Why Paying Women To Have Babies Is A Terrible Idea — And What To Do Instead
Paying for babies doesn't work. But government could certainly stop making raising kids so expensive and undesirable.Women won the ‘war on marriage’ — now they miss the spoils
If feminists were honest revolutionaries, they would change their slogan from “Smash the Patriarchy” to “Mission Accomplished.” The numbers don’t lie. Single women own more homes than single men. More women are primary breadwinners than ever before. The gender balance on college campuses has completely changed over the past six decades. Women earned 35% of Bachelor’s degrees in 1960. Today, they earn close to 60%. Even the norms on sex have changed. Magazines like Teen Vogueand sex-positive feminist outlets will write in defense of “sex work” but would never publish a modesty manifesto urging women to be more “ladylike.”
Despite the “pay inequality” propaganda the left weaponizes to make women see themselves as victims, the truth is that the sisterhood has been victorious. The problem is that women's triumph has come at the cost of the one thing they want most: a family.
Plenty of men aren’t hostile to working women — they’re just not interested in marrying women who act like the job comes first.
Megyn Kelly recently highlighted a growing tension on the right: Young conservative women struggle to find marriage-minded men. The former Fox News anchor said many right-wing men avoid marrying women with careers. According to Kelly, these men see professional ambition as a threat to traditional family life. She warned this mindset could marginalize outspoken conservative women in high-profile jobs.
This debate cuts to the core of the right’s broader conversation about rebuilding the family. I’ve spent years researching marriage trends, and the concerns these women voice reflect real dilemmas. But the men aren't speaking nonsense, either. Many believe that career-driven women will inevitably choose ambition over family. They want wives who share their priorities — not women chasing a different future.
Recent data from the Pew Research Center backs this up. Just 43% of Republican women say society benefits when people prioritize marriage and children. That’s nearly 10 points lower than Republican men. Meanwhile, women are more likely than men to say careers make life fulfilling — 74% compared to 69%.
Men put more weight on family. Twenty-eight percent of Republican men say marriage is extremely or very important to a fulfilling life, compared to only 18% of women. When asked about children, 29% of men agreed, seven points higher than their female counterparts.
Some men may oppose working women on principle, but most simply want wives who put family ahead of career — especially during their children’s early years. Yes, many households need two incomes to get by. But the right’s current debates over gender, marriage, and fertility go far beyond money.
The word “economics” comes from the Greek "oikonomia," meaning household management. The home was never meant to be a holding cell. It was supposed to serve as the engine of spiritual, social, educational, and economic life.
Feminists like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan rejected that idea. They framed the home as a prison, a place where women played “hostess” and “housekeeper” under the thumb of domineering husbands.
That mindset reshaped the culture. The most successful front in the gender wars wasn’t about breaking glass ceilings — it was about “liberating” women from any perceived duty to their husbands, children, or homes.
This obviously isn’t to say women don’t contribute at home. In most families, they’re the ones making sure meals get made, appointments get kept, and the kids show up to practice. But these actions aren’t framed as public obligations. No one shames a woman who misses the mark. There is no social penalty for opting out.
Meanwhile, the standards for men remain clear and unforgiving. For all the upheaval American families have seen in the past 50 years, society still expects men to provide and protect. A man who fails to support his family financially gets branded a “deadbeat.” A man who ducks behind his wife during a street altercation becomes a viral punchline.
Nothing comparable exists for women. Some suggest nurturing and supporting the family are equal expectations, but society rarely defines what those look like. Why? Because the feminist movement made it taboo to speak as if women must do anything in particular to be considered a good wife and mother.
That silence creates an imbalance in the home — an asymmetry that underlies not just policy debates on maternity leave but cultural arguments over “trad” lifestyles and modern family roles.
Society lectures men about duty and responsibility. It tells women about rights and freedom. When a father sacrifices for his family, he earns praise. When a mother does the same, she gets told to prioritize self-care — because a “whole” woman supposedly makes a better parent.
