Guest Post by Haley Lickstein, CEO, Haley Lickstein Media and Women Connect4Good Board Member
Repost from Substack.
Last week, the Heritage Foundation—the group that authored Project 2025—released a 130+ page proposal titled “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.”
I read the entire thing for you. The paper lays out, in no uncertain terms, plans to eliminate access to birth control and IVF, limit women’s access to higher education, and dismantle no-fault divorce. Using their own words, let’s dive in and break it down.
The paper opens with the following framing:
“The percentage of married adults in this country has been on a steady decline since the 1960s, and a third of young Americans are expected never to marry.”
The stated goal of the paper is to propose policies that are:
“Actively Supporting Marriage and Working Families”
to address this trend.
COMING AFTER YOUR EDUCATION
The authors write that:
“big-government liberalism and second-wave feminism—combined to radically change how men and women thought about their roles in the home and about their obligations to one another and their children help to explain the sharp decline in marriage and increase in nonmarital childbirth among poorer Americans”
They continue:
“More Education Correlates with Later Marriage, Fewer Children. Today, more young men and women are pursuing higher education, but most of them now take more than four years to complete a bachelor’s degree.”
They further state:
“Women who complete 4 years of college are less likely to have a child, while completion rates of 4 years of college rose 10 percent for women over the past decade.”
And:
“Fewer than one-third of women (30.5 percent) had earned a bachelor’s degree in 2006—a figure that had skyrocketed to 40.7 percent by 2018.”
This section concludes with the argument that the government should support policies that:
“encourage and protect the formation of families”
and should dismantle programs and policies that have helped women access education, including initiatives like the Grad PLUS program.
COMING AFTER YOUR ABILITY TO GET DIVORCED
The paper then turns to your ability to get divorced.
Before diving into their proposal, it’s important to explain what no-fault divorce actually is. No-fault divorce allows for the dissolution of a marriage without requiring the petitioner to prove wrongdoing or breach of the marital contract in a court of law. This means that if someone is being abused—physically or emotionally—or is being cheated on, they can leave the marriage without first having to prove that harm in court.
No-fault divorce policies have resulted in a 16 percent decrease in wives’ suicide rates and a 30 percent decline in domestic violence, by conservative estimates.
The Heritage Foundation advocates for what they call “divorce culture reform.”
They argue that:
“when no-fault divorce laws became nearly universal, divorce rates skyrocketed”
and they promote the introduction of:
“more-difficult-to-exit marriages such as Covenant marriage”
as an alternative.
COMING AFTER BIRTH CONTROL AND IVF
The Heritage Foundation also focuses heavily on what they describe as:
“the sexual revolution, which separated the sex act from marriage and childbearing”
and the role that:
“Technology and policy”
have played in that shift.
They write:
“Starting in the 1960s, the Pill and other contraceptives swept the country—which promised to reduce the unwanted consequences of casual sex with multiple partners across a lifetime.”
The paper claims that:
“the proliferation of birth control is largely responsible for the decline in children”
and advances the hypothesis that there is a link between premarital sex and divorce rates.
Throughout the paper, the pill is repeatedly described as an “invention” and a form of “technology,” a framing that becomes especially important as the paper turns to IVF.
On IVF, the Heritage Foundation writes that:
“policymakers should not endorse technocratic fixes to the birth dearth that conflict with human nature or ignore or bypass the known sources of human flourishing.”
They argue against policies that expand access to IVF, stating:
“Greater IVF access might even contribute to fewer overall births as many younger women may overestimate IVF’s success rates and delay childbearing beyond their most fertile years, because the most common IVF use case is that of a woman having her first child later in life.”
They further state that:
“policymakers should commit to protecting life from fertilization. In the U.S., technologies such as in vitro fertilization and preimplantation genetic testing routinely manipulate or destroy human embryos. Pro-family champions should fight to protect embryonic and unborn life in law. Such protection should extend not just to cases of abortion but to all uses of reproductive technologies and scientific research.”
The conclusion is clear: they want to eliminate access to IVF and fertility treatments.
It is critically important to note that their language around “technology” does not apply only to IVF. The Republican Party has increasingly referred to birth control as an abortifacient or as a technology that interferes with fertilization—placing contraception squarely within this same framework.
This breakdown relies almost entirely on the Heritage Foundation’s own words. For years, many people dismissed Project 2025 as exaggerated or unreal. We are now watching it unfold in real time. This paper is the next chapter.
And at 138 pages long, it goes even further—laying out how HHS and public advertising campaigns could be used to elevate these policy agendas, and outlining plans to end welfare programs, its deeply homophobic about defining marriage and what makes parents parents, it goes after adoption as it clearly defines the need to support only biological partents and so much more. I will make a lot more content on this but please share it with your friends and help spread the word and make sure to hit me with a follow for more.
