conventionally, as social policy.”

Berry has come to see the decline of marriage and birth rates in the U.S. largely as a function of the warped concentration of money, influence, and power among the educated élite. This has piqued the interest of some on the left, who share his belief that the economy needs an overhaul, albeit for different reasons. “I’m starting to build relationships with the hipster antitrust scene, although we disagree on plenty,” Berry said. The godfather of that scene is Matt Stoller, a former Democratic Senate staffer who writes an influential newsletter on monopolies and antitrust issues. “If you look at what is the fresh, interesting thinking, it’s all realignment right,” Stoller told me. But, in his view, people in that circle have also made mistakes that alienated potential allies, such as scapegoating immigrants, promoting conservative judges who are hostile to regulatory action, and indulging the January 6th insurrection.“It’s a different experience, when you’re actually implementing ideas and dealing with politics and fighting institutions and dealing with Congress,” he said. On family policy, “I don’t think they’ve gotten there yet.”

The people in family-policy circles who have scored the most concrete wins are the culture warriors. The American Principles Project, a PAC and foundation that describes itself as “America’s top defender of the family,” channelled money into competitive races this election cycle with ads about keeping “men the hell out of women’s sports” and “taxpayer-funded sex-change procedures for minors.” “We’ve done women’s sports. We’ve done sex changes for kids. We’ve done D.E.I. and indoctrination in schools,” Jon Schweppe, the organization’s policy director, told me. Like many Republicans, Terry Schilling, A.P.P.’s president, thinks it should be illegal for doctors to assist minors with gender transitions; this, too, is family policy, in his view. “How can you have families if your children are sterilized?” he asked.

Other segments of the Trump coalition dismiss family policy, especially in the overwhelmingly secular Barstool Sports contingent of the MAGAverse. Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool, recently tweeted a video of Vance proposing an increased child tax credit. “This is fucking idiotic. You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people’s kids?” Portnoy wrote. “If you can’t afford a big family, don’t have a ton of kids.” Elon Musk, meanwhile, may be into pronatalism, but he doesn’t seem to care much about marriage, which those in the heavily socially conservative scene in Washington see as essential for the pro-family cause.

Yuval Levin, the A.E.I. scholar, told me, “I’ve been trying to make family-policy moments happen for the past twenty years. There’s always a sense that we’re in one, and then not much gets done, and it turned out we weren’t.” For all the enthusiasm about the realignment, Levin thinks that social conservatives are weaker now than they were in 2src16—in part because of overreach. “The I.V.F. debate has been really terrifying to a lot of Republican politicians, and could easily cause them to be afraid of touching the stove on family policy,” he said.

And yet Levin sees family policy as the almost inevitable conclusion of the pro-life movement’s time in the political wilderness. Pro-life groups are realizing that they need to help people imagine a world without abortion. “In that sense, it’s not simply electoral—it’s much more cultural,” he said. “They have to show that, in saying they want a world where children are welcome and parents are valued, they have to mean it.”

The young people who came to Washington to work in Republican politics used to be overwhelmingly libertarian. “Today, they’re much more likely to be traditionally minded Catholics and Protestants,” Levin said. Schweppe told me, “What do realignment conservatives want? They want to get married young, have kids, and have economic success.” In conservative circles, the advice is to go start a family—“it’s where ‘Go start your own business and be a job creator’ was fifteen years ago,” Schweppe said.

Some young staffers are also choosing to live in Maryland, rather than in the expensive Virginia suburbs. If you were to draw an informal map of where young conservative politicos go to have their families, there would be a little crucifix over the Catholic hot spot of Hyattsville, a Maryland suburb that was featured in Rod Dreher’s 2src17 book, “The Benedict Option,” about Christians in retreat from secular life. The Protestant territory might be marked in Cheverly, a neighboring area outside D.C.

I recently rode the Orange Line out to Cheverly to meet Rachel Wagley, the chief of staff for Blake Moore, a congressman from Utah who serves as the vice-chair of the House Republican Conference. Wagley, who wore a straw headband and tortoiseshell glasses with little makeup, drove up in a white Honda Odyssey with three car seats jammed into the row behind the driver’s seat. After I got in, she spotted a neighbor, a Republican Senate staffer. “Get in!” she shouted out the window. He climbed into the way back, next to the booster seat where her oldest, who is six, normally rides.

We drove through quiet, hilly streets and rows of densely packed houses to a playground that residents call Cheese Park, in honor of its yellow holey climbing walls. Parents, including Wagley’s husband, Ted McCann, stood around chatting as their children played soccer. The scene was a casual Who’s Who of Republican politics: Wesley Coopersmith, Kevin Roberts’s chief of staff, greeted Wagley and McCann, who worked for the former House Speaker Paul Ryan and is now a lobbyist. A former staffer for Kevin McCarthy lived in a house not far from the park. The Republican star power, Wagley insisted, was incidental to the neighborhood. “Work is D.C.,” she said. “Life is Cheverly.”