Even when women abandon their families, the media often wraps the story in the language of empowerment. A woman who leaves a decent husband and young kids to drink Chardonnay on Wednesdays and sweat through Bikram yoga on Thursdays won’t be condemned. She’ll be celebrated. Outlets will rush to reframe the desertion as a stunning and brave act of self-discovery. We can’t fix the American family without confronting sex differences. The political right burns energy on gender identity while ignoring a more urgent problem: how men and women function differently at home.
Plenty of successful men marry high-earning women. But no culture teaches that women should support both a grown man and their children. That’s why women tend to seek partners who earn more. U.S. Census data backs this up: Female physicians often marry within their profession. Male doctors, on the other hand, marry nurses and teachers.
Conservative women misunderstand the men they complain about. Most aren’t hostile to women in the workforce. They’re just not interested in marrying women who treat the job as their top priority. They want a wife who puts family first — because they do.
Even those who claim women can “have it all” admit they can’t have it all at once. You can’t spend 70 hours a week at the office and be as present for your children as a stay-at-home mother.
Men make that trade-off because we’re expected to provide. That’s why we don’t gripe when mom gets the first hug at graduation. But every career-driven woman who outsources her maternal role needs to answer one hard question: Is she comfortable with the nanny getting that moment instead?
Anna Paulina Luna’s ‘Pro Family’ Proxy Push Rings Hollow After She Avoided Florida’s 2024 Abortion Battle
When it came to standing against the anti-family abortion amendment in her own state last year, Luna was largely absent from the fight.Feminist propagandist Chappell Roan is dead wrong about women, happiness, and children
Anti-natalist propaganda is in full swing as usual, as the wildly popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast recently featured singer Chappell Roan telling host Alex Cooper that no one she knows with children is happy.
“All of my friends who have kids are in hell. I don’t know anyone, I actually don’t know anyone who's happy and has children at this age,” Roan explained. “I literally have not met anyone who’s happy, anyone who has like light in their eyes, anyone who has slept. All of my friends who have kids are in hell.”
Liz Wheeler of “The Liz Wheeler Show,” who is wife and a mother herself, couldn’t disagree more.
“Sounds like your friends suck. Sounds like you need new friends if all your friends who have kids are in hell. This is a feminist narrative, and it’s also just not true,” Wheeler says, before pulling out the receipts to prove it.
In a General Social Survey from 2022, the happiest women in the United States were married women with children — and it’s not even close.
39.5% of married women with children reported being “very happy,” while 47.6% of married women with children reported being “pretty happy.” Only 12.9% of married women with children reported being “not too happy.”
Only 21.5% of unmarried women with no children reported being “very happy,” while nearly twice as many unmarried women with no children reported being “not too happy” at 24.6%.
Wheeler believes that Roan’s own anecdotal account may have a lot more to do with the kinds of lifestyles her friends are more likely to be living.
“If her friends are trying to live a selfish lifestyle, if they are trying to drink a lot, and do drugs, and go out to the bars at night, and their children are inconvenient to their hedonistic lifestyle, then yeah, they might not be happy with children,” Wheeler says.
“Or if they are allowing their children to be undisciplined, and if they are feeding their children garbage food that poisons their brain and over-vaccinating them and giving them too much technology and they’re out of control, yeah, maybe they’re annoying, but all of this comes back to the parent, not the child,” she adds.
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Abortion Pill Reversal Saved My Son’s Life. A Pro-Life Community Saved Mine
About seven months after reversing my chemical abortion, my son arrived. I love him more than I ever feared having him.When Mom Friends Aren’t Enough, Build A ‘Grandma Tribe’
Young moms need tangible help and sound advice from people who have been there and done that.I thought I understood God's love — then I became a mom
It is often said that a parent’s love for her child is the closest picture we get of God’s love for humanity on this side of heaven. Years before motherhood was even on my radar, my own mother told me that when my first child was born, I would feel God’s love for me more deeply than ever before.
Last spring when that day came and my son was placed in my arms at the hospital, a glittering joy crescendoed into worship as I thought, Yes, this is exactly what I expected to feel — love beyond comprehension, loved beyond comprehension.
