The New York Times Would Like You To Meet This Totally Harmless Tradwife/Heritage Foundation Hack

For the third time. At least.

Jul 09, 2026

“A Conservative Role Model for Ending the Fertility Crisis”

That is the actual title of a New York Times profile (gift link) on Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Emma Waters — an ideologue in the mold of Phyllis Schlafly, who also famously traveled around the country telling other women to stay home.

It’s not the first. As writer Jessica Shortall pointed out on Bluesky yesterday, Waters has been the subject of at least two other New York Times profiles on her quest to replace standard fertility treatments with some bullshit called “restorative reproductive medicine” and downplaying her desire to force other women back to the 1950s: “White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children,” published in April of 2025, and “As Trump Weighs I.V.F., Republicans Back New ‘Natural’ Approach to Infertility,” published in August of 2025.

I guess they figured that after a whole year we’d need a reminder.

Waters and other advocates try to present “restorative reproductive medicine” as some kind of “all natural” approach that takes into account infertility’s “root causes.” As per the August 2025 article, “[p]hysicians who specialize in the approach analyze patients’ diet and exercise habits, while helping them “chart” their menstrual cycles, a process that can help expose certain reproductive health conditions, like endometriosis, that may lead to infertility.” (Nota bene: “restorative reproductive medicine is not a recognized medical specialization.)

But this is not some “natural” approach that practitioners of modern medicine ignore in favor of pushing unnatural medicines and procedures on patients. Fertility doctors absolutely do all of those things. They are standard practice and there is no difference between “restorative reproductive medicine” and standard infertility treatment other than what it doesn’t include. What it doesn’t include is IVF, intrauterine insemination (IUI), or fertility preservation, because its proponents are ideologically opposed to those things — which is why the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) explicitly states that it is “not medical practice but ideology.”

Now, we of course have no damn problem with people who actually do have personal moral issues with IVF or any other fertility treatments trying everything but those things. That’s not my business or yours. The problem is the fact that these folks want this “method” promoted by the government as an alternative to those treatments for everyone. This is a very bad idea! Because it means that patients, older patients especially, could waste time that they don’t have doing something that isn’t going to be as effective.

Of course … that’s the whole point. They want to keep people from getting IVF until IVF is no longer an option for them. Because of how they love embryos.

The article from yesterday makes brief mention of a “report” she co-wrote with other Heritage Foundation employees, explaining that it included “proposals to give Americans financial incentives to marry by the age of 30 and a “large family bonus” for married parents with more than two children.”

You see, just as the Heritage Foundation set out their plans for the hell we’re living now in Project 2025, they also have a blueprint for rolling back all of the gains made by women and LGBTQ+ people in the last century. Isn’t that fun? That’s the report she co-wrote.

The report, titled “Saving America by Saving the Family,” advocates ending no-fault divorce, ending same-sex marriage, somehow eliminating the concept of “gender identity,” encouraging young people to marry not for love but for “duty and virtue” (that duty being “have children”), encouraging women to be financially dependent on their husbands, tearing apart the social safety net in order to make things more difficult for single parents, denying the problem of climate change (to combat people not having kids due to concerns about the planet) and, of course, Christian nationalism. Because if people are Christian, they’ll be more likely to get married and have babies in “traditional” households.

The data are strong that religious people are more likely to get married, marry earlier, divorce less, have more children, and beneficially influence their children’s social development. Because religion has an outside impact on marriage and family, it merits outsized social and cultural support. One of the biggest impediments that religious Americans must confront, however, is widespread cultural and government-enforced secularism.

Oh yeah, you know — that thing that makes it so everyone can believe what they believe without having anyone else’s beliefs forced upon them?

The report goes on quite endlessly about how feminism, the sexual revolution, and the War on Poverty ruined everything by giving women the ability to provide for themselves financially (and get help when they need it), choose when or if they want to have children while still enjoying recreational sex, and generally live the lives they want to lead as best they can.

The fact is, the only thing that really gets them what they want is reducing women’s choices — because, as it turns out, when women are able to choose, they don’t tend to choose “marry at 17 and sit home broke for 25 years until your husband divorces you.”

It would never occur to me to tell Emma Waters how to live her life. It would not occur to me to say that she shouldn’t be Christian or get married or have children, because none of that is any of my goddamned business. I am firmly on team “people should do what they want, and we should work to make things so that individuals can make these choices for themselves, depending on what works best for them.”

For all their complaints about us supposedly “shoving things down their throats,” you really never see us doing anything nearly as extreme as trying to force them to live exactly as we do, simply because we don’t like living in a world where people do things differently from us.

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Because, ultimately, that’s what this is about. The Right is using this idea of a “fertility crisis” to try and get their way on cultural issues, and the New York Times seems to have few qualms about helping them. And, as overplayed as the analogy may be, I’m going to have to point out that it is literally the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale.

According to a panel of Harvard researchers, much of the decrease in the birth rate both in the US and nationally is due to the sharp decrease in teen pregnancies (and is made up for, in part, by women having babies at older ages, thanks to IVF). Most people who are not enormous creeps would agree that that’s a good thing. The panel also pointed out that we might want to be more concerned about the fact that our maternal mortality rate is three times the rates of other wealthy countries, and that having a baby represents an “economic catastrophe” for most American families before we start pushing people to have more babies. “Expanding child care access, postpartum care, and maternal health services […] would improve outcomes regardless of their impact on fertility,” they argued.

I, personally, would like to point out that we do not even have enough ob-gyns for all of the people currently giving birth, particularly in areas run by people who are ideologically aligned with Emma Waters. Areas where it is now even more dangerous to give birth than it used to be, thanks to the anti-abortion laws that force doctors to wait until the last possible minute before providing care to patients in crisis. Also, there are 330,000 to 345,000 children living in foster care in the United States and 10 to 11 million living in poverty. Maybe we should consider taking care of the pregnant people and children we have before we start talking about any “birth rate crisis.” Certainly before we start exploring “rolling back the last century of cultural progress” as a viable solution.

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