What I did not anticipate, however, was how the parallel (albeit an imperfect one) of a mother’s love for her child and God’s love for us would continue to evolve long after the initial newborn sweetness wore off and the grueling reality of being a parent set in.
In what has been the hardest and best year of my life, God has used motherhood to show me not just how much he loves me but what that love actually looks like.
Be still and know
My son is like a battery-powered toy that just keeps going and going and going until eventually the battery dies and the toy comes to a halt. Likewise, my son never stops moving until he falls asleep. He’s been this way since he could lift his head. Movement, activity, stimulation — this is what he demands every second of his waking hours.
I shouldn’t be surprised. He’s the prototype of a wild little boy. My husband was the same as a child.
And yet this has grieved me as a mother. If I’m being honest, I feel a little cheated.
I want to rock him to sleep. But he prefers to be laid down and left alone, free to roam his crib and wrestle his stuffed raccoon until its battery finally dies. I want to snuggle him — to wrap him in my arms, kiss the top of his downy head, and tell him all the things I love about him. He prefers the freedom of his legs (or his hands and knees; we’re not walking quite yet). I long for him to sit in my lap and flip through picture books. He would rather be sitting on his own playing with toys or getting into something he’s not supposed to (potted plants are his latest obsession).
I’ve wept over this resistance of his. Child, let me love you for goodness' sake! I want to tell him.
Abounding in affection for her child, a parent aches to pour out her love.
On Christmas this year, my thirst was briefly abated. After a long day filled with family, gifts, and feasting, we pulled into our driveway late at night. I did what I always do when we get home — unbuckled my son from his car seat, carried him inside, changed him into pajamas, fed him, and prepared to lay him down in his crib and walk away.
But just as I was laying him down, he did something he hadn’t done since the early newborn days. He rested his head on my chest. All the tension left his little body, and he just collapsed in my arms.
A Christmas miracle.
Tears welled in my eyes. I sat down in the unused rocking chair in the corner of his bedroom and just held him like that for an hour, trying to breathe as softly as I could for fear that he would wake and the moment would slip from me.
As I sat there silently weeping, a thin voice in my spirit whispered, I feel what you feel.
What?
I feel what you feel.
Over the next several days, the meaning unraveled itself bit by bit. The sudden shift in my son’s behavior was due to exhaustion and overstimulation from a day of ceaseless activity. Only when he had been sapped of all energy did he allow me to lovingly hold him close.
And suddenly I couldn’t unsee it: Am I not the same way? Like my son, I am a busy body. Early to rise and late to bed, my days are packed to the brim with productivity. Rest is a luxury I don’t much indulge in. In fact, the hurried life is where I feel at ease. I revere God; His Son Jesus is my Savior; the Bible is where I find truth. But like so many Westerners, I am addicted to what John Mark Comer calls “the hurry drug.”
When I am at my wits' end, crashed and burned, bone-tired and soul-weary — only then do I sit in my Father’s presence with no agenda, allowing Him to love me like a parent loves a precious child.
I realize now that this grieves Him for the exact same reason my son’s resistance grieves me. Abounding in affection for her child, a parent aches to pour out her love.
Again, my eyes well with tears.
Become as little children
Although my son is a busy bee, he is by no stretch of the imagination an independent child. If I so much as walk out of the room to grab my ringing cell phone, he bursts into tears. When I cook dinner, he clings to my leg and cries until I pick him up. Then he squirms and arches backward, begging to be put down again. This process repeats itself until I'm finished cooking. He doesn’t really want to be held; he just doesn’t want me paying attention to something that’s not him.
He loves to play with toys, but only if I’m watching him. Car rides are a disaster because he can’t see me (and yes, we have the mirror gadget; it doesn’t help). Walks in the stroller are short-lived because he can’t stand to face the opposite direction of me. I’m praying that in time the sky and trees will become interesting to him. But so far, no luck.
Full transparency: This aspect of his personality has been hard for me. I feel tethered to him to such an extent that brushing my teeth can be burdensome.
He’s so needy, I whined to my mom one day over a cup of coffee.
He’s just attuned to you, she said matter-of-factly.
Jesus’ words in Matthew 18:3 flashed into my mind — “become like children.”
Humbled, it registered that what I found annoying about my child was a beautiful image of how we are supposed to be with God: Dependent. Needy. Tethered. Attuned.
I heard somewhere — from a friend, a book, I’m not sure — that God gives us the child our heart needs. That certainly seems to be the case for me: a self-reliant independent who forgets that divine resources are a prayer away. My son’s insistence on my undivided attention is a mercy, a kindness, a gentle reminder to adjust my heart’s posture heavenward. I’m thankful.
White as snow
Every parent can relate to cleaning up messes.
One day my son had one of those epic blowout diapers that is no match for a changing table and some wipes. As I began stripping off his soiled clothing to put him in the bath, he suddenly sneezed, and because he had a cold at the time, snot got everywhere — all over his face and all over me.
This is what God sees when he looks at us. Utterly filthy, covered in a mess of our own making, and yet — beloved.
Before I could even pivot to grab a tissue, he threw up all over himself. In a matter of seconds, the child was covered in three of the most nauseating bodily substances.
Such a strange moment for God to reach down and nudge me.
As I took in the image of my son in the filthiest condition he’s ever been in, I could see it so clearly: This is what God sees when he looks at us. Utterly filthy, covered in a mess of our own making, and yet — beloved.
But the parallel continued to evolve.
Despite the staggering mess before me, I wasn’t harsh with my son. I didn’t let him sit there in his filth. Nor did I begrudgingly plunge him into icy bath water, grab a sponge, and start roughly scrubbing him clean while I grumbled about how inconvenient this whole ordeal was.
No, I bathed him gently, patiently, methodically — rinsing him with warm water, taking my time to make sure every inch of him was washed clean before I dried him off and dressed him in fresh clothing.
Again, I was struck with the emotive image of God’s kindness toward us. He doesn’t look down condescendingly from his heavenly throne, sighing in exasperation that we’ve made a mess of ourselves again. He isn’t hesitant to begin the process of cleaning us up, never rough or impatient as he washes our sin away.
He is tender and kind, never withholding grace, no matter how big our mess is — faithful to wash us clean over and over again, forever, until final glory when messes are no more.
I feel the same about my son. There will come a day when the season of cleaning up his messes comes to an end. Until that day, though, I will meet him in the filth, whether it's his own or it’s the muck and mire of mud puddles on the playground, and I will gently and lovingly wash him clean.
As I re-evaluated my son — now spotless and smelling of soap — God nudged me once more, this time with a question: Why?
Why the gentleness, the patience, the tenderness? Why the unflinching reaction to clean up this colossal mess?
Easy. Because he is mine.
Exactly.
Want to win women over to conservatism? Take a cue from Ivanka Trump
There’s no question that November was the “dudes rock” election.
After President Trump took his college-age son Barron's advice and took his message to a bunch of comedic, manosphere-adjacent podcasts, the young male demo turned out for him in droves.
On 'Skinny Confidential,' Ivanka preached female empowerment without invoking cringey, feminist victimhood or posing family as an obstacle to women’s success.
While Trump also saw a 7% jump in votes from young women, the gender gap that's been dogging the GOP since the 1980s persists. The female vote simply remains elusive to Republicans.
The wrong approach
Why? One theory is that conservative outreach to women has been ineffective because it has applied a heavy political hand instead of an inspirational, nurturing, and creative one. From a marketing standpoint, the secret to winning women may be to play a sisterly role, as exemplified by Ivanka Trump’s recent appearance on popular female-focused podcast, "Skinny Confidential."
In the episode, the poised, business-savvy Trump daughter revealed intimate details of her childhood as well as insight on her life as a mother and entrepreneur.
Ivanka also praised her own mother, Ivana. “She really was this unbelievable role model for what a working woman could be, almost in mythological terms,” she said. “She was impossibly glamorous, while also being a working woman at a time when there were many, many more barriers, much higher expectations, for both her in a boardroom context, much less forgivable absences for a school play or a doctor’s appointment …”
To illustrate the point, Ivanka recounted a childhood memory of her mother strutting through a casino construction site.
“She points like one perfectly lacquered finger up to the sky and doesn’t even tilt her head, at least in my memory, and says to the general manager: ‘There’s a light bulb out.’ And I look up and there’s more lights than there are stars in the sky.”
To the podcast’s many female viewers, this was an aspirational story of a fabulous woman of refinement, intelligence, and confidence — traits we all hope to develop.
'Daddy' issues
It was a refreshing change from Alex Cooper’s "Call Her Daddy," the podcast presidential candidate Kamala Harris chose to appear on in her outreach to young women voters.
"Call Her Daddy" appeals to a far different feminine ideal — that of the sexually "liberated" woman unafraid of manipulating men to get what she wants. It's no wonder that fans were scandalized when Cooper quietly got engaged and married, choosing a conservative lifestyle after misleading her female audience into participating in hookup culture.
Yet Cooper's podcast is undeniably popular, second only to Joe Rogan's.
Leaving aside female political junkies who love to consume the news, the average young female listener, I would venture to say, is more responsive to conversational, fun content like Cooper’s, where the values are communicated more tacitly than explicitly. This is a prime opportunity for conservative-minded creators to attract more women by leaning into the topics that women enjoy first, putting politics second.
On "Skinny Confidential," Ivanka preached female empowerment without invoking cringey, feminist victimhood or posing family as an obstacle to women’s success. Ivanka beamed as she talked about her daughter’s maturation, noting that Arabella asked her for self-defense classes of her own accord. Now, weekly jiujitsu is a Trump family affair and “moving meditation” for them, prompting Ivanka to discuss another topic of female enjoyment and new gateway to the GOP: health and wellness.
Default progressivism
With RFK Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement, the subject of health and wellness is prompting many women to reconsider their default progressive setting. Since Jane Fonda and the "Let’s Get Physical" era of the 1980s, fitness has been a female interest — holistic body awareness, not so much. The latter has likely been overshadowed by so-called "reproductive health" — doublespeak for abortion.
But now, women are increasingly sensitive to what they are ingesting and suspicious of authoritative claims of “safety,” especially after the draconian Democratic response to COVID. There is also the resentment and shock of many women struggling with the fertility-complicating effects of hormonal birth control, long pushed as harmless by the medical industry, despite its many side effects and unknown long-term consequences. They’re questioning an FDA that is overwhelmingly deferential to food companies when it comes to introducing ingredients that lack long-term studies.
Brands like "Skinny Confidential" and Alex Clark’s "Culture Apothecary" are tapping into this ripe market by offering women knowledge of their bodies in cute packaging as well as a comforting hand to hold as they navigate the Wild West of wellness.
Want to breathe better and maximize the oxygen your body takes in at night, while developing a chiseled jawline (without invasive plastic surgery)? Try the mouth tape "Skinny Confidential" offers. Want to reduce face inflammation? Try the ice roller. As body positivity comes under scrutiny too, more women are questioning whether processed foods could be sabotaging their weight-loss efforts.
There are many other attractive and appealing female personalities and celebrities who haven’t declared a party affiliation but are conservative-coded. They’ve given clues with their wholesome lifestyles and proud features of their family on social media. Paige Lorenze, Sofia Richie Grainge, and Kristin Cavallari are among them.
After years of liberal propaganda, women want to see the full range of their experience represented: a rich, life-affirming vision of womanhood that prizes homemaking without shaming professional ambition and that encourages beauty and health without demonizing aging.
Their hearts and minds are there for the right to win, if we only take up the challenge.
The Only Way To Make Abortion Unthinkable Is To Wipe Out The Feminism Fueling It
Feminism is the ideology that pro-lifers need to focus our energy against. Until we do, feminism will just keep on fueling abortion’s engine, one precious and innocent baby at a time.
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